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the fundamentally unknowable, even immaterial ideal of intent,
how can translation do anything but fail The modern rhetorical
move would be to reframe the question. The words are there on
the page, but the author, like meaning, is something we create
for ourselves. Intention, that beautiful thing, is in the eye of the
beholder. What might at first seem
“Fidelity must
be neither literal
nor figurative,
but dynamic—
transfigurative.”
like abdication or evasion can in
fact be renewal, since changing the
basic terms opens fertile new fields
for debate. Fidelity must be neither
literal nor figurative, but dynamic—
transfigurative.
Whether from page to screen,
stage, song, or game—in short,
between media—adaptation has,
if only grudgingly, often been given greater leeway than
translation in recreating a work, while being similarly vilified
for failures to honor the original. Movies, we sigh—ruining
the book since 1902. Or used to. If these days adaptation
commands greater leniency and esteem, the reasons are
many: a cultural shift, some might say, in the definition of
philistinism; a chastened deferral to the disseminative power
of visual media; but more than any of these, I think, is an
enhanced understanding of what moving a work across media
entails—the cultural, commercial, and technological constraints
that come with the territory and force change. DVDs with
extras—director’s commentary, deleted scenes, making-of
documentaries—put me in mind of nothing so much as critical
editions of literature, with their essays and appreciations,
contemporary to both classic text and modern reader. Whatever
the consumer motivation for their inclusion (packaging filler
to meet a price point, or endless special editions), DVD extras
give us insight into the conditions of a work’s creation. Reviews
from even a decade ago are a testament to the ways blame
for a movie’s faults were wildly, often wrongly ascribed,
due to misunderstandings of how movies are made. Greater
transparency of process equals greater appreciation for the
difficulty, necessity, or ingenuity of aesthetic choices. Greater
public awareness of the sheer extent to which translators alter
a text on a regular basis might obviate popular myths like
the sanctity of punctuation or the audacity of substituting a
synonym.
Disciplines, like new media, emerge to be disparaged, or
understood only in terms of existing disciplines, before being
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National Endowment for the Arts