Modern narratives and film adaptation as translation/Narrativas modernas e a adaptacao filmica como traducao.
da Silva, Carlos Augusto Viana
Introduction
This paper analyzes the process of translation of representative
modern narratives into films and discusses ways of reading these
literary texts in the new media, and possible implications to their
reception. Two novels and a short story and their film adaptations are
presented, namely, Mrs. Dalloway (1976), by Virginia Woolf, and A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1994), by James Joyce, will be
compared to the films Mrs. Dalloway (1997) by Marleen Gorris and A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1977) by Joseph Strick. The short
story The Dead (1993), by James Joyce, and the corresponding film, The
Dead (1987), by John Huston, is also investigated. We start from the
fact that aspects such as the linear format of narratives, the updated
quality and the particular aesthetics of creation are regular goals of
strategy presented in these translations to create images of the
literary universe of the writers to contemporary viewers. As theoretical
background, we take into account ideas of film adaptations as
translations, by Cattrysse (1992), and some principles of Descriptive
Studies of Translation, by Toury (1995).
The cinematographic translation
Research on the process of translation of literary texts into the
cinema has become an important object of study since it attempts to
analyze different forms of achievement of this very contemporary
phenomenon within a context in which readers are immersed in a variety
of audiovisual texts, such as cartoons, films, soap operas, TV series
and others on an equally varied number of subjects. Such audiovisual
products also allow readers to have access to representative texts of
the canonical literary tradition.
One of the important facts to foster this activity, in
Lefevere's conception (1992), is the varied forms of rewriting
which present, criticize, adapt and resignify texts, or rather,
activities that contribute to the dynamics of the development of
literary systems. Further, translations, as a kind of rewriting of
source texts, also affect the interaction between literary systems not
only for projecting images of a writer or a literary work in different
systems, but also for introducing new elements into a poetics,
delineating elements of changes. In the rewriting of a text in a new
system of language as the cinema, for example, new mechanisms of
representation may be perceived, since the procedures must take into
account poetic and discursive aspects of the new medium.
Discussing the process of adaptation as translation, Cattrysse
(1992, p. 17) notes that it is a mistake to consider translation as
something more related to faithfulness to the source text than any other
kind of adaptation. From the author's point of view, adaptation as
translation also follows criteria of approximation and distance from a
source text and thus it cannot be separated from those employed in
translation practice. The central idea of Cattrysse's discussion is
that linguistic or literary translation and film adaptation are
distinguished under the perspective of the process of production,
because the filmic process of creation occurs in social contexts
different from those of reception process since the social context of
reception of a literary text is different from that of a cinematographic
one.
Even-Zohar (1990, p. 12) discusses the polysystem theory as the
aggregate of literary and non-literary forms that exist in any given
culture. The author regards the literary system as a set of semiotic
phenomena which are dynamic mechanisms and, as a system, is not only
synchronic or diachronic, but heterogeneous. Thus, the term polysystem
emphasizes the idea of multiplicity in heterogeneous relations within a
certain cultural system. By considering this cultural heterogeneity, the
polysystem theory rejects the idea of value judgments and elitist
selections. Consequently, it is not concerned with canonized works only
as the criterion for the selection of an object of study, although it
acknowledges the existence of cultural hierarchies.
According to Cattrysse's (1992, p. 54) point of view, the
principles of the mentioned theory are very productive for the study of
film adaptation, because
[...] translation studies and film adaptation studies are both
concerned with the transformation of source text into target texts under
some conditions of 'invariance', or equivalence (emphasis in
original).
Toury's (1995) perspective of translation also shares this
view. By focusing on reception, he tries to systematize a method of
analysis that consolidates the interaction of the translated text with
the target system. He developed the idea of social norms that are
responsible for the translators' aesthetic assumptions in the
target culture. Concerning literary texts, the social norms may be
related to some elements of the poetics of the source text, such as
style, language, themes, genres, for instance, that translators must
observe, as well as literary conventions of the target system which
affect their decisions.
The process of translation on the screen also follows this
principle, since film adaptations are inserted in specific poetics, in a
different context of production and, as a consequence, they present
particular processes of creation, and sometimes are subjected to some
constraints of the market industry in which, in many cases, the main
objectives are to provide spectators with entertainment and/or to
present cultural products with commercial purposes.
