Radical Remake
In this article I will review a
chapter from a book by Italian author Umberto Eco, titled “Experiences in
Translation” in English. I read a Spanish translation of it, and its title was
closer to the Italian original (Dire quasi la stessa cosa) “Decir casi
lo mismo”, which means “Saying almost the same” (though in both books the
subtitle is the same as the English title). The central thesis of the book is
that translation is an act of negotiation, where the goal is not just to be
faithful to the original, even when that includes changing the semantic meaning
of the source text in order to convey its “guiding spirit”, which is of course
open to interpretation. The goal is rather to negotiate between the many
possible options, losing something here, but winning something there as a
compensation, depending on the purpose of the translator, who can never attain
the ideal of saying exactly the same as the original in another language, but
always different degrees of “almost the same”.
The book deals with many theoretical
issues in linguistics and translation studies, but always with relation to
their application in several examples both from Eco’s translations of literary
works from other authors, and of his collaborations with the translators of his
own works into several other languages. The chapter on which I will focus
appears near to the end of the book, and relates to the concept of “radical
remake”, which Eco characterizes as a kind of translation. But before I
introduce the concept of radical remake, I will recount the overarching
background in which Eco places this special case of translation.
Near the beginning of the book, Eco
tries to define translation and introduces us to the criterion of
reversibility. No matter what amount of interpretative license is used in the
translation of a text, it can still be considered a proper translation if,
after back-translating an already translated work, the end result is, on the
whole, equivalent to the original text. Of course, there is a continuum of
optimality of reversibility, where, only in comparison with another
translation, can it be said of a translation that it is optimal when it retains
its reversibility in the highest number of levels possible (pragmatic,
syntactic, metaphoric, etc.). Nevertheless, this approach to a criterion for
identifying a valuable translation has its limitations, as will surface later
on.
In a latter chapter Eco discusses
Peirce’s comparison of interpretation to a process of translation, which
Jakobson went on to characterize by suggesting a diagram of this kind:
Translation
|
Intralinguistic
Rewording
|
Interlinguistic
Proper translation
|
|
Intersemiotic
Transmutation
|
Eco exemplifies rewording as making
an Italian synopsis of the Divine Comedy. Then he exemplifies proper
translation as translating the same work into Swahili. Transmutation (a term
proposed by Perice, which is comparable to “interdiscursivity”, proposed by
Cesare Segre, or to “intermediality”, proposed by Heinrich F. Plett) is
exemplified as pouring the Divine Comedy into a comic, where there would
be transportation from the semiotic system of the written word, into the
semiotic system of the comics form, where the written word cohabits with the
graphic image. Other examples of transmutation, proposed by Jakobson, are the
“translation” of Wuthering Heights into a movie, of a medieval legend
into a painting, and of Mallarmé’s Après midi d’un faune into a ballet
by Debussy. And although Jakobson wasn’t thinking about transmutations between
non-verbal systems, Eco proposes a few, like for example, the interpretation of
some pictures at an exhibition by means of the musical composition Pictures
at an exhibition by Mussorgsky or even a painting’s version in words
(ekphrasis). Another interesting example with Eco does not mention is the
representation of works of classical music into audiovisual works by Walt
Disney in his film Fantasia, in which the music is accompanied by
animated cartoons. Eco argues that transmutation is not a kind of translation,
although both radical remakes (which still fall into the category of a
translation) and transmutations, are kinds of reformulation.
When explaining the concept of
remake Eco first discusses cases of partial remake. One example is found
in the translations of one of his novels. In the story, there is a character
who has a background in a country region within Italy, and his very unique
style of speech is an essential feature. Some of the translators have chosen to
pick country regions within the countries where their target language is
spoken, and fill the character’s dialogue with expressions typical of that
region. Nevertheless, in these cases, the interpretative license to transform
the content serves the greater purpose of keeping faithful to the intention of
the original.
Radical remakes, according to Eco,
are special in that they would be considered in the literary sphere as
translations, but they also constitute examples of interpretative license of a
more extreme variety. These examples are put on a scale of licenses, until the
point where a few cases are at the threshold of no reversibility, while still
being considered translations in lay terms.
The first example is Raymond
Queneau’s book, “Exercises in style”. Eco himself translated it from the
original French into Italian, and had to resort to radical remaking more than
once. The idea of Queneau’s book is telling a brief narrative episode and then
retelling it many times, each time under a title that announces the style of
the reformulation. Some of his exercises are about the content (the text is
modified through litotes, in the form of a prognostic, a dream, a blurb, etc.)
and these cases are ripe for proper translation. Other exercises, instead,
change the expression. In these cases the text is interpreted on the basis of
constrained writing (that is, anagrams, lipograms, increasing letter number
permutations, etc.) or through metaplasms (onomatopoeias, syncope, metathesis,
etc.). In these cases the only option available is radical remake.
A more extreme case in the scale of
license is the example of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. The
translations of one of its episodes intro French and Italian, called “Anna
Livia Plurabelle” appears under the name of Frank and Settani, who did
collaborate, but the translations were actually done mainly by Joyce himself.
In order to transfer the principle of the pun, which is the fundamental
principle behind Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce rewrote the episode in each
translation, in an interesting case of target-oriented translation (let's
remember that in source-oriented translation a more strict adherence to the
literal meanings in the source is relatively more important, whereas in
target-oriented translation, the translator is allowed to reformulate in order
to convey better the general idea).
In Finnegans Wake, it is
estimated that 800 river names appear as puns inside the words of the work,
intended to convey the sense of flow. Of these, 200 appear in the episode in
question, and though Joyce doesn’t manage to get more than 80 in Italian and a
few more in French, he in turn manages to include more puns with words related
to bodies of water, like river, lake, tide, etc. At this moment the level of
reversibility is almost null, yet it is the author himself who is authorizing
the radical remake, which justifies it. As a matter of fact, in the act of
translating the episode, Joyce offers a glimpse at what is the real mechanism
behind the composition of the original Finnegan’s Wake.
These examples of radical remake are
comparable to virtuoso interpretations of music sheets and to variations on a
musical theme, but they are borderline cases of translation, whereas
transmutation, as Eco argues, is not a case of translation. These examples
constitute an approach that is half based on theory, half based on common
sense, and illuminate us on the question of what is really a translation. This
is important for the translator who wishes to be assured that a rewriting,
retelling or reformulation can be a valid translation, so long as there is a
negotiation with an overarching purpose of translation at the core of the
remake.
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