Collaborative self-translation – Pizzeria Kamikaze as a case in point

ABSTRACT

This paper examines graphic novels through the prism of translation and adaptation studies. Based on the similarity between the mechanisms of interlingual translation and adaptation, or intermedial translation, we discuss the applicability of the concept of ‘collaborative self-translation’ to a case study in which the author and the illustrator function as ‘bilingual’ co-authors. Thus, we provide a unique point of view on graphic novels in general, shedding light on their multimodality and the way they combine the verbal and the visual. Our case study is the graphic novel Pizzeria Kamikaze, first published in 2004, which is about people in an afterworld that actually mirrors life on earth. Based on a story by the Israeli author Etgar Keret, it was transformed into a graphic novel by Keret and the illustrator Asaf Hanuka. This collaboration, facilitated by the artists’ shared social milieu and artistic interests, enabled them to realise, in an innovative way, the elements of comics and cinema already embedded in the original work. The result is a multidimensional work – a satire on Israeli society which also evokes the fantastic world of comics and simulates the dark atmosphere of film noir, while pointing to universal dilemmas.

KEYWORDS:

• Graphic novel
• comics
• cinema
• literature
• translation
• adaptation
• collaborative self-translation

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Etgar Keret, Asaf Hanuka and the publishers Keter and Kineret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir for permission to include panels from the graphic novel in this paper

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Pizzeria Kamikaze was nominated for the Eisner Award, which Hanuka eventually won in 2016 for The Realist (Hanuka 2015), a book based on the comics he published in the weekly supplement of Calcalist Economic Newspaper.

2. In the literature, a novella is longer than a short story and shorter than a novel. See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/novella (accessed 14 March 2018).

3. Allenby road also lent its name to Gady Taub’s novel (Taub 2009) which revolves around a nightclub located in that street.

4. Happy Campers is a comedy film (Waters 2001) and the name of companies that sell camping equipment. For American and other readers, the irony embedded in this title transcends its literal meaning.

5. An integrative view of various interlingual and intersemiotic translations of Keret’s novella (into English, French and Dutch as well as comics and film) has been provided by Gremmen (2014).

6. Humour is based on incongruity – the co-presence of incompatible frames of reference (Koestler 1964, 37) or ‘scripts’ (Raskin 1985; Attardo 1997). It is ironic if it involves the ingredients of irony such as flouting the Gricean maxim of truth, pretending, and criticising (Clark and Gerrig 1984; Weizman 2001; Hirsch 2011).

7. This is a case of situational irony, ‘a situation where the outcome is incongruous with what was expected, but it is also more generally understood as a situation that includes contradictions or sharp contrasts’ (Elleström 2002, 51).

8. It seems that this claim should be limited to what the author is conscious of.

9. For the element of ‘play’ in postmodernism, see Hutcheon (1988, p. 10, 15, 49, 51, 114).

10. For a similar approach in Waltz with Bashir – Folman (2008) and Folman and Polonsky (2009) – see Kohn and Weissbrod (2012).

11. Nonetheless, Hanuka’s realism has its limits. This sticks out if we compare the graphic novel with the film based on Keret’s literary work (Dukić 2006) which features live actors and accompanies the protagonist’s suicide with the picture of a sink full of blood.

12. For relevant pictures, see the Nirvana official site: http://www.nirvana.com/ (accessed 14 March 2018).

13. For relevant pictures, particularly from the 1960s, see the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation site: http://www.imageduplicator.com/ (accessed 14 March 2018). The choice of blond is possibly also in homage to Hanuka’s wife, the illustrator Hilit Sheffer.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Weissbrod

Rachel Weissbrod is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel. Her areas of research include theory of translation, literary translation into Hebrew, film and TV translation and the interrelation between translation and other forms of transfer. She has published in Target; The Translator; Meta; Babel; Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance; Translation Studies and more. Her book Not by Word Alone, Fundamental Issues in Translation (in Hebrew) was published by The Open University of Israel in 2007.

Ayelet Kohn

Ayelet Kohn is a Senior Lecturer at The David Yellin College of Education, Jerusalem, and a former Chair of the Department of Photographic Communication in Hadassah Academic College, Jerusalem. Her main area of research is the mutual relations between images and written texts in their sociological context. Her work looks into political graffiti, tourism posters, iconic photography, visual propaganda in social media, talkbacks and short documentary reportages. She has published in Visual Communication; Computers in Human Behavior; Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture; Convergence and more.