Deathblow in Venice
One of the most blatant cinematic misinterpretations of a book is the movie by Luchino Visconti, Death in Venice, drawn from Thomas Mann’s novella. I myself have argued that when Visconti transformed The Leopard of Tomasi di Lampedusa into a movie, he successfully helped his spectators to understand the deep sense of the novel.
Not so with Death in Venice. Mann’s main character, Gustav Aschenbach, is a fifty-year-old writer (therefore, in those times, a very old man); he comes from a high bourgeois family of austere state servants; he is a historian and an art critic (one of his essays was entitled ‘Spirit and Art’); and he shares with many German intellectuals of his generation a neoclassical love for pure, Platonic, ideal beauty.
Having a classical temperament, he is immediately faced with the romantic and decadent nature of Venice. When first setting eyes on the adolescent Tadzio, who will later become the object of his love and lust, he admires him as something similar to Greek statues of the golden period, as a pure perfection of form. Aschenbach’s remarks are always referring to his classical culture to the extent that many visions of the sea remind him of figures in Hellenic mythology. The tragedy of Aschenbach, when he realises that he physically desires Tadzio, consists in discovering that his purely Platonic sense of beauty was step by step becoming a carnal passion. In the background, there is an implicit criticism of the aesthetic ideals of neoclassical art historians à la Winckelmann, whose sincere and spiritualised artistic taste was in fact the sublimation of homosexual drives.
That’s the tragedy of Aschenbach: he cannot accept the revelation that his aesthetic ideals were disguising a more terrestrial excitement – and at the same time he cannot resist his carnal tumult. Death in Venice tells the story of a victory of Dionysos against Apollo.
What happens with the movie? Visconti probably found that it was difficult to represent the aesthetic ideals of the old man visually; probably he was misled by that name, Gustav, which evoked Gustav Mahler. Aschenbach therefore became a musician. It is true that in a few flashbacks we follow a dialogue between him (supporting a classical idea of art and beauty as order and detachment from passion) and his friend (who extols a more Romantic idea of the artistic genius), but these are mere words. Spectators are fascinated by the sound, and the sound is provided by the music of Mahler, which becomes the ‘real’ manifestation of the inner feelings of the protagonist. Aschenbach speaks as if he were Bach, but we hear Mahler.
Mann’s Aschenbach is a mature and old-fashioned gentleman – and this makes his slow transformation more tragic and unacceptable for him – while Visconti’s Aschenbach looks younger, fragile, psychologically tortured, already ill, ready to identify himself with a dilapidated Venice morbid in its refined social rites. Moreover, Mann’s Aschenbach comes from a bourgeois family and received his ‘von’ very late, as an award for merit, while Visconti’s Aschenbach appears immediately as a Gustav von Aschenbach, and as such is already marked by the symptoms of a decadent nobility and looks more similar to Huysmans’ Des Esseintes than to a severe scholar. He is already as voluptuous and condemned to death as Venice.
His attraction for Tadzio is immediate, while in Mann’s story it takes time for Aschenbach to shift from his Hellenistic fantasies to the acceptance of the real passion that stirs him. Besides, in the novel Tadzio is fourteen years old and there is no shadow of malice in the few glances and in the only smile he addresses to his mature admirer. In the movie Tadzio is a little older and every time he looks at Aschenbach his gaze is far more ambiguous.
Where then in the film is the opposition between two ethical and artistic ideals? Why should Visconti’s Aschenbach be so troubled by a not-so-unexpected temptation, why should he feel it as radically and tragically perverse – despite the fact that Visconti reminds us at times of the existence of a gracious wife and of a daughter? Does Aschenbach suffer because he feels unfaithful to his wife or rather because he realises that his whole spiritual world and his algid cult of beauty are turning upside-down? Mann’s Aschenbach cannot stand the discovery that his aesthetic ideals were simply the disguise of a sexual turmoil.
The plot remains more or less the same: there is still Venice, an artist, a boy, many minor characters, and there is the obsessive presence of the pestilence slowly sneaking up on the city, a metaphor for the growing moral disease of the artist. But the decision to change the occupation and the features of Aschenbach has produced a radical change to the whole story.
Let us say that Visconti wanted to provide a deliberately different interpretation of Mann’s novel. Frequently transmutations represent a critical standpoint. Naturally, even a translation proper implies, with an interpretation, a critical standpoint. But in translation the critical attitude of the translator is in fact implicit (as were the translations of la sventurata rispose, which show how the translators correctly interpreted the intention of the text and attempted to convey that intention to their readers). Translators are duty-bound not to say more than the original text, while in transmutation the critical intention of the ‘adapter’ becomes preponderant, and represents the very essence of the whole process. Adaptations frequently produce not only variations in expression but also a substantial change in content.
Adaptation, use and interpretation
Spaziante12 suggests that for many cases of adaptation one could speak (following the distinction I posited in The Role of the Reader and The Limits of Interpretation), of use rather than interpretation of a text. One can use a text in many ways (one can even use the pages of a book to light a fire), and among them there are very respectable practices: one can use a poem or a novel as opportunities for daydreaming, to muse about personal experiences and memories, which do not come from the original text. In my previous writings I defined as mere use certain deconstructive drifts that follow the principle that il n’y a pas de vrai sense d’un texte, but I was not considering the use of a text as a censurable habit.
Anybody, on occasion, can listen to a Chopin waltz and (instead of following the musical discourse attentively) indulge in remembering a time when it was heard next to a beloved – and many people will play a song again when wanting to regain a lost moment in time (as Rick Blaine does in his Café Americain in Casablanca).
Among the infinite ways to use a text there is also the custom of starting from a stimulus text in order to get ideas for creating one’s own text. One can write a sequel to Gone with the Wind, rewrite Sylvie from Sylvie’s point of view, emulate a great author – as Sophocles did when writing his own Oedipus Rex after Aeschylus’s Oedipus. Many adaptations are therefore excellent examples of creative use of a previous text. But insofar as they are freely creative, they are not translations, since a translator has always to tame, in some way, his or her ‘creative’ impetus.
Demoiselle d’Avignon
To come back to more terrestrial and profane experiences, I remember a pleasant party where at one stage we played an old game known in Italian as Le belle statuine, the beautiful statuettes. A given group had to represent visually, each using their own body, a work of art (a novel, a movie, a painting and so on). Three girls performed a very swift event, disarticulating their limbs, twisting their bodies and grimacing – and they looked cute and provocative at the same time.
Everybody (or at least the smartest among the onlookers) immediately recognised Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon. Nevertheless I do not think that somebody who had never seen that painting would have been able to reconstruct or even figure out the original work from that performance. That representation emphasised the non-realistic and primitive force of the original work, perhaps overstressed a visual rhythm, but was unable to suggest the colours, the contour of the figures, the strokes of the brush – moreover, it was also misleading from the point of view of the expressed content, since the demoiselles of Picasso are five and not three.
These demoiselles were a witty instance of transmutation, not a serious example of translation. I admit that it was a nice case of interpretation. But as I have tried to demonstrate, the universe of interpretations is massively larger and more multifarious than the territory of transmutation.
NOTES
- I Mottetti by Eugenio Montale, tr. Katherine Jackson (I found it at world.std.com/~jpwilson/kjbio.html).
- Poèmes choisis, tr. Patrice Dyerval Angelini (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).
- ‘Undici danze per Montale’, in Il Secondo Diario Minimo (Milano: Bompiani, 1992), pp. 278–81.
- Obviously I knew that a blue is not a dance, but try to find another dance by using only the U . . .
- In Vocali (Napoli: Guida, 1991).
- I found the first English one on
