CHAPTER 1
DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT

I initially read Ionel Teodoreanu’s Lorelei on a train pulling out of Iaşi on my first visit to Romania. I had been bilingual in Romanian and English since I first learned to speak, so Teodoreanu’s luxurious metaphors were familiar and soothing, his language that of my father, mother, grandmother, and most of the important people in my life.  I was sixteen.

Several years later, I re-read the novel again and, a few years after that, yet again. In all, I read the novel some five times, and each time Teodoreanu’s imagistic prose was as lush and exponential in its properties, if not more so, than before. Meanings and images multiplied.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, it is equally true that each of Teodoreanu’s images were worth a thousand words. But even though my first encounter with Lorelei was rich and fulfilling, time and memory made the novel greater than the sum of its parts.  I learned later that, throughout his career, Teodoreanu’s critics strenuously objected to his excessive use of metaphor and his imagistic style.  In a 1944 article appearing in Fapta, Ion Caraion writes, “Dela un cap la altul al operei sale, Ionel Teodoreanu a risipit c’un dispret de campion pagini, capitole, kilograme si kilometri de metafore” (anul II, nr.58). “From one end of his works to the other Ionel Teodoreanu squandered with the contempt of a champion pages, chapters, kilograms and kilometers of metaphors” (trans. mine).  The tone of Caraion’s piece resonates with a harsh resentment of Teodoreanu’s style as the product of a man who did not live life, but rather wrote about a kind of life in a world of decadent imagery.  Caraion continues his diatribe, saying, “Toată lumea crede că romanele lui Ionel Teodoreanu gâlgâie de viată şi sănătate. E o optică falsă, eronată. Sănătate de acolo este întreţinută cu calciu şi cu vitamine injectate. Viata de acolo nu e viată. E o iluzie despre viată.”  Everyone thinks that Ionel Teodoreanu’s novels gurgle with life and health. It is a false, erroneous vision.  Health in that place is supplemented with calcium and vitamin injections. Life in that place is not life. It is an illusion of life (trans. mine).  Caraion also accuses Teodoreanu of failing to question the social miseries of the times, and, as such, concludes that since the “young novelist” posed no questions, it followed that he had no answers to real issues.  Perhaps this was in part because his contemporaries expected what Barthes called in S/Z a “readerly text.”  In The Subject of Semiotics, Kaja Silverman writes that such a readerly text,

enlists those readers and viewers by fostering in them a desire

for closure, and a belief in the revelatory nature of endings.

Narrative represents a particularly powerful syntagmatic lure,

affirming the coherence of the text and binding the reader or

viewer to it in a relationship of pleasurable dependence. (245)

 

Lorelei’s resistance to such a utilitarian seduction, however, situates it closer to a “writerly text” in which Barthes says "everything signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a final great ensemble, to an ultimate structure" (12).  With the exception of Teodoreanu’s consummate trilogy, La Medeleni,[1] most of his novels were regarded as naïve and melodramatic, as well as imagistically gaudy.  Much later, though, Lorelei was redefined by critics like Nicolae Ciobanu, who writes in the 1970 edition of Ionel Teodoreanu: Viaţa şi Opera:

Fără a ne oferi pagini de răscolitoare investigaţii psihologice sau     

de impresionante încleştări epice, Ionel Teodoreanu, ca un adevărat

poet aflat în cele mai bune clipe de inspiraţie, îşi potenţează naraţiunea

de la un capăt la cealalt cu ajutorul unui fluid lyric pătruns de inflexiuni

meditative-confesive de superioară calitate. (205)

 

Without offering us pages of turbulent psychological investigations

or stunning epic impressions, Ionel Teodoreanu, like a true poet finding

himself in the best moments of inspiration, fills his narration from one

end to the other with the help of a fluid lyric penetrated by meditative and

confessional inflections of a superior quality (trans. mine).

 

It is specifically Teodoreanu’s metaphoric[2] style written in the grai dulce (sweet speech) or Moldavian dialect, with its lyrical tension, that inspired me to translate Lorelei for my dissertation.  It exemplified, in many ways, Paul Ricoeur’s tension theory of metaphor,[3] but not limited to linguistics and literature or Aristotelian rhetoric. In the case of the translation and adaptation of Lorelei, the event of the epiphora as a relationship between a “primary idea and a new idea” reveals the forces at work when resolving image and meaning through metaphor. But my fascination with the novel’s sweet speech was not limited to the montage of images generated by the written words; it sprang also from the actual sound of Teodoreanu’s (Romanian) poetically inflected prose. Lorelei read like music.[4]  In Roger Scruton’s book, The Aesthetics of Music, he discusses how sound becomes tone in imaginary spaces created by the listener’s perception, or “hearing as” effects. His idea borrows from Marcus Hester’s[5]  theory of metaphor and Wittgenstein’s observations on the way we perceive drawings that contain traces of other perceptive possibilities. Both Wittgenstein and Scruton distinguish between the physical material in question (the former referring to visual and the latter to auditory) and the consequences of perception that allow us to see or hear the material as something else. Excluding clever illusions like Wittgenstein’s famous duck/rabbit drawing, the point is that metaphor (in music and language, respectively), is an aesthetic juxtaposition to the primacy of a single note by way of surrounding notes, as well as to the primacy of a single image by way of other images. Certain notes, by virtue of their tonal position in a musical phrase, want to resolve into another tone. The simplest illustration of this is the end of a symphony, when the conductor’s arms are held up to sustain the tension before releasing the music to its resolution.  Similar moments of tension exist throughout, and are driven variously by tonality, rhythm, and the like. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics confront lyrical metaphor in the same way, that is, by resolving the tension between seeing/hearing and seeing as/hearing as.  We can see a metaphor that wants to be heard, for instance, in the phrase “the women clucked over the bargain bin,” thus the tension between seeing/hearing.  We can also feel the tension of seeing/hearing the women as hens. Teodoreanu’s dense figurative style engages all of the above in a way so significant to my study that it is worth the following clarification of the opening passage to Lorelei:

The scene is a train station with the main protagonists. Teodoreanu writes “Tot aşa trec, cu literă mică, versurile lui Francis Jammes, ducînd în trap marunt, spre cerul cel mai dulce, şi-n varatec parfum de sulfină, livanţică, mintă şi romaniţă, numele fetelor de altădată (7).  “This is how they pass, in a small gallop, in lower case letters, the verses of Francis Jammes, carrying the names of girls from another time, on the summery fragrance of yellow sweet clover, lavender, mint and chamomile flowers up to the sweetest sky” (trans. mine).

We “see” the literal picture a series of juxtaposed images of letters ascending in a cantor or gallop, thus rhythmically to the sky, French poetry, and a collage of fragrant flowers of yellow, green and purple. The “seeing as” and “hearing as” effect multiplies the juxtapositions by offering the actual text as the primacy of a narrative composition in tension with the metaphoric after-effects: the colliding, drifting, ascending movement of sights, sounds and smells. If we know the poems of Jammes, we may “harmonize” the “lower case letters” with actual names; if we do not know Jammes’ poetry, we may supply our own choice of girls’ names, or simply imagine letters floating upward, much the way notes climb in an arpeggio-style on a five-line musical staff. Simultaneously we have the perfume of wild flowers, each distinct in their shape and color, and the sound of the spoken words.  Teodoreanu further juxtaposes the limitations of a “three-minute stop” with the implication of memory or time past.[6]  In painting, as in music, it is possible to exceed the constraints of canvas or musical measures by layering, blending, shadowing, or harmonizing both colors and tones; in writing, metaphor and figurative language achieve the same spatial feats, while in Teodoreanu’s case, his lyrical grai dulce “reads as” music.  For native Romanian speakers and bilinguals, grai dulce, as I will argue later, has the added implication of tasting the sweetness of the Moldavian dialect as it rolls off the tongue.

In Musical Languages, Joseph P. Swain discusses the “ancient paradox of musical semantics,” and makes the point that a community must be in linguistic accord in order to communicate meaning. While it is universally accepted that music conveys meaning, “no community of listeners can agree among themselves with any precision that comes close to natural language about the nature of that meaning” (45).  Teodoreanu’s predicament seems in part a result of the sound of his lyrical prose in contention with the linguistic meaning of his abundant metaphors.  

So I started in earnest to re-conceive all that Teodoreanu composed in Romanian, in English, but with an internal ear to the very sound of his figurative language.  The task was overwhelming at first, but not because of problems with lexicographical equivalence.  Lorelei was not the Rosetta Stone; I had dictionaries to help me rough out the story and literally substitute one word for another. In Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, Susan Bassnet discusses models of equivalence that address historical and contemporary approaches to translation and expose the advantages and drawbacks of each. But such an approach was little better than a machine translation. I was suddenly struck that it wasn’t enough to translate word for word what Teodoreanu wrote. I had to translate what he meant, what he was suggesting the reader feel, see, hear, smell and taste in and through and around his dense lyrical prose. I wasn’t concerned with why he wrote what he wrote, but how he did it; what creative process and range were underway when he wrote it.  In a very telling way, I was interested in the resonance the novel had for me not only as a bilingual but also as an interdisciplinary artist. In order to approach the whole question of translation, and later, adaptation, I had to be more than a reader, or an interpreter; I had to be a writer, a painter, and a musician, and not purely a priori, but quite specifically as each of those things. In other words, my decisions as a translator and adaptor genuinely drew from my practical and aesthetic interdisciplinary knowledge of these arts. 

