Comic strip as literature : Art Spiegelman's Maus in Slovenian

Abstract

Until recently comic strips were predominantly categorized as either juvenile distraction or some odd adult enthusiasts' hobby. The genre experienced a minor revolution in the 1990s when on the one hand the mass visual media began to explore its rich potential whereas on the other hand the medium's ability to offer "tremendous resources to all writers and artists" (McCloud 212) came under scrntiny, prompting authors like Art Spiegelman to wage an experiment. His biographical Holocaust graphic novel MAUS l and II (1986, 1991) became a bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner. The paper looks into its 2003 Slovenian edition from the point of view of the undividable entity of drawing and lettering within a panel. It also touches upon certain translation solutions - how closely they correspond to the source text in terms of syntax and transfer of information - but it is not a detailed contrastive analysis as such.