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Abstract
This article examines L’Araignée de Mashhad (Neyestani Citation2017), a graphic narrative by Iranian-born Mana Neyestani, now residing as a political refugee in France. Though he continues to write in Persian, his work is published in French translation, which becomes the source for translations into other languages. This article applies the framework of literary translingualism to shed new light on Neyestani’s L’Araignée de Mashhad. Literary translingualism, which encompasses “literature written in a language not native to the author, in two languages, or in a mix of languages” (Kellman and Lvovich Citation2015, 152), brings into sharper focus the narrative’s languaging practices, both beyond traditional approaches to graphic narratives and in relation to the global literary market. The translingual nature of L’Araignée de Mashhad emerges from its publication process, where the “original” is already a translation. This article argues that the untranslated Persian calligraphy within is neither an expression of cultural exoticism nor a form of multilingualism that a reader could overlook through glossing. Instead, it disrupts the ideology of monolingualism, redefines the meaning of “multi-” in multilingualism, and situates language within a broader spectrum of semiotic practices. It also demonstrates how those unfamiliar with Persian script may still access its aesthetic and narrative functions by drawing on the visual in the graphic narrative.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Stephanie Irani-Tehrani (U.S. Military Academy) for her assistance in forming conclusions regarding the Persian language and Persian poetry and to Serge Ewenczyk, the editor of Éditions ça et là, for elucidating the translation history of Neyestani’s work. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Notes
1 This journey is recounted in Une métamorphose iranienne (Citation2012), Neyestani’s first graphic narrative published in France.
2 I use the umbrella term “graphic narrative” (distinct from comics as a medium) to broadly refer to Neyestani’s literary works.
3 Serge Ewenczyk, the editor of Éditions ça et là, has generously filled the gaps in the paratextual history of Neyestani’s publications over the course of several email exchanges (July–August 2023).
4 See Lvovich’s “Translator and Translated Twice Removed: Multilingual Selfhood in Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman” (Citation2021) for analysis of a fictional representation of a twice-removed translation.
5 According to the editor of Ça et là, the original English version was not in a linguistically “publishable” state, a commentary which invites a discussion on the restrictive norms of standard English and the plurality of Englishes. Since the original document is unavailable, this remains a speculative observation.
6 In this article, I refer to multilingualism as a wide repertoire of languaging practices. I also draw on the definition of multimodal studies as a field that “tend[s] to focus on the complexity of the integration of different modes (understood as different means of communicating such as speech, colour or typography) within media products and in relation to a social context” (Bruhn and Schirrmacher Citation2021, 7). See Kress, Günther, and Theo Van Leeuwen. Citation2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London, UK: Routledge; or Serafini, Frank. Citation2014. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy. New York, NY: Teachers College.
7 The field of literary translingualism is distinct from translingual pedagogical approaches. In the context of writing studies and pedagogy, translingualism designates an approach to literacy that acknowledges students’ diverse linguistic backgrounds and encourages them to incorporate these backgrounds in their writing. As a result, “difference in language” is viewed “not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning” (Horner et al. Citation2011, 303). For Canagarajah, translingual literacy constitutes “an understanding of the production, circulation, and reception of texts that are always mobile; that draw from diverse languages, symbol systems, and modalities of communication; and that involve inter-community negotiations” (Citation2013, 41). Multimodality and multilingualism go hand in hand both in literary translingualism as well as in translingual pedagogies.
8 See, for example, how Matthew Brauer applies the translingual lens to Georges Perec’s destabilization and re-invention of French through Arabic (Citation2019, 54–67).
9 It is important to make a distinction between monolingualism as the perceived ability to speak (and/or write) in one named language and monolingualism as an ideological paradigm that “organizes the entire range of modern social life, from the construction of individuals and their proper subjectivities to the formation of disciplines and institutions, as well as of imagined collectives such as cultures and nations” (Yildiz Citation2012, 2).
10 This shift towards multimodality is also evident in a special issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism (2014), dedicated to the intersection of multilingualism and the arts. Its coda essay, entitled “Translingual arts” (Citation2014) by Besemeres, connects multilingualism to other modalities and forms of meaning-making. In a Critical Multilingualism Studies issue addressing transnational multilingualism, Lvovich (Citation2015) argues that, for the multilingual artist Marc Chagall, art offers another way of expressing translingual aesthetics associated with language, which may be visually encoded within an “art text” and be part of the multimodal nature of a painting.
11 Note that a person may speak two named languages that use the same script and be therefore bilingual but not necessarily biscriptal. The latter involves the knowledge of two different writing systems.
12 In a single exception, Persian is both transliterated and translated. When Karimi Majd is welcomed into the judge’s office, she is referred to as “la journaliste de la revue Zanan” (Neyestani Citation2017, 14). The translator’s note translating “zanan” as “femmes” completes Majd’s professional portrait. The remaining glosses refer to cultural phenomena rather than language.
13 Persian calligraphy is frequently incorporated into framed artworks, and the hatching used to depict a glass surface may interfere with translation programs. In one particular case, speech bubble tails obscure parts of the message, rendering it too opaque for translation software.
14 Exploring language through the materiality of its visual forms is also essential to concrete poetry. See Elaine S. Wong’s “Interlingual Encounter in Pierre Garnier and Niikuni Seiichi’s French-Japanese Concrete Poetry” (Citation2015) for a discussion of concrete poetry in which a multilingual (and heterographic) encounter between French and Japanese liberates both languages through spatialization and contiguity.
15 In the judge’s office, one of the frames is a Quranic verse in Arabic. The other is a line from a poem in Persian by Hasan Farahbakhshian. In his home, framed calligraphy depicts verses from poets Rumi and Mohammad-Taqi Bahar.
16 This calligraphy style, widely practised in the Persian-speaking world, has a rich history dating back to the fourteenth century. Its creation is attributed to Mir Ali Tabrizi, a renowned calligrapher of the Timurid era.
17 This heterogeneity of meaning echoes Wanner’s notion of “intersemiotic bridge-building” in his exploration of Wassily Kandinsky’s album Klänge (1912). In this album, “there is no straightforward correspondence between individual woodcuts and prose poems,” yet they form “parallel and mutually interdependent sequences” (Wanner Citation2019, 48, 42). In the context of L’Araignée de Mashhad, the juxtaposition of text and image is further complicated by the modal liminality of the Persian script. While its intersemiotic, heterographic “bridge-building” may not be a deliberate strategy on the author’s part, it remains nonetheless a form of crossing: both linguistically, within the context of French translation, and medially, in the absence of semiotic access to the Persian script. The fascinating juxtaposition of text and image in L’Araignée de Mashhad reminds us that the notion of visual universality, often attributed to comics, is misleading. Images are culturally loaded semiotic resources that may require their own decoding literacy (Cohn Citation2021).
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Liana Pshevorska
Liana Pshevorska is Associate Professor of the Practice in French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University. She earned her Ph.D. in French Studies from Princeton University (2020). Her research centers on contemporary translingual literature of French expression with a focus on migration, multilingualism, and self-writing. Her scholarship has been published in The French Review, Interfrancophonies, and The Journal of Literary Multilingualism. She recently contributed a chapter “L’espace dédalesque de Vassilis Alexakis : errance, (im)mobilité et fabulation dans L’Enfant grec” to an edited volume Vassilis Alexakis: Chemins croisés (2023) with Presses universitaires de Rennes.