For numerous reasons that I shall describe later, such a dynamic approach to translation still fell well short of everything Teodoreanu meant or might have meant to convey. Because of its poetic syntax Teodoreanu’s prose had a synaesthesic component that exceeded the traditional parameters of translating a novel. I recognized in Lorelei complex imagery a juxtaposition of color and sound, now texture and rhythm, now spatial and temporal montage—that in some elaborate passages it almost didn’t matter what Teodoreanu was saying.  It was reminiscent of an anecdote about Courbet that Gérard Genette recalls in Aesthetic Relation,[7]  pitting identity against aspect. Courbet paints an object in a landscape without knowing what it is he is painting. Just as Courbet was able to capture the aspect of a pile of sticks, Teodoreanu’s diverse and saturated palette continuously strives to define emotional, physical and psychological nuances. For some readers and critics, these things are obscured by dense metaphor (the “aspect” of Courbet’s pile of sticks), and likewise differentiated meticulously (the “identity” of the pile of sticks). In both examples, the tension between aspect and identity originates with metaphor. This conflict of seeing and seeing-as is integral to the metaphoric tension Ricoeur discuses. It is further complicated by the degree and intent of the reader’s perception, in terms of how much the reader needs to see, or for that matter, is willing to see. In any case, I did not think the intensity of Teodoreanu’s metaphor obscures the essence of the story, Lorelei, anymore than the landscape impeded Courbet from capturing his pile of sticks in a perceptively discerning way.

I began to reconsider what Hannah Arendt said in her introduction to Illuminations with regard to Benjamin’s understanding of language as a poetic phenomenon (50).  Teodoreanu, like Benjamin and Mallarmé, valued poetry as a healer of languages, where the figurative style relieves the harsh realities of life.  Ion Caraion overlooks the fact that Lucica Novleanu dies prematurely, as does Catul Bogdan’s mother, and that Bogdan suffers from the abuses of tobacco and caffeine, as does Lucica’s father. Mr. Caraion, it seems, wants the pile of sticks to dominate the landscape, because he perceives it as an issue, a real object that must be questioned by social conscience. By Romanian literary standards of his time, Teodoreanu should have outgrown his joyous esteem of childhood and adolescence with its sensate, complex, and tender reaction to life that so distinguished  La Medeleni. But Teodoreanu refused to conform to the demands of his critics and contemporaries and wrote instead with all the flourish of the symbolist poets, like Paul Verlaine and Francis Jammes.  He continued to “think poetically” at a time when his critics were openly hostile to the vestiges of the symbolists, whom Teodoreanu admired. The author’s dense imagistic style was further influenced by the Moldavian dialect, itself a variant of Eastern-Daco Romanian, known affectionately to Romanians as grai dulce. ” In addition to these powerful influences in his figurative style, Teodoreanu pays aesthetic tribute to Vasile Alecsandri, an esteemed poet, and Romania’s national poet, Mihai Eminescu, both fellow Moldavians. Taken together, these forces culminate in a linguistic regionalism that, according to Nicolae Ciobanu, acknowledges the way Teodoreanu literally “traieşte o adevărată stare de jubilaţie, pătrunsă de nostalgia şi tristeţea aducerilor-aminte” (11). “lives a true state of jubilation penetrated by the nostalgia and sadness of remembering things past,” (my translation).  The overall result of Lorelei is a symbolist poetic narrative that reflects the Moldavian habit of memorializing the remembrance of things past, in an intimate, familiar style of speech.

It is true that several dense digressions in the original Romanian Lorelei were at times overwhelming to read.  But in reading those passages as one would hear them spoken, the truncated sentences suddenly arced effortlessly, because of the sonorous rush of sweet speech. Not to put too fine a point on it, the effect is not unlike what Marion Gluck defines in “Two Types of Metaphoric Transfer” (Kassler, 6) in her analysis of the “image of the arch” in Chopin’s Prelude in B Minor, Op. 28, No.6.[8]  The arc is melodic, that is, the notes written on the ledger lines form an arc, ascending and descending along a curved path. The melodic phrase is further defined by a curved line called a slur, which in turn signals the way the phrase should be executed as one of seven parameters of musical notation.[9] This is significant because it illustrates musical metaphor as spatial, because that is where music occurs. It also shows that one need not be a musicologist to feel the effects of melodic phrasing. Teodoreanu’s grai dulce possesses as a dialect, a sense of rhythm and tonal color shaped by the metaphorically charged syntax, without the need to understand the effects of the melodic phrasing of the prose.  Put another way, this means that certain groupings of words form or frame a metaphorical phrase. These phrases lend themselves to a tonal quality deriving from the vowels and diphthongs, in particular that turn or rely on the actual utterance and the way that utterance is heard in spoken language.  The effect is inherently in progress not only because Teodoreanu marks the phrase by punctuation but also because the sound of the phrase implies the tone and rhythm in an intuitive, as opposed to an analytical way. This would not be the case in English, though, for the sound of figurative equivalent in English prose cannot produce the same effect.  Many Romanian words incorporate adjectives in the word form, for which there is no single word form equivalent in English. Adding the necessary qualifiers, therefore, clutters the translation. Having no economical way of reducing continuous, imagistic language composed in the grai dulce into English, made it impossible to fulfill what I saw as my creative obligation: to preserve the character and effect of the Moldavian dialect. I had to preserve, in other words, both the aspect and identity of Teodoreanu’s images.

This praxis thus evolved, necessarily, for me, from a translation into an adaptation, as a creative solution, a way of seeing, hearing, reading, and perhaps most importantly knowing (via Bergson’s intuition) what Teodoreanu nested in waves of images and metaphor. By way of a contemporary, albeit technical, analogy, I thought about MP3 digital audio files, whose formatting involves compressing the total sound present in a given recording to a version that fulfills only what the human ear can hear.  In other words, what we can discriminate in a standard recording is precisely what we get in an MP3; what we cannot distinguish from the standard is simply eliminated. It was clear that I was after a similar equivalence of effect in my objectives as a translator. Ultimately, my task was to recreate what Teodoreanu created, but not in what Henri Bergson called a homogenous, quantitative way.  I set out to recreate Lorelei in a heterogeneous, qualitative way. In Time and Free Will, Bergson says:

Yet the artist aims at giving us a share in this emotion, so rich

so personal, so novel, and at enabling us to experience what he

cannot make us understand. This he will bring about by choosing

among outward signs of his emotions, those which our body is

likely to imitate mechanically, though slightly, as soon as it

perceives them, so as to transport us all at once into the indefinable

psychological state which called them forth. Thus will be broken down

the barrier interposed by time and space between his consciousness

and ours: and the richer in ideas and the more pregnant with sensations

and emotions is the feeling within whose limits the artist brought us, the

deeper and higher shall we find the beauty thus expressed. (18)

 

Despite Bergson’s criticism of the moving cinematographic image,[10] ironically, his insight into concepts such as memory and duration was very appropriate to my decision to adapt Teodoreanu’s story. Like Proust, whose work also betrays influences of music and the Symbolists,[11] Teodoreanu used memory as a narrative device, while revealing the implications of it as both a force and a point of access to the character’s consciousness in ways contemplated by Ricoeur[12] and Merleau-Ponty.[13]  Lorelei is a composite of images and scenes that move through narrative. The author’s creative consciousness and the meted-out progression of memory share the same relationship of the celluloid strip to the recorded image.  It reads like music in the first place, and like a film in the second place, meaning that the style of grai dulce as something one hears even as one reads it, has a sense of movement. Hearing music and seeing images move across a screen communicates movement, and movement implies life in progress.  Sight and sound are necessary to the experience as a way of simulating something that is alive, hence the relevance of Horton Foote’s remark, “A film has its own rhythm, its own life” (Aycock & Schoeneke 19).  Reading, for all of its indisputable pleasures, wants a quiet environment in which to absorb the reader. Musical notes written on ledger lines, like images recorded on celluloid strips can be read in a similarly quiet environment. But to experience the full effects of both, other senses must be engaged.  The adaptation process involved in novel to film is very much the same as moving from written music on a page to performance. It is similar to moving from the recorded images on celluloid to projection. The same is true for grai dulce, which seeks to capture the visual through the sound of the spoken language.

