It seems difficult to translate into words what is expressed by Beethoven’s Fifth, as it is also impossible to ‘translate’ into music the whole Critique of Pure Reason. The phenomenon of ekphrasis permits one to describe an image by words, but no ekphrasis of The Marriage of the Virgin by Raphael can render either the perspective we see when looking at the painting, or the soft harmony of the colours.
Let us now consider the importance that a change in matter takes in cases of so-called intersemiotic translation, that one that Jakobson defined as transmutation and that is sometimes called adaptation.
Adaptations
The commonest cases concern the adaptation of a novel for a film, or occasionally for a theatrical piece, but there is also the adaptation of a fairy tale for a ballet, or for example, of a poem into a musical composition, of a musical composition into a painting or vice versa.
A translation proper can be made both in the presence of the original text and in its absence. Translations in absentia are more common but translations with the original text on the facing page are translations in praesentia. When one transmutes Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune into a ballet, we have music and choreographic movements together; on the other hand, when Debussy transmuted Mallarmé’s L’après-midi from a poem into a musical composition, the orchestra was performing the musical score independently of the literary text.
Such transmutation can frequently serve to help appreciate the inspiring work better. We can speak of understanding through manipulation, and it is possible that after having listened to Debussy’s composition one better appreciates Mallarmé’s poetry. But it would be daring to say that Debussy has ‘translated’ Mallarmé.
Now, let us consider a ballet interpreting Debussy’s, L’après-midi d’un faune. If you cut off the sound, it is impossible to reconstruct the inspiring music from the visual choreography (one can at most guess that there is a story about some mythological beings). In the same vein, it is impossible to reconstruct the original poem from the music. Transmutation is not translation.
It has been said that certain paintings display particular linear tensions, like the direction of dynamic forces, and that those forces can be expressed by a musical composition. Correct, and perhaps the musical interpretation can help us better to understand the deep sense of the painting. But that painting probably exhibited colours or even recognisable images, and these features are obviously lost in the musical ‘translation’. I admit that by synaesthesia it is possible to evoke colours through sounds, but no musical piece can allow one to recognise that the inspiring painting was a particular Miró or a particular Matisse.
If I read the French translation of an English poem I have many ways of figuring out what the original was or at least what it was about. If I listen to the musical composition without knowing the painting I have little chance of tracing the visual source.
In certain cases, we are prepared to accept a change of continuum, provided it is irrelevant for the purposes of interpretation. Let us suppose that in a school of architecture there is an exhibit featuring a scale model of Big Ben. Provided the proportions between the various elements of the model remain unchanged, the reduction in scale is not pertinent. Likewise, as long as the colour of the surfaces is the same, we can build the model in wood, clay or bronze. Modern museums have accustomed us to so-called artistic merchandising: they sell scale-model reproductions of famous works of art, be they the Venus de Milo or the head of Queen Nefertiti. However, if enjoyed for aesthetic reasons, such reproductions are obviously disappointing, because not only the real dimensions but also the tactile consistency of the original object are a part of the aesthetic enjoyment.
Adaptations say too much
When changing the continuum a phenomenon occurs that casts the idea of portraying a transmutation as a translation proper in doubt.
Jane Campion adapted Henry James’s novel Portrait of a Lady into a movie.8 The literary text says that Isabel was better worth looking at than most works of art. I do not think that James simply wanted to say that it was better to look at Isabel than to waste time in a museum: he certainly did want to say that Isabel had the same magic and charm as many art works or of many artistic representations of female beauty.
When reading James the reader remains free to imagine Isabel as like the Primavera of Botticelli, like Raphael’s Fornarina, like a Pre-Raphaelite Beatrice, and even (de gustibus non est disputandum . . .) like Picasso’s demoiselle d’Avignon. Readers can use James’s suggestion in order to picture a given visage according to their own ideal of womanly beauty.
It happens that in the movie Isabel is interpreted by Nicole Kidman. I personally like this actress, undoubtedly very beautiful, but I think that the movie would arouse different feelings if Isabel had the countenance of Greta Garbo or the Rubenesque features of Mae West. Thus the director has made the choice for me, and as a spectator I am less free than as a reader.
In the passage from one continuum to another we are forced to render explicit, and thus to emphasise, certain aspects of the content that a translation would have left indeterminate. I have already quoted Augusto Monterroso, who wrote the shortest tale in Western literature:
Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.
(When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.)
If one had to translate it into another language (as I have just done) it would be easy to retrieve the Spanish text from the English one.9 Now, let us think of a movie director who wants to ‘translate’ this tale into a film. Apart from the fact that the movie would have to show the protagonist as male or female, the director cannot simply show a sleeping person who, when he/she awakes, sees a dinosaur. He would thus lose the sense of that todavia. At this point the director would realise that this short tale suggests at least two different stories: (i) a person is awake, close to a dinosaur; in order to avoid such a disturbing experience he/she falls alseep, and on waking sees that the monster is still there; (ii) a person is awake, without dinosaurs around, he/she falls asleep, dreams of a dinosaur, and on waking realises that the dinosaur from his/her dreams is still there. It goes without saying that the second reading is, in both a surrealistic and Kafkaesque mode, wittier than the first one.
One is obliged to choose only one of these two interpretations and, even though unable to produce a version as essential as the original, one could produce something that could be summarised either as (a) as he/she woke up, the dinosaur that he/she tried to ignore was still there, or (b) as he/she woke up, the dinosaur that he/she dreamt of was still there.
Let us suppose that a director chooses the second interpretation. Considering that a film must last at least a few seconds, there are only four possibilities: (i) one starts by imagining that a person dreams of a dinosaur, wakes up and sees that the dinosaur is still there – and then one could develop a story with a series of events, perhaps very surreal, which the verbal tale does not make explicit but which could explain what really happened; (ii) one represents a series of everyday events and by complicating them ends with the episode of the dream and of the waking up; (iii) one tells various aspects of the life of the main character by reiterating obsessively the experience both of the dream and of the dinosaur; (iv) one decides to make an avant-garde movie by repeating for three hours the same scene (dream and awakening), in the same vein in which Andy Warhol showed the same image of the Empire State Building for several hours.
Now let us ask the spectators of our four possible movies to summarise them. It seems to me verisimilar that the spectators of (i) and (ii) will be able to identify one aspect of that oneiric experience as more pertinent than others, but I do not know which one because I have not seen the movie. Spectators of version (iii) could say that the movie tells about a recurrent oneiric situation concerning a dinosaur, which was first a dream-like figure and then a real one. Even though the second ones would have better realised the spirit of Monterroso’s story, they would be unable to rephrase it literally as it was originally. Spectators of version (iv), if very fussy, would say that:
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.
(and so on ad infinitum),
which seems more like an avant-garde poem than a report on a new movie.
In chapter 10 of The Betrothed, after having spoken at length about Egidio’s seduction of the Nun of Monza, Manzoni, in a passage of great decency, in a brief sentence, gives the reader to understand that the Nun surrendered to her seducer: La sventurata rispose. An English version reads The poor wretch answered and a French
