Re-Illustrating Multimodal Texts as Translation: Hebrew Comic Books «Uri Cadduri» and «Mr. Fibber, the Storyteller»

This article deals with two Hebrew comic books, Uri Cadduri and Mar Guzmai ha-Badai [Mr. Fibber, the Storyteller], originally created by the poet Leah Goldberg and the illustrator Arie Navon, and published in the children's magazine Davar li-Yeladim in the 1930s and 1940s. They were re-illustrated by Rutu Modan and Yirmi Pinkus, respectively, and published in book format in 2013. Focusing on these books, the article studies the translation of multimodal texts, in which the replacement of one component—the illustrations, in this case—affects the entire work. By replacing the illustrations, Modan and Pinkus created a whole new set of relations: between the new versions and their originals, between the illustrations and the verbal text, between the works under discussion and other works. The article applies the concepts of translational equivalence and translational shifts to their work. These two books differ both in their artistic style and in the nature of the relations involved: Modan, who acknowledges her debt to Navon, distances herself from his work and establishes substantial intertextual relations with classical European and American artists, whereas Pinkus's work is characterised by a non-attributed relationship with Navon's art, on the one hand, and intratextual relations (between elements in his own work) on the other. This leads to the conclusion that the actual relationship between texts does not necessarily correspond to the acknowledgement of the act of translation. Rather, the article exposes the full complexity of the intra- and intertextual relations in these multimodal texts where non-verbal components undergo a process of translation.