ABSTRACT
The graphic novel Pitseriya Kamikaze (Pizzeria Kamikaze 2004) tells the story of Haim, who commits suicide, only to discover that the afterlife for suicides is depressingly similar to life on earth. Based on a story by the Israeli author Etgar Keret (1998), it was recreated as a graphic novel by Keret and the illustrator Asaf Hanuka. The similarity between the mechanisms of adaptation, or intermedial translation, and those of interlingual translation allows us to characterize this as a case of “collaborative self-translation”, one in which the author functions as one of the translators of the original work and collaborates with the illustrator to create a new work—in this case a graphic novel. The collaboration, facilitated by the artists’ shared social background and artistic interests, enabled them to give new and innovative expression to elements of comics and cinema already embedded in the original work. The result is a satire on Israeli society that also evokes the fantastic world of comics and simulates the dark atmosphere of film noir while addressing universal dilemmas in the lives of young people.
