Sundog Rising!
Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog
A Dickens of a Dosteovsky, You Say …
I’ve just gotten around this year to reading Douglas Hofstadter’s classic whatsit Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, and I’m kicking myself for not reading it in 1982 when I was being taught computer programming in a disastrous class with Professor Chan at the University of Winnipeg. Things would have made a lot more sense, if I had …
That being said GEB is a great book for more than math and logic theory. Hofstadter explores the mystery of translation in Chapter Twelve, coming up with this surprising statement after analyzing different English translations of the opening line to Dosteovsky’s Crime and Punishment. He’s particularly interested on how the translators handle the street name mentioned in the opening sentence:
“What about number 3? This is the most interesting of all. This translation says ‘Carpenter’s Lane’. And why not, indeed? After all, ‘stoliar’ means ‘carpenter’ and ‘ny’ is an adjectival ending. So now we might imagine ourselves in London, not Petrograd, and in the midst of a situation invented by Dickens, not Dosteovsky. Is that what we want? Perhaps we should just read a novel by Dickens instead, with the justification that it is ‘the corresponding work in English’. When viewed on a sufficiently high level, it is a ‘translation’ of the Dosteovsky novel — in fact, the best possible one! Who needs Dosteovsky?” (pg. 380, GEB)
When I was done chuckling, I remembered last week’s blog on Alfred Hitchcock translating Patricia Highsmith’s novel Strangers on a Train into a movie — and ending up using Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop for the last scene.
A Crispin of a Highsmith, you might say.
Now hold on a second! Howz that work exactly? You start off translating one novel and discover the best result for your language is another novel by another writer entirely?
My argument last week was that people shouldn’t get hung up on movies being different from the books they’re sharing a title with because the two art forms are completely different media, with idioms of their own to carry out for proper effect. Not unlike two spoken or written languages … Making a movie of a book is quite literally an attempt to translate it into a different language.
The paradoxes of translation are many and well explored in other arguments. In fact, Douglas Hofstadter ended up writing another massive tome even longer than Gödel, Escher, Bach on that very subject. Is a “proper” translation of any work ever really possible? What should the translator try for most? The literal meaning of the original, the substance of the idea being advanced, or some duplication of the artistic style exhibited in the original expression? You’d think just telling the damn story would be enough, but really, it isn’t.
When you’re translating from book to movie you’re faced with even more problems. You mess with different interpretive senses. What you read, in your head, is physically seen, on screen. Two pages of internal monologue have to be conveyed by an actor’s facial expression. The rules are all different! A movie can’t take you all the places a novel naturally goes, and likewise a novel can’t begin to have the visual impact at the absolute centre of the film experience. Choices have to be made.
Let’s examine three examples. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies and J.R.R. Tolkien’s books; Mike Nichols’s movie of The Graduate, and Charles Webb’s novel; and Terence H. Winkless’s movie of Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game. That’s right, I said Terence H. Winkless. Five great novels, four great movies, and one absolute dud.
Lord of the Rings and The Westing Game I read before seeing the movies, The Graduate I read after seeing the movie. This is very important. Regardless of how the activity actually happened chronologically, to my perception, the book is the translation of the movie in The Graduate’s case.
Peter Jackson had an enormous task ahead of him. As I worked out last year, Lord of the Rings is my favourite read of all time (to date), and he wanted to make a movie out of it?! He made his choices, and not many would argue they were the wrong choices. If there’s any complaint here, people wanted to see more of what he did with the material. High proof that what he adapted and cut from the very long story to make it work on screen worked very well indeed. With high marks to his casting director as well. Seeing the movies made me want to read the books again, and they stood up just as well as before. If not holding an even greater resonance now that I had actual faces, voices, and environments to hang the narrative on.
Not that I don’t have complaints. I didn’t like the green colour of the ghost army in the third movie, I think Jackson missed the boat entirely on adequately establishing Denethor’s motivation also in the third movie, and what the hell was that whole bit with Aragorn falling off a cliff after being wounded in the second movie? Not every choice was great, but I could forget about the books entirely while I watched the movie and only focus on the thrill I was getting out of the story in an entirely different sensory language. Perhaps the best example yet of a movie translating the essential substance of a property in its own brilliant style.
Then there was The Graduate. Loved the movie. An amazing bit of innovative film making, I thought. Then I finally read the novel, and discovered … wow, this is almost as close to a literal translation as you can get. Webb’s novel is almost all dialogue and sparse description, most of the lines lifted directly as the script for the movie. In fact, when I got to the book, that’s what I felt like I was reading. An early draft of the film script.