Ionel Teodoreanu published Lorelei in 1935, and, although it is not his most celebrated work, it has recently been revisited by post-modern Romanian literary critics.  They have re-evaluated Proustian influences in the novel regarding subjectivity, narrative function, and visual imagery. These are elements that situate Teodoreanu’s figurative prose precisely in what Barthes calls the “space between language” (Preda, 1991).  The equivalence of meaning so crucial to translations was not adequate, however.  The immediate implications of analyzing Lorelei from the translator’s point of view meant confronting diverse theoretical concerns that competed in guiding my approach both to translation and adaptation. In the former case, I had to decide what kind of story Lorelei was in order to choose the right theoretical tool. Although an interesting case could be made for feminist critique, for example, given the erotic dimension of a May-December relationship, it was nevertheless a love story of mythic and artistic preoccupation that turned on the very stuff of legends.  In contrast to Nabokov’s Lolita,[14]  Lorelei is not an erotic tale, although eroticism may be one interpretation. But it is a complex story, in part because of the plot, and perhaps to a greater extent because of the way Teodoreanu uses language; the story of and the story between the two lovers shapes the words around it, rather than the words shaping the story.  In a long passage describing Catul Bogdan’s total preoccupation with the girl from the train, he seems, in contemporary American culture, to be something of a stalker. It is easy, in other words, to over-emphasize a specific interpretation at the expense of losing the fabulous potency and multiplicity of the surrounding imagery.  Nabokov originally wrote Lolita in English, and then translated it himself into his native Russian. In other words, he was aware of the possibility that translations can alter content and focus.  Bruno Osimo quotes Nabokov in a 1964 interview in his article “Nabokov’s Self-translation: Interpretation problems and solutions in Lolita’s Russian Version” as saying, 

I trained my inner telescope upon that particular point in

the distant future and I saw that every paragraph,

pockmarked as it is with pitfalls, could lend itself to hideous

mistranslation. In the hands of a harmful drudge, the Russian

version of Lolita would be entirely degraded and botched by

vulgar paraphrases or blunders. So I decided to translate

it myself.

 

Teodoreanu’s critics never dwell on the age difference between Catul Bogdan and Lucica Novleanu or even suggest that Catul Bogdan’s obsession with her after their encounter on the train is disturbing.  What irritated Teodoreanu’s critics was the gestalten he set into motion by virtue of relentless metaphors. Ovidiu Papadima, writing in Gîndirea (1936), remarks that the two protagonists are incapable of integrating in the life of their times; they are doomed to aspire to an ideal love, which, for Romanians, is a theme attributed to the incomparable Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889), Romania’s national poet. But did this mean that I had to map correspondences from the source text that had the added (metaphoric) echo of what every Romanian reader would recognize as “eminesciană,” into the target text?  According to Walter Benjamin, it did not, gestalten notwithstanding.  Eminescu is himself a metaphor, but not so exclusive as to require inclusion in the target culture.  In “The Task of the Translator” Benjamin stresses the “hallmark of bad translations” as those that merely transmit inessential information.  He also says that:

            Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which

is not to say that it is essential that they be translated;

it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the

original manifests itself in its translatability.  It is plausible

that no translation, however good it may be, can have any

significance as regards the original. Yet, by virtue of its

translatability the original is closely connected with the

translation; in fact, this connection is all the closer since it is

no longer of importance to the original. We may call this

connection a natural one, or more importantly, a vital connection. 

Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with

the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation

issues from the original—not so much from its life, as from its afterlife. (71)

 

Teodoreanu’s lyrical expression, then, possessed a translatability of image and theme that would be palpable in a target audience even without Eminescu, precisely because of its holistic, legendary quality manifest in imagery and texture. I reasoned that I was translating in a willfully non-transparent way, and, as such, my theoretical concerns were more aesthetic than pragmatic.  J. Hillis Miller examines the context of translation and metaphor in his essay “Border Crossings, Translating Theory: Ruth” (Budick & Iser), and extends the trappings of both to literary theory.  Traduttore, traditore in no way equates “untranslatable” with “unrenderable.”  Miller says, “Theory’s openness to translation is a result of the fact that a theory, in spite of appearances, is a performative, not a cognitive use of language.” In other words, the ability of theory to “travel well” is precisely because it is adaptable. Lorelei possesses similar attributes. Yet, because Teodoreanu’s novel was a veritable poetic gestalt, not one particular theory was available to me in a definitive sense, pragmatically, aesthetically, or any other way.  A professor of mine once said that each theory was like a tool, each one should be used according to its purpose. Although often it was tempting to reach for a hammer when a more delicate instrument was called for, I rifled through my theoretical toolbox and used the best elements of several theories. I was free, after all, like a resourceful backyard mechanic, to use such tools in favorable combination with each other and with the text. Benjamin’s insight into my translation objectives extended into my approach to adaptation as well, as did Brian McFarlane’s Novel to Film, along with work by James Naremore and others.  In The Novel and the Cinema, Geoffrey Wagner discusses Balázs’s categories of transposition, commentary, and analogy as varying degrees of fidelity between the novel and the film adaptation.  But Morris Beja asks in Film and Literature, “is there a necessary conflict?”  Both translation and adaptation are always subject to charges of infidelity, even though their relationship to the original author’s work may admirably compensate their secondary status by way of a fertile and passionate reconstitution of form and content.  Benjamin tells us that the original always precedes the translation, and, by extension, the adaptation; that is not to say that the latter embodiment of plot, character, theme, story, or action is necessarily less authentic, beautiful, or becoming in its own, autonomous way.  In Invisible Work, Efraín Kristal writes about Borges’s many accomplishments as a translator. According to Borges, a translation is often an improvement on the original. In Arta Poetică, he relates an anecdote about Rossetti and Swinburne discovering Edward FitzGerald’s translation of Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyat. I have triangulated the quotation from the original Spanish into Romanian, to underline the very usefulness of translation, since I do not know Spanish.  Borges writes:

            Rossetti şi Swinburne şi-au dat seama de frumuseţea

traducerii; şi totuşi ne întrebăm dacă li s-ar fi părut la fel de

 frumoasă în cazul în care FitzGerald ar fi prezentat

 Rubáiyat-ul ca pe un original (în parte, chiar era original),

şi nu ca pe o traducere. (65)

 

                        Rossetti and Swinburne realized the beauty of the translation;

            and yet we ask whether it would have seemed so beautiful that

FitzGerald would have presented the Rubáiyat as an original

(in part, it actually was original) and not as a translation (trans. mine).  

 

But in addition to negotiating instinctive and theoretical approaches to both translation and adaptation, I had to keep an eye on identifying and tracking the way these simultaneous processes fold and unfold.  It had occurred to me that my own creative process was underway in what I will argue is a parallel dimension or separate reality – separate because the target language occurs in a time and place other than the original.  In some ways, I translated and adapted Lorelei to illustrate the process of experiencing two languages simultaneously, as a reader and writer. Furthermore, I am on intimate terms with the creative arts. Combining these roles allowed me to test what I intuitively believed: the very process of experiencing a story in two different languages projected the experience into two different spaces of consciousness.  In no way, however, did I presume to duplicate Lorelei the way Borges’s Pierre Ménard  manages to (re)write an original Don Quixote.  In this regard, my study is not a general discussion of translation and “the absurdity of sameness between texts,” but one of a special case of translation inherently present in bilingualism and interdisciplinarity. 

Language imprints a cultural identity that is often best understood from outside a particular language, and what better vantage point than being in another language. While many elegant linguistic, psychoanalytic, and semiotic propositions, for example, are possible a priori, bilinguals have the unique opportunity to experience literally two cultural identities. It goes way beyond what Doug Robinson writes in What is Translation? in reference to Antoine Berman. In “The Experience of the Foreign,” he quotes Marilyn Gaddis Rose’s comments about neoliteralism, and the appeal of Benjamin and Venuti—“foreignizing without slavish word-for-word rendering”—as a way of “translating to bring the target language text to the interliminal language that bilingual readers experience between Baudelaire’s French lines and the lines of his translators” (83).  Not all translators are true bilinguals, and not all bilinguals are translators, but those translations whose “durations” take place in interliminal (referring to thresholds of conscious awareness) language I would argue are the best, though understood the least by monolinguals. In the Christopher and Jonathan Nolan film, Memento, the protagonist suffers from short-term memory loss, and, as a result, cannot make new memories. He must solve a murder by taking snapshots and tattooing messages on his body in order to figure out the truth of his situation. The Nolan film is a wonderful example of Bergson’s ideas about memory and duration, because it makes perception and memory a simultaneous event[15] while Rose’s signifier of interliminal unifies theoretical implications of translation and philosophy of consciousness. My collective reference also reinforces the role that interdisciplinarity plays in helping to locate and simulate an abstract model that describes how the interliminal event is a threshold for a parallel dimension of reality, where two strands of memories validate a heterogeneous qualitative approach.