Thus, film adaptation studies should not be focused on the
assumption of faithfulness or on the judgment of parameters of high or
low quality of the analyzed objects. Instead, they should observe the
way these texts are read in the new context of language, in what
circumstances they are produced as a result of a process of cultural
transfer, and their function in the cinematic context.
Modern narratives in adaptation
Modern narrative is characterized by its experimental nature since
it does not necessarily follow a linear order in plot structure, or
rather, with a beginning, middle and end. The emphasis of that kind of
narrative is not on the story itself but on the possibility of making
the readers go deeper into the constant stream in the characters'
consciousness which takes them closer to the process of association of
impressions, ideas and memory.
Humphrey (1972) defines the narrative in this perspective of
writing as the stream-of-consciousness novel, identified immediately by
its subject matter. The author emphasizes that this aspect, rather than
its techniques, its purposes or its themes, distinguishes it and
reinforces that:
[h]ence, the novels that are said to use the
stream-of-consciousness technique to a considerable degree prove, upon
analysis, to be novels which have as their essential subject matter the
consciousness of one or more characters; that is, the depicted
consciousness serves as a screen on which the material in these novels
is presented (HUMPHREY, 1972, p. 2).
The novels Mrs. Dalloway (1976) and A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (1916) and the short story The Dead (1993) were produced under
the process of 'innovative style', which contributed to insert
Joyce and Woolf in canonical modern literature.
Regarding the process of translation/adaptation of these texts to
the cinema, some questions may be asked in order to understand or at
least to reflect upon their rewriting into the new context of production
and their projection as audiovisual representations of texts of a
literary tradition.
Starting from the fact that aspects such as the linear format of
narratives, their updated quality, and the particular aesthetics of
creation presented by these translations may be seen as regular
strategies that represent images of the literary universe of the writers
to contemporary viewers, we will analyze some ways these cultural
products are constructed on the screen and interpreted in the context of
reception.
The linear format of narratives
One of the most common strategies used in the cinematographic texts
in question is the creation of a story with linear events. In Mrs.
Dalloway, by Marleen Gorris, themes and elements of Woolfs plot are
presented in this perspective. It is a drama focusing on situations of a
day in the life of the main character, Clarissa (Vanessa Redgrave) while
organizing a party. Through the use of the flashback technique, some
events of Clarissa's past, when she was a young girl, are shown.
Other characters Peter Walsh (Michael Kitchen) and Septimus Smith
(Rupert Graves)--establish this relation between the present and the
past. Peter, who loved Clarissa in his youth, but was rejected by her,
comes back to England after a long period in India. Similar to Peter,
Septimus is tormented by his past, but his problems are of a different
kind since they are linked with the effects of World War I, which
eventually led him to commit suicide.
The film reinforces aspects of the novel such as Clarissa and
Peter's reminiscences and Septimus's mental disturbance in the
London of the 1920's. However, it incorporated a new perspective.
Whereas in the novel these facts are developed at the level of the
characters' reflections, in the film they change to a strong visual
appeal and are part of the constitutive elements of the narrative.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1977), by Joseph Strick,
just as Joyce's novel did, presents the school years of the main
character, Stephen Dedalus, in whom the spectator visualizes information
from his childhood until his first years as a young man, his
intellectual awakening, and his rebellious attitudes against social and
religious conventions in his education. The presence of elements of
Joyce's literary universe is clearly highlighted in Strick's
project. However, the setting up of the filmic narrative has a different
perspective in such a way that it becomes more conventional on screen.
The first scene, for example, is very representative of the above since
the spectators observe a camera movement which shows the Irish landscape
putting emphasis on geographic references and historical facts, such as:
"Ireland, 1885--Ruled by Britain but moving towards Independence
under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, a protestant
nationalist supported by the Catholic majority of his country."
Similar to techniques in the short story, in The Dead (1984), by
John Huston, one finds the description of the main characters'
actions and the articulation of those to the context of interaction (the
party in the Morkan sisters' house). In the film, however, besides
the description of the main characters' actions, one is introduced
to these characters through dialogues and the articulation of the
context of interaction (the party in the Morkan sisters' house).
Concerning the innovative characteristics of the literary texts
studied as modern deeply impacting narratives at the beginning of the
last century, we observe a common element in their translations for the
screen: a tendency towards the construction of more traditional
narratives in the new contexts. This idea is reinforced by some critics.
