Trauma and Paratranslation: A Historical Approach to the Holocaust in the Comic “The Testament of Magneto”

ABSTRACT

This contribution aims to study the re­lationship between the history of the ­character Magneto from the X-Men, the history of the Holocaust, and the paratranslational method created by the School of Vigo. We will consider comics as historical sources because they represent the past and use fictional narratives as a way of thinking and problematizing historical reality. We will present the notion of paratranslation to demonstrate how this tool is fundamental for research on this topic. The analysis will be carried out through the X-Men comics that seek to reconstruct the biographical journey of the character Magneto, passing through the experience of the collective social trauma of the Shoah. Thus, our intention is to show how the sacralization of a subject already so trivialized by the “excess of language and representation” ends up inducing narratives that would be more “appropriate” than others to represent the collective social trauma.

Keywords:
Paratranslation; trauma; comics; Holocaust