Graphic Fiction by Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot

Translated from the French by Edward Gauvin

This graphic story takes place in the first part of the twentieth century, at a pyramid in Egypt. You'll meet Bedouin tour guides and their British clients—but who are the real "pharaohs"?

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First published in English in Words Without Borders' February 2007 issue: (Worth) Ten Thousand Words: A World of Graphics.

for The Pharaohs of Egypt
https://wwb-campus.org/literature/the-pharaohs-of-egypt

Florent Ruppert

Florent Ruppert was born in Troyes in 1979. His publications include the fanzines Le Journal de l'Aventure (2002), Le Journal de l'Aventure diese 2 (2003), and Del Aventure (2004); and the books (all published by L’Association) Safari Monseigneur (2005), La Poubelle de la Place Vendôme (2006), and Panier de Singe (2006), for which he and Jérôme Mulot won the Best Newcomer Award at the 2007 Angoul'me International Comics Festival. His latest book, Barrel of Monkeys, again in collaboration with Jérôme Mulot, was published in 2013.

Jérôme Mulot

Florent Ruppert (Troyes, 1979) and Jérôme Mulot (Dijon, 1981) have published the fanzines Le Journal de l'Aventure (2002), Le Journal de l'Aventure diese 2 (2003), and Del Aventure (2004), and the books Safari Monseigneur (L'Association, 2005), La Poubelle de la Place Vendôme (L'Association, 2006), and Panier de Singe (L'Association, 2006), for which they won the Best Newcomer Award at the 2007 Angoul'me International Comics Festival.

Edward Gauvin (translator)

A 2021 Guggenheim fellow, Edward Gauvin has translated in various fields from film to fiction, with a personal focus on contemporary comics (BD) and post-Surrealist literatures of the fantastic. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, and World Literature Today, and twice placed in the British Comparative Literature Association’s John Dryden Translation Competition. It has also been shortlisted for several major awards—the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, the National Translation Award—and twice nominated for French-American Foundation Translation Prize. He has received fellowships from the NEA, PEN America, the Fulbright program, and the Centre National du Livre, as well as residencies from Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, the Banff Centre, and the Belgian government. A multiple grantee of the French Voices program from the French Embassy, he is a frequent contributor to their cultural initiatives. As a translation advocate, he has written widely, spoken at universities and festivals, and taught at the Bread Loaf Translation Conference, where he will be returning (virtually) this summer. The translator of over 400 graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders.

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Links available online only

Meet the Creators

Read an interview with the "two-headed cartoon beast," Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot, published in metabunker.

Meet Translator Edward Gauvin

Read Gauvin's interview with The Comics Journal, in which he explains how he got his start as a translator: “Year Abroad. Dumb luck. Decent Taste."

Being Bedouin

Read a young Bedouin tour guide's thoughts on Bedouin history and culture, published on the independent news site Egyptian Streets.

Then, listen to Bedouin songs from the Smithsonian's music collection.

The Pharaohs as Inspiration

Look at a modern mural that invokes the pharaohs to commemorate people who died during a soccer match—and read about the artist who made it.

Background on Egypt

Mural, Egypt 2013, photographed by stttijn. License: CC by 2.0.

To learn more about Egypt's history, read the BBC's timeline of key events from 7000 BCE to 2018.

Links available online only

More from the Creators

Read Barrel of Monkeys, also by Ruppert and Mulot.

More from Translator Edward Gauvin

Read Gauvin's other work for Words Without Borders, of which he is a contributing editor. We especially recommend his translation of the comic "Crocodiles are Everywhere" and his essay on his own work being translated.

Or visit Gauvin's YouTube playlist of videos related to his work, including a reading of his translation of the story of a man who "sort of flies," below.

Being a Tourist

Read about a modern encounter between Western tourists and Bedouin guides, from the perspective of the tourist.

5 More Pharaohs: Then and Now

Find out which ancient pharaoh you most resemble in this National Geographic quiz
Read the poem “The Sphinx Speaks," by Francis Saltus Saltus
Then, read Wordsworth’s poem about the retreat of the armies of Napoleon, whom some compared to a pharaoh: "By Moscow Self-Devoted to a Blaze"
Take a look at Tobias Wolff's In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War, a Vietnam War memoir
Listen to Dre Murray's song "Pharaoh," about the materialism of “modern day Pharaohs,” and read the lyrics.

More Literary "Savages"

You'll find the word being used, with conscious and unconscious irony, in such poems as:

Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago"
Hamlin Garland's "Do You Fear the Wind?"
The poem "The West Indies" by British abolitionist James Montgomery.

"A Human Being or An Old Shoe?": More Stories of People Getting Labeled

The tourists in this story call their tour guides "savages." Read another story from Egypt, in which a grandmother is only ever referred to as "The Guest."

Read selections from Taxi, Khaled Al Khamissi's nonfiction collection of stories of Cairo's cab drivers—their experiences are, in some ways, similar to those of the tour guides in "The Pharaohs of Egypt." One of the cab drivers asks, “What do you think, sir, am I a human being or an old shoe?"

Reading Grade Level(s): 3, 4, 5 and up

Background Resource
Note for teachers of secondary students:
1. Pharaohs and Savages
2. The Body Leaves Home, the Mind Stays Put
3. Fantasy and Reality

To access these Teaching Ideas, please register or login to WWB-Campus.

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The Guest - Fiction

The Last of the Bunch - Graphic Fiction