The Egyptian graphic novel Metro by artist Magdy El Shafee was first published in 2007 by Dar al-Malamih, a publishing house with a reputation for championing younger and politically outspoken authors. Part of the wave of graphic novel writing that in the 2000s in Cairo and Beirut, Metro tells the story of a disillusioned but principled young Cairo hacker named Shehab who witnesses the murder of a businessman and finds himself involved in a conspiracy of corrupt authorities, a bank robbery, and, eventually, a political protest against government corruption that ends violently. Not long after its publication, the book was banned by an Egyptian court for offending public morals, and all copies were removed for sale. The book paints a bleak picture of political and economic frustration in late-Mubarak era Egypt. This paper will examine some of the formal and linguistic challenges that a graphic novel such as Metro presents for translation. With a fixed visual layout and limited space for text, a graphic novel presents tighter constrictions on the translator than an all-text novel does. At the same time, the visual immediacy of the genre demands an informal, colloquial style: the pull to present a colloquial English translation—a domesticated translation, to use Lawrence Venuti’s term—operates in creative tension with Metro’s immersion in Cairo’s urban cityscape, one that lends itself far more to foreignization. Unlike an all-text novel, the words in a graphic novel form only a part of the entire work. How, then, should a translator attempt to translate the visual aspect of the text, if at all? As is implied by the title, El Shafee uses Cairo’s subway system—recreated visually with images of the Metro logo and background renderings of station maps throughout the text—as a symbol of the hidden lines that connect a city of vast socioeconomic differences. The dichotomy between wealth and poverty is inscribed in El Shafee’s frequent use of overhead images and drawings from a worm’s-eye perspective. The horizontal network of the Metro and the vertical world engendered by economic disparity and corruption two represent visual dimensions of the text that pose additional challenges to the translator. It is these “untranslatable” qualities—the visual and the linguistic—that I will address in this paper.