My central argument is that translation and adaptation, separately and collectively, are primary and creative productions of work in terms of literature and film.  My praxis engages the very heart of the issue common to both disciplines, popularly referred to as the “fidelity versus fertility” debate, which in no case should be the sole criteria for relegating a translation or adaptation to a secondary state of reproduction. Subsequently, my interdisciplinary treatment of these discursive terms unifies theory in a surprisingly useful and creative way.  The very role of theory in my project, therefore, does not precede or determine my choices as a translator or adaptor. Instead, the praxis clarifies and, in some instances, harmonizes theory. The happy consequence of this “creative evolution” (Bergson) is that I can answer Mr. Beja’s question: No, there is not a necessary conflict.

My specific claims are discussed below.

I.  Fidelity, though challenged at various points in some two thousand years of translation history, as well as by contemporary practitioners in the field, remains the dominant force in English language translations. In The Translator’s Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti explains how translations are judged largely on the basis of fluency.  He writes it is also the force behind subordinating translation to the secondary production of literature. It is not surprising, then, that the idea of fidelity is the core criterion for judging film adaptations of novels as well. McFarlane gives examples of the way the term fidelity adheres tenaciously to various three-range classifications common to theorists like Dudley Andrew, Geoffrey Wagner, Michael Klein, and Gillian Parker.[16]  At opposite extremes are total fidelity and free adaptations (“borrowed” or “analogous”), with an amiable aesthetic and technical compromise in the middle. In translation studies, a similar model emerged in the late 1600s with Dryden (Steiner), who challenged Aristotelian notions of mimesis by freely adapting Aeneis.  Criteria for judging successful translations and adaptations hinge on how aptly form and content between the original and the recasting of the original are reconciled.  But traditional views of fidelity in terms of literal and visual narrative for bilinguals are not as murky or combative. Bilinguals who participate in life through two languages (thus two identities) are generally more optimistic in their efforts to convey meaning, and with good reason. Doris Sommer writes extensively about the advantages of living in two languages in terms of having access to creative linguistic solutions. Fidelity, for some bilingual translators and adaptors, therefore, becomes a more flexible concept akin to having one’s cake and eating it too. Mitigating factors resulting from displacement and the immigrant experience, however, pose a legitimate challenge to this claim.[17]  Bilingualism adds to translation and adaptation the element of experiencing meaning in the original, as well as in the recreation of the original.  For monolinguals, orthodox views of fidelity seem mired in the kind of paradox causality implies, for deterministic thinking makes fidelity impossible, as Quine proposes in Word and Object. Susan Bassnet expresses as much in her reflections on the relevance of Sapir and Jakobson’s position on structural semantics with regard to translation. She reminds us of the “validity of Sapir’s statement that each language represents a separate reality” (19). Yet we know—or we ought to know—that fidelity is not limited to linguistic equivalence, because linguistics is not limited to denotative meanings.  In fact, it is the connotative realm of language that complicates meaning not only in one language, but between different languages. In Bilinguality and Bilingualism, Josiane Hamers and Michel Blanc cite studies by Bialystok & Ryan (1985a,b) that explain a cognitive model of language development. While the study exceeds the present discussion, it stresses “two cognitive dimensions associated with structuring and assessing knowledge” that become even more significant “when a child’s language experience includes more than one language” (68-70). But connotation can also be the key to solving problems in conveying meaning between two different languages because it is not limited to fixed lexicographical signs; connotation originates in the way language is heard and felt, even if it is read.  For example, musicians can sight read a musical score, but “hear” the music in their heads.[18] Conversely, take for instance our tendency to verbally quote a favorite passage: it is then we speak something, when we give it sound, that we begin to establish a sense of fidelity, though we can “think” the exact quotation in our minds.  In other words, fidelity in translation refers to the relationship between the original and the translated or adapted version, but it also qualifies the relationship between the text and the reader. The same thing happens when we hear ourselves reading text. The relationship between the text and the reader is qualified, sound and gesture and visual plains of awareness to the moment urge creativity to solve issues of context and connotation. As readers, we do not defer to the author, but to our own sensibilities, our own intuition. If we are pleased or satisfied with our rendition then we view any and all variations of our own intuition as inferior or unfaithful.  Every encounter with a text, whether it is read in the original or in the translation takes place simultaneously with the reader’s memory.  And, ideally, in the case of judging fidelity, even the original author, who has the opportunity of acquiring more memory as well as proficiency in the target language, is likely to approve or deny fidelity based on his own new intuition.  Perhaps this accounts for Nabokov’s own dissatisfaction with his translation of Lolita. By the time he had written his Russian version of the story, additional memory had been accumulated in his second language, English.  Had he lived and experienced both languages from a similar acquisition point, he might have been less frustrated.  Quite reasonably, then, anything that competes with our own voices, and ears, and vision, all the more when new experience has taken place, appears somehow less than true, and in some cases, a betrayal.  This is because fidelity, in a Kantian way, is bound to a quantitative judgment of equivalence, to say nothing of the claim that we can never really know the Ding an sich.[19]  The original is juxtaposed to the translation, but this multiplicity is still related to a unified consciousness.

Bergson’s illustration of quantitative multiplicity is a flock of sheep, where each sheep can be counted, though they all look the same.  They can be counted, because they are spatially juxtaposed.  If a translation is faithful to the original, both are quantitatively, spatially differentiated, though apparently similar. But in terms of aesthetics, fidelity must extend to qualitative multiplicity as well. Bergson’s explanation is that such “duration,” or the experiencing of an event, which further unfolds as memory, since it “conserves” the past, is heterogeneous and temporal.  Since heterogeneity does not determine juxtaposition, conceivably, a translation or adaptation need not—should not—be bound to time and space of the original. It is a memory, of sorts, that is prolonged into a translation or adaptation in this case, and as such, becomes part of a new duration.  For a translation to fulfill all of the attributes of the original, it would have to take place in the same duration.  Even a revision or rewrite of an original by the same author writing in the same language is suddenly not the same.  The flow of time and memory formation simply does not permit it. To hold translation accountable for every aspect of the original would demand that translation overcome time and space.  A compromise, however, would be to re-create the original in the time and space of the target audience, in order to offer those spectators  the chance to experience the plot, characters, action, theme, and so on, for themselves,  in a kind of re-reality. In Theories of the Cinema, Francesco Casetti discusses the idea of experience with reference to Edoardo Bruno this way:

            It is a visual experience: the spectator is an active accomplice,

            ready to participate in what he sees and to recognize himself

            as a seeing subject.  It is an experience of signification:

“to read” a film means to grasp its obvious meanings, but also

to be ready to understand its imperceptible details, its recondite

themes, its illusive meanings, and so on. Finally, it is an

experience of another reality (italics mine). (281)

 

Bruno’s observation of film as a separate reality via the spectator’s consciousness is a process similar to experiencing an event in two different linguistic consciousnesses.  He says also that “art does not reproduce, it proposes” (1986-87), and this nods to Bergson’s claim  in Time and Free Will that we can experience aesthetic feeling “provided that it has been suggested, and not caused”(17).  In other words, the original artistic event, in this case the novel Lorelei, was Teodoreanu’s proposition, his suggestion, that created the circumstances in which the audience could experience the effects as freely as its sensibilities and perceptions allow.  Lorelei would not cause a specific or definitive response; rather it would urge an anticipated range of responses to its rich metaphoric nature. In his introduction to Andre Bazin’s What is Cinema?, Hugh Gray quotes Bazin’s reference to Robert Bresson’s adaptation of the novel Jaques le fataliste  to his film Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne: “The sound of a windshield wiper against a page of Diderot is all it took to turn it into a Racinian dialogue” (7).  Put another way, Bresson’s visual metaphor encouraged the effect of a dialogue by Racine. Finally, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities illustrates the collision of Bergson’s ideas of duration and the creative adaptation and manipulation of space as a means of getting at parallel realties of meaning in one language that achieve an equivalence of effect in another language.[20]

II. Fertility, or sense-for-sense method in translation and adaptation, is the creative and generative component central to the primary and original production of work. Benjamin does not suggest that the task of a translator should be to overthrow, obscure, or replace the original. Nor do I.  But reverence for the original is never grounds for denying a “kinship of languages” that is revealed through translation.  He says “of all forms it [translation] is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own” (73).  In Bergsonian terms, translation-adaptation is an empathetic process that strives to “suggest” what the original itself “proposed” we experience.  In Film Adaptation, James Naremore suggests that the trope of adaptations as translation anticipates “inevitable gains and losses,” but is quick to add that “art renews itself through creative mistranslation (62).” This harks back to Borges, who champions the resurrected text over the original, precisely for its gesture of renewal. It is worth pausing to consider the impact of no work ever having been translated or adapted, since various classics of ancient texts like the Bible and the works of Homer, to name but a few, have influenced world literature.  Add to this the writings of Petrarch, Dante, and Shakespeare, and one would agree how certain monumental works have shaped and contributed to the development of individual national literatures. Just as translation has informed the creative production of culturally diverse canons by way of crossing disciplines such as philosophy and art, or religion and history, adaptation has generated new text, and often in new textual forms. The processes of translation and adaptation are similar in that both strive to uncover what is already there, or as Orson Wells once said of film adaptations, as quoted by Naremore, “if one has nothing new to say about a novel, why adapt it at all?” (63). 

