Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film

Katja Krebs, Katja Krebs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134114177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teatro

This book provides a pioneering and provocative exploration of the rich synergies between adaptation studies and translation studies and is the first genuine attempt to discuss the rather loose usage of the concepts of translation and adaptation in terms of theatre and film. At the heart of this collection is the proposition that translation studies and adaptation studies have much to offer each other in practical and theoretical terms and can no longer exist independently from one another. As a result, it generates productive ideas within the contact zone between these two fields of study, both through new theoretical paradigms and detailed case studies. Such closely intertwined areas as translation and adaptation need to encounter each other's methodologies and perspectives in order to develop ever more rigorous approaches to the study of adaptation and translation phenomena, challenging current assumptions and prejudices in terms of both. The book includes contributions as diverse yet interrelated as Bakhtin's notion of translation and adaptation, Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare's Othello, and an analysis of performance practice, itself arguably an adaptive practice, which uses a variety of languages from English and Greek to British and International Sign-Language. As translation and adaptation practices are an integral part of global cultural and political activities and agendas, it is ever more important to study such occurrences of rewriting and reshaping. By exploring and investigating interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives and approaches, this volume investigates the impact such occurrences of rewriting have on the constructions and experiences of cultures while at the same time developing a rigorous methodological framework which will form the basis of future scholarship on performance and film, translation and adaptation.

1 Introduction

Collisions, Diversions and Meeting Points

Katja Krebs

“Cast as an act of love, and as an act of disruption, translation becomes a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history” (Emily Apter 2006: 6)

“For better or worse, every adaptation is an expression of love, however selfish or perverted that love may seem.” (Thomas Leitch 2011: 10)

Translation and adaptation—as both practices and products—are an integral and intrinsic part of our global and local political and cultural experiences, activities and agendas. Translation is pivotal to our understanding of ideologies, politics as well as cultures, as it simultaneously constructs and reflects positions taken. Similarly, adaptation offers insights into, as well as helps to establish, cultural and political hegemonies. Within Translation Studies, the relationship between translation and political agendas has been, and continues to be, discussed in detail—most recently by scholars such as Mona Baker and Emily Apter, for example, who argue convincingly that “translation is central to the ability of all parties [in our conflict-ridden and globalized world] to legitimize their events” (Baker 2006: 1) and “a concrete particular of the art of war, crucial to strategy and tactics, part and parcel of the way in which images of bodies are read” (Apter 2006: 15). Both studies are based upon the analysis of a large corpus of material which consists of news items, statements by governments, literatures and so on relating to historic as well as contemporaneous conflicts. And both include examples of translation, which in another context may be regarded as adaptation: the rewriting of texts.

Collisions

It is ever-more important to study such rewritings in order to understand more fully the impact such occurrences of translation and adaptation have on the construction and the experience of culture as well as politics. Popular culture, for example, has seen an exponential proliferation of adaptation and translation (see Hand and Krebs 2007): Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (2008–2010)¹ has been a translation and adaptation phenomena par excellence with translations of both the novels and the film adaptations permeating global popular culture in less than five years; J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, in its various media permutations, including film, stage, cartoon, games and so on, has been translated into more than 60 languages; and Steven Spielberg’s and Peter Jackson’s The Adventures of Tintin (2011) celebrates Hergè’s Les Aventures de Tintin, which have appeared on screen, stage and page in over 50 languages for at least 70 years. One of the latest examples, at the time of writing, is located on the small screen: an analysis of Anglo-American television’s embrace of, and possibly obsession with, contemporary Scandinavian crime drama, such as the Danish series The Killing, both in subtitled form (BBC4) as well as rewritten form (Fox Television), can only be understood in terms of both translation and adaptation. Somewhat randomly chosen from a plethora of available examples, these instances are all truly global translation and adaptation phenomena which have contributed significantly to the shape of a popular cinematic landscape; all involve a rewriting and reshaping with regards their form, that is cartoon to stage, novel to film, and with regard their language, that is from Swedish, English and French into a number of other languages. The theatre has also seen a resurgence of work based on translations and adaptations: popular films are being turned into stage musicals on a regular basis (see, e.g., Krebs 2011; Symons 2008), and respected theatre companies, such as Kneehigh in the UK, have an entire repertoire consisting of translations and adaptations from a number of different media and genres, including opera, fairytale and film (see Radosavljević 2010). In the 2010–2011 season at the National Theatre, an adaptation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein caused international interest: Directed by Danny Boyle, who is primarily known for feature films such as Trainspotting (itself an adaptation from Irvine Welsh’s novel of the same title) and Slumdog Millionaire, it was shown in cinemas in parts of Europe, the United States, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Interestingly, the actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller alternated the roles of the creature and Victor Frankenstein, thus further blurring the boundaries between source and adaptation. The list of countries which offered screenings of the stage production is noteworthy: Southern European countries such as Spain, France and Italy were notable by their absence, while screenings were clustered in Northern and Eastern Europe: Romania, Poland, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, and Germany all participated in this experiment where screen and stage converge. What this means with regard the hegemony of the English language, cultural expectations of stage and screen, and European cultural relations—North/East versus South/West, new members versus old members—remains to be seen and needs to be examined in more detail. What is already becoming clear, however, is that both adaptation and translation are not merely innocent bystanders in cultural relations.