Merten (1998, p. 1), for example, in his text 'Vanessa
Redgrave's art gives life to Mrs. Dalloway' says what is found
in Mrs. Dalloway is a reduced version of the novel, but not the
implications of its style. Olsen (2002), talking on A Portrait of the
Artist as Young Man in 'On the page/On the Screen: two ways of
reading Joyce', affirms that Strick's narrative is clearly
more conventional than those of Ulysses (1967) or Finnegans Wake (1965).
Wawrzycka (1998, p. 72), discussing in 'Apotheosis, Metaphor, and
Death: John Huston's The Dead Again' the idea that the
Gabriel's epiphanic moment at the end of The Dead was not very much
explored in terms of cinematic possibilities, writes that Huston is an
artist that used Joyce as a model, but drew life out of his model and
gave it his own. We can see in these interpretations that, although all
the critics emphasize the more traditional structure of the films, they
also recognize that some important elements of the source texts are
highlighted and suggest that the filmic narratives have artistic
potentials.
Updated quality
This strategy may be directly associated to the context of
production of cinematographic translations. It may be interpreted as a
consequence of particular readings of the texts taking aspects of
reception into consideration.
Cattrysse (1992, p. 60) discusses the presentation and the
functioning of a film adaptation within its filmic context and
reinforces the idea that films are not presented to the public by their
credits alone. They are also presented by a set of parafilmic
activities, such as previews, critical reviews, promotional activities
etc., which are important to the process of reception in the target
system. Thus, a description of the context of production of the object
of study and its reception should be taken into account, since the
functioning of a film adaptation varies in time and space.
In Mrs. Dalloway, for example, this situation may be observed
through the way some themes are developed and some characters
constructed. By the use a flash-forward in the very first scene,
Septimus, the war neurotic character, is shown in the trenches at the
moment of his friend Evans's death. In the novel, discussions on
the war are constant, but its development is presented through the
characters' insights and reactions. In the film, the visual appeal
seems to bring something more attractive or with more impact to
spectators at the very beginning of the narrative.
Pruzan (2002, p. 4), in the text 'Adapting Mrs.
Dalloway', reinforces that to Eileen Atkins, the screenwriter, the
main objective of this strategy was to make clear to spectators the
connection between the characters since the beginning. Once more the
idea of directing the literary universe is transmitted to the audience.
The above aspect may also be observed in the films based on
Joyce's texts. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, two
relevant procedures reinforce the updated quality of the text: the
presence of historical information on screen about Ireland in the very
beginning of the cinematographic narrative and the use of language
spoken in dialogues or voiceover. The first procedure may be interpreted
as an attempt to contextualize the political and social background of
the literary work and the second, as an attempt to organize events.
The articulation of time and space in The Dead is redefined through
the fragmentation of these categories, leading to a more linear
characteristic of the narrative. This boils down to the fact that in the
film the emphasis is on the development of actions based on the
characters' external realities and not exactly on the internal
ones, as in Joyce's text. As a result, the narrative seen on screen
has a lower rhythm when compared to the short story.
In Corseuil's view (1996, p. 77), one of the problems in
Huston's adaptation is related to the director's inconsistent
exploration of two major narrative devices: focalization and integration
of narrative development throughout the descriptive scenes. In order to
justify her position, the author affirms that:
In general, camera-eye tends to be unobtrusive, letting the
characters carry on the narrative. The film's lack of a focalizer
and its consistent freezing of story-time to enhance the descriptive
sequences lead to the conclusion that Huston's film is less keen on
the potentials of its own medium to narrate a story than on its
approximation to a poetic piece, in which images stand still, [...]
(CORSEUIL, 1996, p. 77).
We agree with Corseuil on the exploration of these narrative
devices, even though we interpret it as evidence of the director's
narrative project and not really as a problem.
The particular aesthetics of creation
The interference of filmmakers' individual style of creation
and the constraints of the context of production are very relevant to
understand some procedures and aspects of the process of translation of
these film adaptations. The first point to be made in this discussion is
the canonical quality of the translated texts and the status they have
within the literary system. Keeping that in mind, directors have to deal
with the following challenging situation: to provide the readers of the
novels and of the short story with 'plausible' images of the
literary universe of the texts and, at the same time, to create images
for new spectators.
