Le Metamorfosi: graphic novel a confronto

Translated title of the contribution: [Machine translation] The Metamorphoses: graphic novel in comparison

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

[Machine translation] “Our way of speaking and telling is changing [...] reading has become three-dimensional, nothing that happens is content with a text written to be told,” Stancanelli notes in Repubblica (24/12/2020) regarding the growing success of the graphic novel. The high number of 'translations' in words and images of Franz Kafka's works at an international level shows that the intermediate and multimodal transposition of the texts of the Prague author constitutes a new key to access literary heritage in German. In the case of Kafka, “the skilful and sophisticated dance between words and images” (McCloud, 2007) is also justified by the graphic activity of the author himself, whose drawings have returned to the center of interest after the discovery, in 2019, of one hundred unpublished sketches., This contribution intends to compare two non-German graphic novels of The Metamorphosis to highlight both the peculiarities of the two adaptations and the methods of receiving the Kafkaesque story outside the central European area: the Italian volume by Sergio Vanello (2021) and the French one by Corbeyran and Horne (2009). The analysis will focus on some particularly significant aspects in terms of form and content: on the one hand, the revival or 'distortion' of the graphic elements typical of comics, the perspective of the narrative, the style of drawing compared to Kafka's writing and the relationship between word and image; on the other hand, the rendering of fundamental thematic nuclei such as space, eros and the city of Prague. In terms of the image, the identification of intertextual quotes (from other works of Kafka or from the comic) and intermediate (film) will reveal a different stratification of reading levels and a different degree of understanding and rendering not only of The Metamorphosis, but also of Kafka's literary production as a whole, also clarifying why the volume of Corbeyran and Horn was then translated by Kai Wilkensen and marketed in the German market., Both adaptations, in their diversity and autonomy compared to the Kafkaesque hypothesis, still have the merit of attracting, surprising and making the contemporary reader reflect, once again demonstrating the graphic novel's ability to “reinvent itself and to invent” (Fofi, 2012).
Translated title of the contribution[Machine translation] The Metamorphoses: graphic novel in comparison
Original languageItalian
Pages (from-to)161-191
Number of pages31
JournalPROSPERO
Volume29
Publication statusPublished - 2024

Keywords

  • Kafka
  • graphic novel
  • Metamorfosi
  • Vanello
  • Corbeyran/Horne

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of '[Machine translation] The Metamorphoses: graphic novel in comparison'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this