So far, studies of such hybrid texts as mentioned above have discussed them exclusively in terms of adaptation or translation. Yet all these examples make it impossible to hold on to what seems a somewhat arbitrary distinction between the act of adaptation and the act of translation. Both translation and adaptation—as (creative) process, as product or artefact, and as academic discipline—are interdisciplinary by their very nature; both discuss phenomena of constructing cultures through acts of rewriting, and both are concerned with the collaborative nature of such acts and the subsequent critique of notions of authorship. Whether translation and adaptation are twins or indeed first cousins, however, is not the main concern of this book. Rather than necessarily argue that adaptation and translation are quintessentially the same, what this collection of essays aims to do is enrich our critical vocabularies and approaches by opening up a dialogue between these two fields of enquiry.

Diversions

It seems a curious state of affairs that two distinct academic fields and discourses have developed which investigate such closely related acts of rewriting as adaptation and translation, without engaging with each other’s critical perspectives and methodologies. Such emphasis on division and lines of separation is not exclusive to the academy. Popular, and some academic, western discourse tends to view adaptation as a creative version of, rewriting of or commentary on a source text, as opposed to translation which, it is assumed, offers sameness and strives for equivalence. Thus, a binary is constructed around these two acts of rewriting: creative freedom versus linguistic confinement, or piracy versus trustworthiness and faithfulness, depending on which side of the fence you sit on. Of course, this view “betrays an ignorance of developments in Translation Studies over the past three decades” (Venuti 2007: 9) as well as Adaptation Studies, both of which have gone beyond discussions of equivalence, faithfulness and fidelity (see, e.g., Hermans 2007; Hutcheon 2006; Oittinen 2000; and Sanders 2006).

In her influential work Adaptation and Appropriation (2006), Julie Sanders proposes that adaptations are “reinterpretations of established texts in new generic contexts or … with relocations of … a source text’s cultural and/or temporal setting, which may or may not involve a generic shift” (19). However useful Sanders’ emphasis on relocation and reinterpretation may be, to what extent this specific definition allows for a clear distinction between adaptation and translation is questionable. Depending on the generic contexts and forms, reinterpretation and relocation are also commonplace in translation practices. Translation history is witness to a plethora of examples which comply with Sanders’ definition of adaptation (see, e.g., Hale 1999; Krebs 2007; Milton 2009; Tymoczko 1999), and contemporaneous examples can be found in large numbers particularly in translation practices for the screen and stage.

Meeting Points

Screen and stage offer an abundance of case studies that blur the boundaries between adaptation and translation. The dramaturgical processes necessary, the practices employed by directors, writers, actors, and so on, and the nature of film and theatre that destabilises notions of single authorship (see Lehmann 2006) and ‘original’ in the first place, disallows a distinction between adaptation and translation more decisively than other forms and genres. According to Sirkku Aaltonen, “translation for the stage probably employs adaptation more frequently than does printed literature” (2000: 75) not only because of artistic decisions and subsequent claims of ownership made by director, performer, and/or dramaturg but also because theatrical systems themselves are “living organisms coexisting in a symbiotic relationship with other cultural and social systems … and part of a complex network of subsystems, mainstream and fringe theatres as well as various consumer and producer organisations” (5) and so on. In addition to theatre’s complexities as a creative practice and as a site of performance, Gunilla Andermann observes, when discussing the difference between a reader and a spectator, that “members of the audience are left to fend for themselves when, during the course of a performance, they are confronted with unfamiliar and often bewildering information” (2005: 7). Footnotes or explanatory introductions which are sometimes made use of in published translations are not available to the audience of a live performance or indeed a film.

