ABSTRACT
Yehonatan Geffen’s Ha-Keves ha-Shisha-Asar (The Sixteenth Sheep), a collection of poems and stories for children first published in 1978, has a series of subsequent versions: In 1992 and then again in 2010, it was republished with new illustrations; the texts were also set to music and appeared as an album, and the songs were later incorporated into a successful theatrical production. Using this work as a case study, this chapter seeks to examine the following claims: In multimodal texts, each mode translates the others in the sense that it interprets them using strategies that are familiar from interlingual translation. The illustrations and music coexist with the verbal text, so that the translation is not unidirectional. The verbal text loses its priority as a source because it is consumed along with its visual and/or musical translations. The various artists (author, illustrators, composer, director, etc.) function as an ensemble, sharing in the creation of a work that transcends any one of its specific versions.