III. Bilingualism is a factor in defending fertility in translation because it includes subtle awareness of cultural issues that are compromised by transparent translations. Although dynamic equivalence, which “aims at complete naturalness of expression” (Nida 1964:159) thus appeals to target audiences, the source language is subordinated. Skopostheorie (Vermeer and Reiss) uses the “target-cultural purpose of a translation” to determine the translation process, according to Douglas Robinson in Translation & Taboo. Here too the target language is privileged over the source language, often to a more extreme degree. These examples tend to accommodate the target audience at the expense of the “strangeness” of the original. Lexicographic facility, or fluency in two languages can guarantee dynamic or adequate equivalence, respectively, by making the target audience receptive to linguistic and cultural codes, but it does not insure the same experiential component that bilingualism possesses. In other words, there is a practical difference between learning a language and living one. The memory or stored knowledge of a word or its connotation is not the same in terms of duration, as an experience that has been lived and catalogued in the mind by a word or its connotation. This is a provocative statement to be sure, but one worth offering to the realms of translation studies, linguistics, and art, and even philosophy, because it suggests an implied dimension of language that remains a stigma on the fertility-fidelity debate. We possess an intimate relationship with language when we live it, and, quite naturally insist that something is always lost in translation.  No degree of equivalence can compensate for that which cannot be experientially duplicated by form alone. Yuri Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere lends itself appropriately to this proposition, all the more because he resists Sausserian arbitrariness.  In Universe of the Mind Lotman suggests that semiotic systems can transmit both “available information” and can create new information which is “to some degree unpredictable.”  He clarifies:

            A minimally functioning semiotic structure consists of

            not one artificially isolated language or text in that language,

            but a parallel pair of mutually untranslatable languages which

are, however, connected by a ‘pulley’, which is translation.

A dual structure like this is the minimal nucleus for generating

new messages and it is also the minimal unit of a semiotic

object such as culture. Thus culture is (as a minimum) a binary

semiotic structure, and one which at the same time functions as

an indissoluble unit. Thinking along these lines has led us to the

concept of the semiosphere. (2)

 

 Lotman makes some compelling claims about cultural space and translation, which he explains as “"a primary mechanism of consciousness. To express something in another language is a way of understanding it" (127).   This exposes one of the preeminent problems with translation, because what Lotman is saying is that seeking clarity in another language is tied to connotation. That is, equivalence in translation is not measured by denotation alone. When we borrow foreign expressions that can be easily interpreted in the dominant language, we are using that phrase in a connotative capacity. There is no insurmountable barrier to the saying “joie de vivre”, afterall.  We say it in French as though we assume the French are somehow an authority on what it means to have that “joy of life”.  It would be absurd to accept that one ethnic group or nationality has authority over another in terms of its emotional philosophy towards life, yet we seem to need constantly to refresh or increase our lexicon of connotative words and expressions. We do this to defend our right to match or exceed the experience of another or the other. Language, like the human experience, craves metaphor, tends towards metaphor as a means of qualifying experience. That is why Aristotle recognized the significance of metaphor in rhetoric—for its ability to articulate, to impress, to defend and to persuade. 

IV. Foreignizing a translation as Schleiermacher and Venuti argue, though a potential precursor for nationalism is an aesthetic acknowledgment of original authorship. It takes the sting out of the pejorative qualifier of derivative so that creative translations and adaptations may emerge as original in their own right. The idea here is to acknowledge the original as intimately bound to the source author and text, but, as I will argue, without surrendering the creative experience of the translator writing in the target language. Foreignization, or the more extreme version of radical literalism, can create as many problems as it solves. Like Douglas Robinson, I resist literalism “as a utopian social movement” as he writes in his essay on Antoine Berman in What is Translation?”  It is important to note the difference between literalism, or what Marilyn Gaddis-Rose calls neoliteralism as a “translation practice” and elitism among certain translators like Nabokov who equate high culture with intelligence and multilingualism with literary superiority. My approach to Lorelei is neoliteral insofar as fidelity means preserving the original, which can only imply preserving the foreignness of it as well.  But being faithful to the original need not be so at the expense of the creative production of the translation and adaptation.  On the one hand, I recognize the primacy of the original by not denying its foreignness. At the same time, however, I look to creative treatment of that foreignness as I present it to the target audience. Such a technique is similar to creating art with found objects, using contiguity to describe the foreign by insinuating it into the domestic. Suppose, for example, one finds a tree trunk that resembles a human face.  By incorporating that tree trunk into a sculpture, the foreignness of the tree is preserved, available, visible.  But the sculptural adaptation of that found object, though based on a thing that precedes the finished form, is no less original than the tree.  In some ways, as certainly Borges would agree, the original tree trunk attains a greater meaning, a deeper significance because it now exists as aspect and identity insinuated into a new and original form.  It is an example of defamiliarization that Roman Jakobson expands upon in “On the Linguistics Aspects of Translation” (1959), where “equivalence in difference” reconciles aspect and identity. Lotman claims that we can either transmit available information or create new information, thus there are two versions of the process of conveying information out of or into semiospheres. This is best illustrated by translating versus interpreting—a slight but critical difference. The former is given to subtleties based on written treatment of fidelity and fertility issues, while the latter concerns more immediate, oral, accurate transmission of information, hence a tendency toward domestication. An interpreter, consequently, would not foreignize because it would defeat the purpose of clear and expedient conveyance; new information is not created, although the equivalence of difference is calculable in terms of the end result.  But for the bilingual distinctions between domestic and foreign, embellishments are less paramount, that is, a bilingual does not strive to foreignize. Languages are equal in terms of experiences lived through them, hence bilinguals, by virtue of their ability to switch codes with greater ease, tend toward the most apt choice—domestic or foreign in substance and texture. Taking Lotman’s construct of the semiosphere, at whose margins or boundaries other semiospheres touch or overlap to allow the transmission of information, we can see the dynamics of such an interface in a rather rigid or controlled relationship. But imagine bubbles that float in space and bond in three-dimensional space.  For the bilingual, the relationship between one culture and another, hence one language and another, is not temporary or static and certainly not one-dimensional. In Bergson’s world, it seems unlikely that any kind of static relationship is possible because there must be constant flow of experience.  That said, bilinguals who live actively in two languages are not “in the world” but rather “in worlds” that constantly shift, collide, bond, slip, rotate, inter- and superimpose themselves. But since, as Francis Newman asserts in his response to Matthew Arnold’s assault on his translation of Homer, “Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge,” readers and spectators at large are the ultimate arbiters; they respond to an equivalence of effect in terms of their specific culture. Any theoretical proposition for the way translation and adaptation work as processes must necessarily include the bilingual process, because such bilinguals are constantly creating parallel realities as a means of experiencing interliminal events.   Foreignizing a translation, in other words, is not necessarily an overt style to bilinguals because the whole notion of ostranenie, or “making strange,” is irrelevant; both languages are familiar; neither is “other.” 

V.  Translations that evolve to adaptations as a means of fulfilling a fertile recreation of the original text unify theoretical concerns, rather than being subordinated by them.  Just as bilingual translation is a special case within the larger dominion of translation studies, adaptations of translations—specifically those that extend the translation process to the fulfillment of fertility—are a special case within the larger field of adaptation studies.  There is a difference, both technical and creative, between adapting an English text to an English movie and adapting a foreign work into an English adaptation.  Brian McFarlane writes, “To date there has been very little attempt to construct any theoretical basis for the study of literature-film adaptation” (198). Lorelei combines the translation and adaptation as two parts of the same creative process. Adaptation as praxis is an attempt to re-create the physical form of experience in the target language, as a way of allowing a target audience to share in that experience, hence earning not only fertility of meaning, but fidelity as well.

VI. Translation and adaptation are processes and not mere systems. The question of fertility or fidelity, therefore, is still subject to critical standards, but the final judgment should be made on the basis of the work as an original form of production, whether literary or cinematic.  As such, if a given praxis can stand as a parallel production of work, it can affect the role theory plays in translation and adaptation discourse, especially at a time when we have, as McFarlane suggests, no clear theoretical basis for such discussion.  This point speaks directly to an auteur theory, for example, in terms of restoring the role of author to the translator/adapter, instead of conferring it upon the director alone. In other words, adaptation occurs at the level of the screenplay proper, and not exclusively under the director’s interpretation of the script.  Samuel Beckett, a bilingual writer, was fastidious in his scripts and maintained fierce control over the directors of his plays. In this regard, Beckett is an example of a bilingual writer who was aware of the aesthetic dangers of the auteur theory.

