Death on the Page, Rebirth on the Screen: Literature Between Translation and Adaptation, Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun as a Case Study

Abstract

This research provides a comparative study between Hilary Kilpatrick's English translation and Tawfiq Saleh's film adaptation ʾ Al-Makhduʿun ( The Duped) of Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun. Drawing on Narrative and Appraisal theories, this research investigates the ideological disparity between Kilpatrick and Saleh's approaches to Kanafani's text by examining their respective attitudinal stance and patterns of narrative (re)framing in relation to three dimensions: politics, religion, and culture. The research, thus, accentuates the ways in which the translator's identity, with its nexus of associated values, can reshape and reconfigure both narratives and reality by producing hegemonic or resistant translations. In doing so, the study, from a postcolonial perspective, aims to redirect the attention toward the ‘vertical’ power dynamics in and of translation, in addition to exposing the varying, often subtle, levels of negotiation, manipulation and intervention such politically loaded narratives, especially contested narratives, experience in translation. In fact, combining literary translation with adaptation reveals how narratives of the same objet d'art are creatively interpreted and re-negotiated differently when the translation medium involves visuals.