“Our way of speaking and telling is changing [...] reading has become three-dimensional, nothing that happens is satisfied with a written text to be told”, Elena Stancanelli noted in 2020 about the growing success of the graphic novel. The high number of literary and graphic ‘translations’ of Franz Kafka’s works internationally shows that the intermedial and multimodal transposition of the Prague author’s texts constitutes a new key to accessing the literary heritage in the German language. In Kafka's case, “the deft and sophisticated dance between words and images” (McCloud, 2007) is also justified by the author’s graphic activity, whose drawings have been renowned following the discovery in 2019 of 100 unpublished sketches.
This contribution intends to compare two non-German graphic novels of The Metamorphosis to highlight the peculiarities of the two adaptations and the non-Mitteleuropean reception modes of Kafka’s tale: the Italian volume by Sergio Vanello (2021) and the French one by Corbeyran and Horne (2009). The analysis focuses on several particularly significant aspects of form and content; on the one hand, the resumption or ‘distortion’ of graphic elements typical of the comic strip, the perspective of the narration, the drawing style compared with Kafka’s writing and the relationship between word and image; on the other hand, the rendering of fundamental thematic nuclei, such as space, eros and the city of Prague. In terms of the image, the identification of intertextual (from Kafka’s other works or the comic) and intermedial (film) citations brings out a different stratification of reading levels and a diverse degree of understanding and rendering of The Metamorphosis and Kafka’s literary production as a whole, clarifying why Corbeyran and Horn’s volume was later translated by Kai Wilkensen and marketed in the German market.
Both adaptations, in their diversity and autonomy with respect to the Kafkaesque hypotext, nevertheless attract, surprise and make contemporary readers reflect, emphasising the graphic novel’s capacity to "reinvent itself and invent" (Fofi, 2012).