This last point is a critical issue in the case of Lorelei, because mise-en-scène can function as an extension of the translation, in terms of reducing or transforming literal narrative to visual narrative.  If mise-en-scène is recognized as such an extension, it limits the degree to which a director can supplant a translation by self-conferring his interpretation on the level of translation.  Adaptation, even when it does not involve a preliminary translation, still requires a translation process from literal to visual that can utilize mise-en-scène in the same creative way; directors are interpreters, after all, and closer to the role of reader than writer. Therefore, when mise-en-scène is altered by the director, it is a separate act of interpretation, and not one of primary creation, any more than a reader’s or viewer’s response to a (literary or filmic) text is.

Finally, my praxis attempts to redefine the various and competing territories subject to aesthetic and theoretical scrutiny, by identifying the bilingual event in the translation and adaptation process as a discrete space in which a parallel dimension creates a parallel reality. On a very fundamental level, two instances of the same text in two different languages cannot occupy the same time and space simultaneously.  Studies in cognitive neurology through imaging suggest that “translation and language switching” (bilingual events with mutual proficiency) occur in the same areas of the brain (Price et al). While such switching strays beyond the limits of my discussion, it is worth mentioning because it lends support to my suggestion that a common linguistic source implies fertility and fidelity in a kind of cerebral gestalt, but still allows for the emergence of two distinct voices (one faithful, one fertile), insinuated in their respective realities.   More to the point of my praxis is Doris Sommer’s observations about bilinguals in her book, Bilingual Aesthetics.  “Difference has a way of surviving domestication,” she writes, which reaffirms the value of ostranenie, when it respects strangeness as a natural right of “being” for the bilingual, rather than an intentional effort to create strangeness—a mere device. A bilingual translation is not the same thing as a bilingual who translates; the former is a quantitative exercise, while the latter is a qualitative re-experience.  In order to develop critical, discursive tools for translation and adaptation, we must reconsider a qualitative multiplicity over the traditional quantitative view, and not only of theory and narrative. We must include the role, function, effects, and ultimate contribution of translators and adapters as creative writers and artists in their own right. We must also recognize interdisciplinary approaches as creative solutions not only to translating and adapting texts, but to unifying various and competing theories discursively.

My scope is narrow in that I am limiting my discussion of translation and adaptation to a praxis in which my bilingualism plays an important part. But my objective is to liberate the praxis into a primary and creative life of its own, in which my interdisciplinarity plays an equally vital role.  Ultimately, I hope to offer my recreation of Lorelei as a way to contemplate a translation and adaptation as parallel states of literary and filmic narrative. This is important because it addresses a current trend in translation studies that challenges the traditional preference for transparency, which effectively condemns the translator and adapter to a subordinate, or worse, invisible role.  It is equally significant because film adaptations rarely surpass the novels upon which they are based, because of what is not included. Readers claim interpretive rights with good reason; as such, when cuts are made, the reader feels cheated, and the fidelity card is played. But to limit the production of adaptations to the initiated is to disqualify a vast cross-section of readers and spectators confronting translations and adaptations for the first time. 

I will divide my discussion of translation and adaptation respectively into the following subcategories:

1.      Some languages are tubas (Semiotics)

Languages are like musical instruments, each capable of producing and reproducing the same melody, or in this case, narrative. Music, like mathematics, is universal, and not coded in such a way as to limit access to it, except of course to musicians and mathematicians at a performance level.  Langue is equal to notes in a musical range of sounds, the system that oversees the way words and notes combine to communicate meaning. The various instruments are parole, or the process (range and register) that executes the notes.  This illustrates what is meant by fidelity and fertility, in terms of how the same musical piece or narrative can be reproduced faithfully (note-for-note, or word-for-word) and still fail, while emphasizing the importance of hearing the translator’s voice. Mozart’s Minuet in G written for harpsichord can be translated for a tuba, but the result will be a foreignization that occurs similarly when moving across linguistic and cultural boundaries. It is the same minuet, but clearly different, and certainly original in its own right as far as tuba arrangements go. This is not to suggest, however, a hierarchical judgment of instruments. Remember, each instrument—each language—has equal access to the same notes. Even tympani can play the same minuet, as well as the kazoo or crystal glasses filled with different volumes of water.  By contrast, one can play Led Zepplin on a cello, or oboe, and while playing note for note, change the entire audition of the piece. Returning to Mozart, the same minuet can be arranged for a piano or violin with still different results, without altering the original melody, moving the sound away from brass, and closer to strings.  Even key changes that alter the timbre and register will affect a discriminating ear. The point here is to stress that languages and instruments have distinct voices, even when the same text or melody is executed. When we challenge a translation, we are not only judging technical and artistic prowess; we are challenging the very voice of that language.

This example reveals two important considerations. One is that fidelity is not always the most effective term to describe the success or failure of a translation or adaptation, and the other is that Borges has a solid point when he says that "sometimes the original is not faithful to the translation.”  Many would agree that Bach himself wouldn’t mind being rocked every now and again. In this regard, the art of arrangement, or the way a musical piece is organized with respect to harmony, counter-point, bass line, tempo, key changes, and the like, can resuscitate or obliterate a musical identity. The same is true for translating across languages. A handy example would be re-arranging lines or rhymes of poetry in order to achieve, for example, certain harmonic properties of a sonnet. There is a telling correspondence between prosody and time signatures is music; both are constrained by strict units of rhythm and value. Anyone who has read James Joyce’s Ulysses is immediately aware of the linguistic and connotative complexities involved.  The sheer idea of attempting a translation into Japanese or Italian seems impossible, if not suicidal.  Yet both have been done.  Clearly Ulysses is a vast, consummate orchestral epic, and lends itself—though not without daunting effort—to languages that possess similar possibilities.  In James Joyce’s Italian Connection, Corinna del Greco Lobner writes of Joyce that “To know a language, in his view, meant a lot more than reading, writing, and speaking correctly; it meant to possess words so completely that modifications obtained through vocal inflections, body language, and prolonged silences could be grasped without effort by a practiced ear.”  Both Joyce’s musical training and multilingual skills allowed him to live on intimate terms with his interdisciplinary creativity, at whose very center was language and music. A better example might be Joyce’s Italian rendering of “Anna Livia Plurabelle”, which Lobner says “is a mistake to call a translation,” since Joyce, in full possession of the Italian language, created it as masterfully as he did the English version. Interestingly, and to further press the point, Joyce left the French translation to others, including Beckett, though Joyce’s French was “peerless.”  Lobner clarifies by explaining that Joyce found French to be “the language of moderation and criticism, therefore unable (at least as far as he was concerned) to cater to the chittering needs of Anna Livia.”  In other words, Joyce, no doubt in part because of his musical background, was acutely aware of the figural in the body, where gesture, tone and cadence refine linguistic inflection.  In The Mind Behind the Musical Ear, Jeanne Bamberger quotes Joyce’s poem, “Simples,” to demonstrate the way language in the hands of musical writers behaves like melody: “poets bend lexical and syntactic convention; in doing so they liberate otherwise unnoticed feelings, senses, even objects, making the reader experience what is simplest and most familiar in new ways” (94).

Certainly Joyce would agree that languages, like instruments, have their own voice.

2. Hermeneutical oranges and Bergson’s color spectrum

In “The Task of the Translator” Benjamin talks about how “content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin,” distinguishing essence from form. But a translation as a creative and generative process can reconstitute the essence of the original in a new, legitimate form (like orange juice). Where translation is a mode for Benjamin, I think of it more as a state of being, for to drink the juice of an orange is to experience a parallel form of the original that captures its rightful essence. The consumption of the orange as text then becomes a matter of taste, and, in this regard, fertility is justified over fidelity. In other words, the whole process of translation should never be a forgery; it should be a parallel state of the original. (And no, Vitamin C doesn’t count).  In The Creative Mind Bergson multiplies (and simplifies) the implications of the various strains of hermeneutics by way of his color spectrum. If we can “sympathize” with the color orange and insinuate ourselves in it, we will discover we are “between red and yellow.” A translation, especially a truly bilingual event of experiencing meaning, is more than the color orange; it is a spectrum of color that is mutually defined by shades of meaning, spaces between words and language that intuition of durations (experience) reveals. If orange is the conscious reality of the original, and “between red and yellow” its bilingual multiple, then we have a parallel duration of the original, or experience.

