Later, the novel tells us that the Nun slid into a criminal life. But Manzoni does not tell us what happened between her answer and the moment she became guilty of many crimes. The gravity of her fall is only suggested by that lapidary sentence that implies both a moral judgement and compassion. It is the reader who must interpret that reticence. Manzoni was very prudish and never mentioned a sexual scene.
Manzoni’s novel has been the subject of various versions for both television and cinema. Directors had to show us the answer of the Nun – not necessarily as sexual intercourse but at least as a moment – thus showing a face, a gesture, a smile, a gleam in the eye, a tremor. They were obliged to ‘say’ if she was happy, excited, or tortured by lacerating qualms of conscience. They had to make us see in some way the intensity of that answer, which the written text left indeterminate. In transmuting the verbal text into another continuum, a movie-maker is obliged to compel the spectators to accept a given visual interpretation of a verbal reticence.
In the shift from continuum to continuum the interpretation is mediated by somebody who acts as a gatekeeper reducing freedom of the addressee.
Adaptations say too little
But adaptations do not only run the risk of saying too much. Sometimes the opposite occurs.
The Mozarabic illuminators who made those marvellous manuscripts called the Beati, illustrating the Commentary to the Book of Revelation by Beatus de Liébana, were supposed to illustrate the various pages of St John’s Book. Apparently they had great difficulty in rendering this passage from chapter 4:
A throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald. And round about the throne were four and twenty seats; and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold. And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the Seven Spirits of God. And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal; and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.
A prime instance of hypotyposis, indeed. Now, hypotyposis uses words in order to encourage the addressee to build up a visual representation. But this demands the cooperation of the reader. The big difficulty experienced by Mozarabic artists was to represent the four strange creatures standing in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne – or, as the Latin Vulgata, the only version they knew, said, super thronum et circa thronum. How can these four creatures sit on or upon and around the throne at the same time?
Moreover, St John’s vision came from the vision of Ezekiel, and the illuminators knew that text. It says (according to the King James version, chapter 1, vv. 4–26):
And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf’s foot: and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass. And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides; and they four had their faces and their wings. Their wings were joined one to another; they turned not when they went; they went every one straight forward . . .
Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went . . . And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up . . . And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone . . .
An examination of the solutions given by the various Beati shows us that this is an impossible situation, giving rise to representations which do not ‘translate’ the text satisfactorily. The images seem unable to decide where the hell these four damned beasts were, and in which position, or what the wheels looked like.
This occurred because the illuminators, brought up in the Greek Christian tradition, thought that the prophet ‘saw’ something similar to statues and paintings. But both John the Apostle and Ezekiel came from the Jewish tradition, which was not visually, but aurally oriented and, what’s more, their imaginations were those of seers. Therefore, John was not describing something similar to a statue or to a painting, but rather a dream – and dreams are more similar to movies than to miniatures. In a film-like vision, the creatures can wheel and appear simultaneously on, in front of, and around the throne. In a miniature they must remain in one place.
In this instance the Mozarabic miniaturists could not cooperate with the text, and somehow, in their hands – under their pen or brush – and in their minds, hypotyposis failed.
For mysterious reasons the illuminator of the Apocalypse of Saint Sever represents a happy exception to the rule. He puts the beasts at different distances from the throne and one of them seems on the verge of passing through it. Maybe that artist had a vague intuition of what was really happening in both the visions and he did his best to express a sort of spiral-like translation. He did his best, but he could not completely achieve what he probably intended to do: the change in the expression continuum froze his intuition. As Sol Worth once said, ‘Pictures can’t say ain’t,’ but I would add that pictures frequently cannot say ‘I am moving this or that way.’ Probably a futurist painter like Boccioni could have succeeded in doing so, but Mozarabic illuminators couldn’t. There are things one can do with a movie but not with a painting. The verbal text suggested more than its visual transmutation and the change of continuum humiliated the vision.
Who is speaking in Pinocchio?
Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi begins with:
C’era una volta . . .
– Un re! – diranno subito i miei piccoli lettori.
– No ragazzi, avete sbagliato. C’era una volta un pezzo di lengo.
An early English translation by M. A Murray (1883) reads:
There was once upon a time . . .
‘A king!’ my little readers will instantly exclaim.
No, children, you are wrong. There was once upon a time a piece of wood.
It is correct. But let’s see what happens with a French translation:11
– Il était une fois . . .
– UN ROI, direz-vous?
– Pas du tout, mes chers petits lecteurs. Il était une fois . . . UN MORCEAU DE BOIS!
In this translation Il était une fois (Once upon a time) is introduced by a dash as if a dramatis persona, that is, one of the characters of the novel, were speaking. Thus the reader is led to believe that the second line represents a conversational turn, and that some kids are reacting to the first speaker. At this point, even the direz-vous seems to be pronounced by the kids. On the contrary (and that is why Collodi did not open the first line with a dash or with inverted commas), the one who is speaking at the beginning is the Narrator (standing outside the story and summoning his ideal little readers). Thus even the second line does not represent a conversation taking place between characters, but rather a sort of metafictional device, by which the Voice of the Narrator evokes his ideal readers, attributing to them a mistake (an understandable one, indeed, since usually kids are accustomed to fairy tales beginning with kings or princesses) and immediately after disenchanting them, saying that his own is a different and unheard-of tale. Then, after that metafictional warning, the story starts.
The strategy of Collodi is very subtle, because it is doubtful whether he really conceived of his story as a simple tale for kids, and there are a considerable number of ‘adult’ interpretations of Pinocchio as a very complex allegory. However, that French translation, by a simple misuse of dashes, eliminates any possible more sophisticated reading. In a way we can say that Murray’s version overinterprets Collodi’s intention, by eliminating the last dash, but reinforces the metanarrative device.
Now let us come to the filmic adaptation of Pinocchio by Walt Disney. Collodi’s devotees can say that Disney changed the story to some extent, that Cricket is not longer a severe pedagogue but rather a nice vaudeville character and so on, but these are not relevant objections. The real problem is that Disney did not dare
