Graphic Novels in Translation: Background information when reading Our Beautiful Darkness

Graphic Novels in Translation

This article relates to Our Beautiful Darkness

Our Beautiful Darkness by Ondjaki has been translated into English from the original Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann. The process of translating a graphic novel differs somewhat from that of a more traditional prose novel. This is due to the importance of the interaction between the text and images, with each component needing to work in harmony with and enhance the other to establish a fully-formed narrative.

Hannah Chute, who has translated several graphic novels from French into English, has discussed the challenges and trade-offs of working with a visual form. On the one hand, she explains, "having the graphic on the page can give you a clue of what to use if the meaning is ambiguous" in the original language. A word in French might have eight different meanings in English, but it's easy to figure out the correct meaning, because it's drawn on the page. On the other hand, the formal constraint of the text boxes—having to fit the translated words into the same size space, so as not to disrupt the images—is a challenge, almost like poetry, in which many translators want to retain the form, meter, and structure of the original poem. The translated English might take up more space than the original, but "I have a hard character limit and I have to respect that, so I try to figure out a way to get the meaning across in some other configuration," Chute says.

Alun Ceri Jones, the founder of a Wales-based publishing house that specializes in translating comics and graphic novels into Celtic languages such as Welsh, Scots, Gaelic, and Irish, as well as English, said in an interview that he runs into similar constraints. Additionally, his publishing house tries to adapt graphic novels from one culture, not just language, to another, which presents its own challenges. The combination of text and visuals may make sense to a French audience but not an Irish one, for example. Translating the text means keeping the writing as "natural, as funny, and as consistent [to the visuals] as the original."

Some other examples of international graphic novels that have been translated into English are:

• Horizontal Collaboration by Navie (text) and Carole Maurel (art), translated from the French by Margaret Morrison
• My Brother's Husband by Gengoroh Tagame, translated from the Japanese by Anne Ishii
• Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, translated from the Swedish by Hanna Strömberg, Richey Wyver, and Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom
• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, translated from the French by Mattias Ripa (Part 1), Blake Ferris (Part 2), and Anjali Singh (Parts 3 and 4)

Filed under Books and Authors

This article relates to Our Beautiful Darkness. It first ran in the July 31, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.