            3.  “Portmantage” and the lexicophysics of quantumfiable Joyce

Montage functions in James Joyce’s writing (Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) at the level of a bilingual event in translation and adaptation.  Sergei Eisenstein recognized Joyce’s cinematic instincts in literary narrative, but he does not specifically identify it as a linguistic structure. The point here is that Joyce juxtaposed not only narrative frames but linguistic frames a well. By fusing syllables originating in different words he collapsed spatial and temporal states of whole, original, and various source utterances into organic images.  The closest approximation of what Joyce was up to, in my view, was unleashing the vast reservoirs of words by splitting them like atoms. The resulting particles of meaning, each of which carried the energy of culture, history, semiotics, and philosophy, to name a few, were free to fuse and bond with other words, or remain illusive particles fit to frustrate the critics as he so intended for “three-hundred years.”  Ironically, despite Joyce’s use of what Eisenstein calls montage by attraction, the very technique shoots itself in the foot cinematically without “narrative comment,” as Barrow explains in Montage in James Joyce’s Ulysses, (5).  Similar problems existed in translating and adapting Teodoreanu’s poetic imagery to film, and I suspect that this is in part because the target medium was already present in the original style; though the comment seems playful, I am in earnest in suggesting that a stage of adaptation was part of Joyce’s and Teodoreanu’s initial creative process in visualizing the literal narrative. Yet the cinematic technique is quite at home in Joyce’s creative consciousness: In “Joyce and Eisenstein: Literary Reflections on the Reel World,” William Costanzo points out the way cinematic montage functions in Finnegans Wake:

When Joyce calls his book a “meanderthalltale” (19.25), he is

yoking single words with simple denotation into a new expression,

something richer, more complex, more volatile…[T]he combination

of Neanderthal, meander, and me and the tall tale challenges the

mind to make connections, to synthesize the seemingly familiar

into concepts that are yet to be explored. (179)

 

The term “stream of consciousness” is a linear proposition insofar as the vast and various gestalten of the creative mind allow for diverse thoughts and images to course through consciousness in succession, or montage. Figurative language becomes the kind of spatial metaphor intrinsic to music.  But the potential Joyce saw in juxtaposing words and meanings is similar to the bilingual prowess that Doris Sommer talks about, specifically as she cites numerous examples of language games common to bilinguals. She gives many illustrations of the ways code switching can produce “virtuosity” and surprise, and adds, “By now even some linguists have strayed from the once standard “syntagmatic” rule-based approach to develop a “paradigmatic” preference” (35).

            4. Euclid’s three degrees of freedom and the special relativity of parallel realities.

The creative process of writing, translating, and adapting meaning specifically to a film narrative engages metaphoric properties whose epiphora or movement creates a space in a parallel dimension of time. Although the concept is lofty, it is conducive to my discussion of how lyrical prose moves “horizontally” to a visual medium. I am not, however, suggesting that this horizontal movement is simply given over to a syntagmatic chain.  I am suggesting, rather, that metaphor is not so much the lexicographical “container,” as Lakoff and Johnson contend, as it is a parallel space that curves along the original path of meaning.  Euclid’s particular geometry that locates an observable object by way of a linear perspective is similar to the fidelity model; word-for-word equivalence is measured to fit; the meaning of the text uses lexicographical coordinates that superimpose the source language onto the target language in a transparent way, so that the overall effect is domesticated. It gives the illusion of the original.  In Einstein’s world, however, time and space are relative and dependent on one another; equivalence of meaning unfolds and curves in a fourth or greater dimension, whose parallel existence is a fertile recreation of the original. While it is an autonomous creative process, it is dependent, and relative for the original. In other words, the verticality of the paradigmatic axis and the horizontality of the syntagmatic chain are bent (as Joyce bends the lexical and syntactic conventions) into a sphere.  The collective processes of translating and adapting resist the one-dimensional model of the typical cross-hair graph (vertical axis and horizontal axis). Instead, these processes demand a multi-dimensional space where the axes may intersect spatially, as in film and music.

The dissertation is divided into three chapters, the first of which addresses the preceding sub-categories.  The second chapter is the actual screenplay as an industry-standard script.  Since I am arguing that mise-en-scène is as much a function of the translation as a pre-requisite for the adaptation, I will include still shots or storyboard sections that reflect composition of key scenes. The purpose here is to demonstrate image-for-image as important a criterion as word-for-word, or sense-for-sense. The image, after all, is the place where translation and adaptation blend. The final chapter will address the many and various obstacles I faced as a translator and adaptor that resulted either in artistic solutions or (fertile) approximations in my task of trying to render faithfully not everything Teodoreanu said, but everything he might have meant.

Romanian is a Romance language that is lyrical and musical; as an instrument, its voice lends itself to metaphor and imagery with a rich register.  While it is a Romance language closer to Latin than any other, Slavic influences during the 7^th and 8^th centuries left an indelible mark. Romanian is the only Romance language that has failed to preserve amor, carus, amare, sposa, etc., replacing them by dragoste, drag, a iubi, nevasta, logodna (= betrothal), a logodi (= to betrothe)" (Niculescu, 49).  This speaks to the idea that emotional words are the most resistant to translation, because emotional experiences are personal. Where Benjamin defends the translatability of certain languages whose meanings can be sustained in the afterlife of another language, I submit that languages—as instruments—can similarly be transcribed, without sacrificing respective emotion words, since each instrument has its own way of expressing emotion. But even as Lorelei, in its original voice, satisfied both my scholarly and creative objectives, the very things that appealed to me proved to be the most problematic.  On the one hand, Teodoreanu’s dense figurative prose offered me an opportunity to negotiate the transfer of literal metaphor to visual enunciation. On the other, however, I had to confront that core issue of translation studies: fidelity versus fertility.

I have been a bilingual speaker and writer all my life, but for many years I took for granted the critical implications of translation as both a skill and an art. For me, having to move between two languages was more a privileged portal than a babelian blockade that demanded a word-for-word equivalence at every checkpoint. I realized that being bilingual meant that I could experience reality in two different dimensions.  In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson defend part of their rejection of objectivism by claiming that metaphor is critical to human understanding and the creation of  “new meaning and new realities,” and no where is this more apparent to me than in a bilingual event. A common characteristic among bilingual writers and speakers is the ability to actually think in a particular language, rather than thinking in only one and merely translating into another.  In the latter case, I think word-for-word equivalence dominates, in part, the choices a translator makes.  But thinking in two languages equally (giving the apparent sensation of simultaneity)[21] demands the presence of not one cultural apparatus, but two.  By apparatus, I mean that each language is infused with its respective culture so that individual words, concepts, and overall sense are filtered through many layers of cultural identity. Van den Broeck and Lefevere (1979: 61-66) indirectly affirm this in their discussion of the translatability of a text in terms of cultural proximity between source and target languages. 

For the bilingual writer and speaker, a translation is not a question of repeating the original source text and the culture that shaped the language, but one of creating a separate awareness of the original reality in a different language, as well as in a different time and dimension.  It applies Lotman’s ideas about the semiosphere in redeemable ways. It is because we experience Tolstoy or Homer in English first that we accept the transparent translation as the original. We have an emotional attachment to first experiences and the language that expresses those experiences. This is at the heart of the disparaging adage that something is lost in translation.  I submit, however, that what is “lost” is more a cultural lapse than a linguistic compromise; it favors a parallel (narrative) reality, because utterances occurring in time cannot occupy the same space (Bahktin’s polyphony notwithstanding).  Besides, as Lefevere says “Language is not the problem.  Ideology and politics are” (14-26).  But polyphonic qualities are ubiquitous in literary texts because of the way metaphor allows for stacked images to be sounded together, as in music. It is impossible, therefore, to strive for purity in word-for-word equivalence, because such a proposition would be something of a linguistic clone, and that would require the same source, hence same language. You can eat a hot dog in Times Square, but not eat the same hot dog in Paris; you experience the flavor in different ways though the recipe is faithful.  Translation, by its very nature, occurs in a different language, further imprinted with a cultural identity, and while the very mention of this seems silly, it proves the indeterminacy of language; simultaneously, though, it proves the wondrous possibilities of it as well. 

In On Value Judgments in the Arts and Other Essays, Elder Olson writes:

            If they are not the right words, or we do not grasp them, we

do not grasp the poem. In another sense, they are the least

important element in the poem, for they do not determine the

character of anything else in the poem; on the contrary, they

are determined by everything else…except in so far as sound

and rhythm move us; we are moved by the things that the words

stand for. (Quoted by James Griffith in Adaptations as Imitations, 37).

 

In the case of Lorelei, I had to accept that fertility of meaning and cultural equivalence could exist parallel to the source text with all of its implications.  Saussure and Metz,[22] for example, could not help me because structural conceits in the form of their respective models imposed rigid systems that resisted parallel realities of meaning.  Instead, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Benveniste, for example, gave me an alternative. In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty refers to the meaning of language as “lateral,” which suggests that meaning intersects not only by juxtaposition with other words, but in the space between words (42). This is important because it unifies two fundamental attributes of my view of translation and adaptation as primary and generative processes, occurring in parallel space to the original. The idea is that meaning, as Merleau-Ponty goes on to say, is not limited by what is said, but by what is not said.  Bazin says something complementarily opposite in “The Evolution of the Language of the Cinema,” where the “image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it” (28).