Thus, the process of reception in the cinematographic system is
very much affected by this situation: at the same time that there are
similarities to the way these modern narratives are constructed on the
screen, as we have seen, there are also particularities concerning the
directors' aesthetics of creation and consequently the manner they
are rewritten by critics.
According to Worsdale (1998, p. 1), in 'A woman for all
women', the film Mrs. Dalloway, although a very well-worked
adaptation, is not completely successful because it is sometimes too
dour for its own good. He says that although the main character is
highly feminine, Marleen Gorris by her adaptation of Virginia
Woolf's novel softens the militant feminist attitudes for which her
productions A Question of Silence (1982), Broken Mirrors (1984) and
Antonia's Line (1996) have been known. In this perspective, we may
observe that the film adaptation has a very particular position in the
cinematographic system, or rather, it is neither too close to
Woolf's book nor to Gorris's filmic production.
In Joseph Strick's A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man,
Olsen (2002, p. 104) identifies a difference in style in relation to
Strick's earlier Joyce's film Ulysses. In his opinion, aspects
such as 'free-associative flashbacks and fantasy sequences are
missing' in the cinematographic text. But, similar to Canby (1979,
p. 2), Olsen also admits that Strick's text presents important
elements of Joyce's universe.
John Huston's The Dead also emphasizes these elements of the
Joycean text. However, Olsen (2002, p. 104) points out relevant
transformations in the translation process of the short story. According
to this author, Huston tends to be more interested in interpreting the
text on screen. Different from Strick who, even constructing a more
conventional novel, attempted to follow the letter and the spirit of
Joyce's work, Huston takes liberties in altering the story. Some
examples are the addition of the character Mr. Grace and the inclusion
of a reference to a passage related to some ideas of 'The Celtic
Twilight', an Irish literary movement.
The main objective of this movement was to spread among Irish
authors a tradition of writing on Irish themes, of using older Irish
literatures and tradition, contemporary Irish speech, folklore and
folk-song in their work, and of linking the Irish landscape with its
older associations. According to McHugh and Harmon (1982, p. 138), the
Celtic twilight element in the movement was really the creation of
Yeats, Russel and their imitators. Joyce, in a different perspective,
had an international view of literature. He was in many ways hostile to
the revival, which he regarded as too concerned with the past and too
regional in outlook. The Dead, the last short story of Dubliners (1993),
is very representative of Joyce's position, since he regarded the
stories of the book as a chapter on the moral history of Ireland, with
Dublin as the centre of its paralysis. McHugh and Harman, in their
discussion on the methods in the development of the stories say that:
The method of revelation is, on the whole, ironic. Romantic
attitudes are gradually confronted with drab disillusioning facts;
sentimental songs or poems are presented in ironic contexts; the sense
of entrapment, a form of paralysis, is frequent (McHUGH; HARMON, 1982,
p. 197).
As may be inferred from the discussion above, Joyce was more
interested in dealing with problems in Ireland than with its traditions.
Although Dublin is the setting for the stories, the vision lights up
many other Irish cities. In the case of the construction of the literary
text on screen, there is evidence of a particular reading of the short
story and of the filmmaker's political reaction towards the
historical past and social aspects of Ireland. In a completely different
perspective from that presented by Joyce in the short story, Huston
shows his own position in the cinematographic text.
Conclusion
This brief discussion has shown that the strategies used to
translate modern literary texts to the cinema consolidated a tendency
towards more conventional narratives on screen, as they did not focus on
the exploration of cinematic possibilities to deal with Woolf's and
Joyce's avant-garde narrative projects. They are conceived as
artistically constructed narrative projects by the social prestige of
the source texts, but they do not emphasize their innovative aspects,
thus lacking an impact in the cinematographic system. As a result, we
may observe an ambivalent position of these texts in relation to their
critical reception, since they are products of interpretations and
evidence of cultural and temporal transfer.
Doi: 10.4025/actascilangcult.v35i3.17238
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Received on May 13, 2012.
Accepted on January 21, 2013.
Carlos Augusto Viana da Silva
Programa de Pos-graduacao em Linguagem e Literatura, Departamento
de Letras Estrangeiras, Universidade Federal do Ceara, Avenida da
Universidade, 2683, 60020-180, Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil. E-mail:
[email protected].