Collaborative translation and the remediation of intergenerational memory in Leila Abdelrazaq's Baddawi

This chapter explores the role intersemiotic translation plays in the remediation and reconstruction of Palestinian collective memory. Leila Abdelrazaq’s graphic novel Baddawi (2015) depicts her father's memories of growing up as a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon. This multimodal text is based on several 'source texts' including the artist's family's oral history. I argue that the transformation of oral testimonies into a graphic novel entails several processes of translation, not all of which are lingual. The artist and her family can be considered intersemiotic translators. Abdelrazaq's father and grandparents translate their lived experiences into oral narratives which she later translates into the graphic novel.

The analysis is divided into two sections. The first examines the collaborative translation processes through which intergenerationally inherited memory is remediated. The second considers the collaboration between the artist and other agents of translation, including the publisher, designer, and editors. I draw on the text and its paratexts as a means of understanding the process of translation, uncovering the agents who contribute to it and the aspects of their lives which influence their translational activities. Finally, I briefly reflect on some visual and verbal transformations the graphic novel undergoes once translated from English into Arabic, and their impact on the transcultural circulation of Palestinian memory.