Reading multimodal translational webs Dialogue of the visual and the verbal in Vanity Fair's publication of Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Abstract

This paper focuses on Gregory Rabassa's translation of García Márquez's Crónica de una muerte anunciada, published with Fernando Botero's illustrations in Vanity Fair in 1983. I analyse its emblematic title pages, showing how they create a remarkable continuum: an integrated whole of visual and verbal elements, strongly dependent on both semiotic codes but not reducible to the components of either. This is a special type of multimodal target text, since Rabassa's translation and Botero's images develop direct relationships with García Márquez's novela. Both contributions are second-order derivative texts, which deploy similar interpretants and adopt equally “displacing” or foreignizing strategies of translation vis-à-vis the context of publication. Their connection with the source text prepares the development of a subtle intersemiotic translational web, favouring internal coherence within the target text itself. To investigate an oggetto traduttivo of this kind, a broad notion of translation criticism is needed, open to external contributions from other research fields such as visual semiotics and rhetoric.