Let us turn our attention for a moment to a pertinent theatre example which makes a clear distinction between translation and adaptation impossible: Mike Pearson’s production of Aeschylus’ The Persians formed part of the National Theatre of Wales’ 2010 season. It used a so-called ‘version’ by Kaite O’Reilly for its performance on a military site in the Brecon Beacons, Wales. Not normally accessible to the public, the site includes a mock (west) German village, constructed at the height of the Cold War, which is still used as a place for testing battlefield scenarios. At no point, either on posters, in the programme or any other written material relating to the performance, is The Persians labelled an adaptation. Kaite O’Reilly is no stranger to adaptation, however: for example, 2002 saw the premiere of peeling, her adaptation of Trojan Women, noteworthy for its multilingual text which includes British Sign Language alongside spoken English. Yet, she insists that The Persians is not to be viewed as an adaptation by describing her writing process in the programme accompanying the performance: “Although I’m not a linguist and therefore unable to read the text in Ancient Greek, through my close reading of 23 translations, made across three centuries, I like to think I caught a sense of the bass line” (O’Reilly 2010: n. pg.).

Emphasising the importance of the socio-political contexts of those 23 translations, she describes the process of writing as one akin to translation in all but linguistic competence:

I chose not to reinvent. I chose to be as faithful as far as I could perceive it, to that ‘initial’ voice and to trust that extraordinary location in which the performance takes place would create a context with more resonance than anything I could ever fabricate. (O’Reilly 2010: n. pg.)

By employing terminology such as ‘reinvention’ as a negative and ‘faithfulness’ as a positive description of the translation process, O’Reilly operates within popular western discourse of translation. Despite her attempts to distance her work from notions of adaptation and instead align it with ideals of translation, both her process of rewriting and the performance comply with Sanders’ definition of adaptation: the production of The Persians, including O’Reilly’s text, is a “reinterpretation of [an] established text … with relocations of the source text’s cultural and/or temporal setting” (2006: 19). Thus, O’Reilly’s and Pearson’s production of The Persians raises a number of intriguing questions. Is this a performance of a ‘translation’ so long as the audience does not read O’Reilly’s programme notes? Or is it an ‘adaptation’ even though it labels itself a ‘version’? How can distinctions be drawn and what would their consequences be, both for watching and for performing? Does the experience of the performance change according to the nomenclature used for the rewriting? Or has The Persians, belonging to the canon of classic western drama, surpassed such labelling? Has the text and the production been authenticated by the title alone? It is such questions that the essays in this collection investigate.

Examples which complicate the relationship between adaptation and translation can be found in abundance not only in the theatre but also on the screen, if only because the two regularly translate and adapt each other. Film adaptation as an academic discipline has quite recently established itself as an area of scholarship in its own right, independent from comparative literature and English departments. However, the ever-growing body of work investigating adaptation on screen tends to ignore translation issues and Translation Studies. This may partly reflect the monolingualism typical of Film Studies in its Anglo-American context as well as the dominant position North America holds with regards accepted film practice. Either way, matters of translation tend to become the butt of the joke as in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) or regular column fillers whereby titles are translated back so to speak from the target language to the source language:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: If You Leave Me, You’re Erased

Not as poetic as the original title but the Italian audiences were left in no doubt about what Jim Carry wanted to tell Kate Winslet.

…

Basic Instincts: Ice Smile

An ice pick was the weapon of choice for Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. But that only partly explains the Japanese title, especially since the original title was the best thing about the film. (Observer 3 February 2008)

Of course, the majority of examples such as these only serve to emphasise English language hegemony. What is important, however, is that Translation Studies and Adaptation Studies have much to offer each other in practical and theoretical terms and should not exist independently from one another. Such closely intertwined areas need to encounter each other’s methodologies and perspectives if only to develop ever more rigorous approaches to the study of translation and adaptation phenomena. Once it has become clear that we are dealing with converging agendas—a tendency towards common conclusions and findings rather than disparate discourses—the merging of ideas and the emergence of creative practices will challenge current assumptions and prejudices in terms of both adaptation and translation. And thus the structure of this collection reflects three stages of such encounters. The essays that follow fall into (and sometimes necessarily go beyond) the following categories: converging agendas, merging ideas and emerging practices.

Converging Agendas

The first section, ‘Converging Agendas’, consists of three chapters, all of which identify areas of convergence from varying perspectives. Márta Minier’s ‘Definitions, Dyads, Triads and Other Points of Connection in Translation and Adaptation Discourse’ offers a historical account of various points at which critical concerns of Adaptation Studies and Translation Studies overlap. Minier argues that both academic disciplines share a great deal in terms of methodologies, terminologies and objects of critical investigation, yet do not communicate extensively with one another, and more often than not fail to recognise what links them together. Minier’s chapter surveys overlapping conceptua...