The uncanny recreated: Maupassant’s Le Horla translated into comics

Abstract

Malrieu (1992) suggests that the gothic genre appears in the 19th century as intrinsically linked to a widespread feeling that life could not be explained by means of scientific reason alone.). If the gothic has its roots in such a peculiar moment, how could it be translated to the new context of the 21st century? This paper examines the translation of a literary text to the language of comics, analyzing the strategies for recreating monomodal literature within the new multimodal setting (BOUTIN, 2012). It is argued that the imagetic sequences in comics rebuild the first text and offer a glimpse into the workings of polysemy in literary texts. To illustrate the issues in multimodal translation, the comics version of Maupassant’s Le Horla (Le Horla d’après l’oeuvre de Guy de Maupassant - SOREL, 2014) is examined. The paper also discusses the use of imagetic resources to recreate the hesitation vis-à-vis the reality of perceived facts (CASTEX, 2004, p.274).