Yet the movie was definitely a movie experience in every sense, and the book was most certainly a literary moment. Keep the language simple with a good eye and maybe you can do a pretty literal transposition of a theme.
Then there was The Westing Game. Just because it was a TV movie doesn’t mean I make allowances. Throughout, I kept thinking “bad decision by the director, appalling misapprehension of the character by that actor — why didn’t the director stop her, idiotic reinterpretation of the storyline, another bad decision by the director, DID THESE PEOPLE EVEN READ THE DAMN BOOK?!”
At the end, no sense of anything being carried over from a wonderfully vital, creative and original story, to a flat, dead, poorly paced, ill constructed film translation lifting a literal idea (badly) with no sense of the essential substance or even specific events.
I could go on. And on and on and on. Barry Levinson’s movie Wag the Dog completely reinterpreted Larry Beinhart’s novel American Hero, but both were great as entirely separate experiences. Making a total Dickens out of an utter Dosteovsky! John Huston’s Under the Volcano was so true to Malcolm Lowry’s novel on one level it felt more like a good read to me than watching a movie.
There is obviously no final word on changing one word into …
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AND ON THE MUSIC SCENE ...
Live! From basements across America, including Detroit!
WEEKEND NACHOS in action!! Thanks to Dylan Baillie's Nascency Productions and hate5six.
See it at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyiEvRz_rpA&list=UUY7Uxvx2ziE8EYaGYpn4XAQ&feature=c4-overview
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REALITY FICTION UPDATE!
And what is Reality Fiction, you may well ask?
Simple. The concept of the Reality Television Series translated to the printed page. 40 characters from my backlog of generally unpublished material are gathered together to compete in a different theme each Episode, with one or two characters being eliminated each sequence until there are only two left to fight it out in the final. The winner gets a short novel of their own as the grand prize.
But somehow, things always seem to go horribly wrong ...
What’s happening now?
The Fairy Tale came to its lively end on Monday this week, with the results coming out after the dust settles on Friday. Who rose to the top of this stirring fable of Princesses Done Wrong, Stolen Shadows, Nasty Queens, Poisoned Carrots, Ghostly Tea Parties, and Humming Fairies?
Continuing Friday at: realficone.blogspot.ca
REALITY FICTION TOO! EPISODES TO DATE
EPISODE TWENTY-TWO: FAIRY TALE
Princess NoName
EPISODE TWENTY-ONE: THE WEDDING
Dearly, Beloved
EPISODE TWENTY: EXISTENTIALISM
Face the Hangman
EPISODE NINETEEN: ABDUCTION
Abduction/Apperception
EPISODE EIGHTEEN: MELODRAMA
“Terror in Tarnation! A Thrilling Narrative in Three Acts”
EPISODE SEVENTEEN: POETRY
“landescapes”
EPISODE SIXTEEN: SILLY EUROPEAN SPY SPOOF (DUBBED)
“Diet Ray of the Stars!”
EPISODE FIFTEEN: EROTIC SUPERNATURAL ROMANCE
“The Shadow of Her Passion”
EPISODE FOURTEEN: FLYING:
“Sky Calling”
EPISODE THIRTEEN: SLAPSTICK:
“The Phantom of the Werewolf”
EPISODE TWELVE: DAIRY FARMING:
“Early One Morning”
EPISODE ELEVEN: BURROUGHS:
“Chapter Nine”
EPISODE TEN: WEREWOLVES:
“The Silver Solution”
EPISODE NINE: WRESTLING:
“Suckerslam XIV”
EPISODE EIGHT: JANE AUSTEN ROMANCE:
“The Proud and the Senseless”
EPISODE SEVEN: THE JAZZ AGE:
“The Bucky-Dusky-Ruby Red Hop!”
EPISODE SIX: SUBMISSION:
“Re-Org”
EPISODE FIVE: MASQUERADE:
“The Eyes Behind the Mask”
EPISODE FOUR: SELF HELP:
“Sausage Stew for the Slightly Overweight Presents:
Some Several Suggestions Guaranteeing Success for the Mildly Neurotic”
EPISODE THREE: NUDIST:
“If You Have To Ask ...”
EPISODE TWO: FRENCH BEDROOM FARCE:
“Un Nuit a Fifi’s!”
EPISODE ONE: STEAMPUNK:
“The Chase of the Purple Squid!”
A J.H.B. Original!
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