Despite orientational and ontological metaphors, or those dealing with entity and substance that have general limitations in one specific language, Lakoff and Johnson claim that metaphors, nevertheless, can themselves exceed structural or conceptual boundaries by their (metaphorical) associations with other objects.  Add to this a concurrent system of (conceptual) metaphor in another language, and the possibilities of generating new meaning and new realities become exponential and self-perpetuating with each act of translation.  For me, then, the decision to translate Lorelei from Romanian to English was not an unconscious desire to challenge the authority of the author, or even to compete with the original text, as Venuti discusses in his essay on “The difference that translation makes: the translator’s unconscious” (Ricardi).  Rather, it was a chance to re-experience another dimension of Teodoreanu’s story in a different language or, as Walter Benjamin explains, to participate in the rebirth of the original into its next surviving generation.  I suspect I have at least this much in common with Cicero, St. Jerome, and Schleiermacher, who embraced translation as an opportunity to accept foreignness of a text as nutritive and generative, or with Deleuze, whose radical horizontality produces “permeability of all boundaries and barriers” (102, Lechte).  

To give psychoanalytical criticism its due, however, I will concede that regardless of whatever lurks in my subconscious, my bilingualism is always there: a robust rhizome, as Deleuze would have it, insinuating its mysterious force in everything I perceive and contemplate, conceptualize, and express.  Just as Beckett explored the notion that existence is indicated by perception, based on Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy esse est percipi, I regard translation as a process that initiates the re-creation, or re-existence of a text, though not in a subordinate position to the original, but rather parallel to it. To perceive the source language in its constitutive parts, which form the basis of meaning, is to re-perceive the meaning in the target language. As Benveniste reminds us, narrative, or meaning, is reliant upon enunciation, or the act, and énoncé (the statement made); both are equally primary and generative in the target language or text, and in the source language and text. In other words, even an inferior translation or free translation comprises characteristics of the original that survive, or re-exist.  To put it yet another way, translation—in terms of necessarily having to perceive the original—does so in the same primary, generative way that an original text is perceived by the original reader.  It is the reader, after all, who verifies the existence of the text by perceiving it, but it is not always the reader who determines the fidelity or fertility of a translation. Such judgments typically fall with critics and publishers, who seldom possess facility in both the source and target languages, yet these judgments influence the success (or lack thereof) of any given translation.  Similarly, film adaptations are not always by critics who have read the original novel. The original writer has little to do, finally, with the reader’s perception of the text as Genette and Barthes suggest in their collective acceptance of the death of the author.  Translators, however, are both readers and writers; they must resurrect the author, only to become both perceived and masked, as it were, by the idea of transparency that stresses word-for-word equivalence. However, when sense over word, or fertility over fidelity guides the enunciation process (in this case re-existence), the text—and translator—shares the same plane of perception; the translator recuperates the author by re-creating the author-text relationship, all the more when cultural equivalence or foreignness is preserved.

The task of translating the figuratively dense Lorelei took me into a world of signifiers and signifieds that not only defied a lexicographical equivalence in terms of volume, but defied to a greater degree the two-dimensional models many popular theories proposed. Such models are applied within a single language system, and not to bilingual events. Benveniste’s insight into semantics over sign proved critical because Teodoreanu’s metaphors could not be reduced to any one particular word.  In fact, Benveniste and Ricoeur, who elegantly defend the sentence as figure rather than the word as figure, justify the combined hermeneutics of translation/adaptation, specifically as regards Lorelei. Film adaptation was my response to a bilingual encounter with Ricoeur’s tension theory of metaphor “at the level of sentence”.  More importantly, though, Ricoeur’s quintessential grasp of tension theory extends both to the translation and adaptation processes as well. This explains the resistance of a standard formula for word for word approaches to translating poetry, for example. At the same time it elucidates the epiphora or displacement of semantics, in prose originals like Lorelei, into semantic units in English.   When Ricoeur says that “metaphor sets the scene before our eyes” (34), he is saying that there is sufficient tension in metaphor at the sentence level to energize its displacement by virtue of the figure as it extends to film. In addition, like Aristotle, Ricoeur is correct to claim that metaphor has the ability to “signify active reality. Thus film naturally responds to the process of adaptation as a creative and generative re-creation of reality. This meant that I would take Lorelei from a two-dimensional narrative model through a three-dimensional one, and eventually into the fourth (or greater) dimension of film. 

Robert Morris proposes “relations between image and language” as a preoccupation with fourth-dimension criticism that helps clarify my argument that bilingual events, as abstract spaces of adaptation present or re-create a parallel reality to an original text. The interliminal experiences bilinguals confront possess the same dynamic of Ricoeur’s tension theory.  According to Bergson’s ideas about duration, this tension is never resolved, but continuously predisposed to semantic and filmic innovation. Therefore, like Benjamin, I believe the task of the translator is procreative; it is qualitative, not quantitative.  Issues of fidelity, which imply sameness, are automatically disqualified because they attempt, as Venuti and others like Robinson point out, artistic and cultural fraud. There are exceptions, of course, in terms of legal or technical translations variously articulated by Mary Snell-Hornby and Andre Lefevre, for example, which rightfully require a word-for-word equivalence.  But in literature, in poetry, drama, and film, or philosophy, word-for-word equivalence must sometimes be set aside in favor of a more quantum approach, where waves can also be particles. I am, however, not impugning many stunning translations that achieve technical and artistic excellence especially where rhyme and meter are brilliantly recreated. I am rather suggesting that labels of fertility and fidelity are sometimes misapplied. Lucrative discourse becomes confounded in theory because of paralytic terms, like fidelity. So while Saussure allows for an endless play of signs, the functionality of his structural approach to language inhibits the procreative and generative possibilities of translation via a parallel dimension of existence and meaning; the relationship between signifiers and signifieds, though arbitrary in nature, is nevertheless part of the same linguistic chain. That is to say Saussure’s structural model may be useful in lexicographical equivalence (fidelity), since an equivalent translation can be just as arbitrary in the chain, but in terms of fertility, the process attending a bilingual event defies such reconciliation. The real difference between fidelity and fertility is the former is vertical (the paradigmatic axis) or concerned with systemic functions, while the latter emphasizes the horizontal (syntagmatic chain), and therefore is concerned with process.  Reconciliation of these two sets requires that they intersect periodically.

The easiest way to illustrate this example is to imagine source and target languages as a single zipper, with interlocking teeth on both sides. The distance between both sides is measured horizontally, that is, that area which displacement must overcome.  Each tooth, then, is a unit of equivalence, except that here and there are missing teeth (gaps) that confound the zipper and keep it from closing.  Lexicographical equivalence is beholden to a system, or langue, and determined to function in a particular way.  If the zipper is a system, then structure is critical. In the case of transparency as a systematic approach to domesticating a text, therefore, the theoretical concerns would be how to manipulate the teeth on both sides of the zipper in order for the zipper to function; parts of the system (zipper) must necessarily fit for the system to work. In transparency, then, the original lexicographical units are sometimes altered (for linguistic, political, social, religious reasons, or in the case of bad translations, simply misunderstood) in order to match the lexicographical target (the locking of the teeth). The transparent version thus corrupts the original in ways that only writers and speakers of both languages would understand. This disenfranchises the reader; the reader becomes literally zipped in by the illusion that he is reading the original author.  In my approach to translating Lorelei, I tempered Deleuze’s notion of radical horizontality with Leibniz’s idea of the fold, because it seemed most appropriate to the bilingual event; re-creating meaning in a parallel dimension is a more of a creative process consistent with parole.  Perhaps the greatest significance of drawing on the theorists I have chosen is that their ideas can be refined to a greater purpose when tested against an actual praxis.  Any good backyard mechanic knows that specific tools must correspond to the components they are designed to service.  Tools can also be used in combination, meaning that oftentimes more than one tool is necessary to initiate analysis and discourse. Furthermore, if one uses a 10mm wrench to remove a bolt, the same 10mm wrench will return the bolt to its proper place.  If not, the practical, like the theoretical tool, is not the right tool for the job. Ricoeur’s plurality, in a theoretical sense, means that while the size of the bolt head may vary from 10mm to ½ inch, the thread size—the part that screws into something else, may indeed stay the same. In other words, the best theoretical tools lie in their application, but should not alter the relationship of the part to the whole. Theory is a way of understanding how things are put together, without interfering with what holds them together. Therefore fidelity and fertility should be more concerned with the fit of the thread, and not merely the size of the head.

Lorelei

Ionel Teodoreanu’s Lorelei is a novel framed, or perhaps better put, contained in a poem that divides the story into 7 parts (6 are defined by lines from the poem, one by a separate heading). What appeared first to me as a clever convention became a revelation by the fifth reading; the novel seemed in some ways an