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 adaptation of the poem, since the poem never appears in its entire form, except in the table of contents as headings.  One of Teodoreanu’s more severe critics, G. Calinescu, echoes a particular disaffection for Teodoreanu’s poetic-prose style expressed by many of the writer’s contemporaries.  While it is generally agreed that Teodoreanu’s greatest talent as a poet-writer was his ability to capture in lyrical detail the visceral experiences of childhood, it is equally believed that his imagistic prose became tiresome and detrimental to his writing at a point in each novel, with the exception of La Medeleni. Dinu Pillat tells us that Teodoreanu was fond of Paul Verlaine, Marcel Proust, Camille Claudel, Rudyard Kipling, and through G. Lesnea’s translations, Russian poet Sergei Esenin (195), but this is no surprise. Collectively, the writers embody imagistic and symbolist prose styles as well as an intimate preoccupation with the lyricism of youth, and in the specific case of Verlaine, a strong musical quality as well.  In the opening passage of Lorelei, Teodoreanu makes a reference to the “verses of Francis Jammes” in an imagistic echo to them; Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) adapted some of Jammes’ poetry to music (Parfois, je suis triste) because, like the other symbolist poets, such as Mallarmé, his lyrical images possess a synaesthesic musicality; his text lent itself to music. But Calinescu, well aware of Teodoreanu’s tendency to use poetry in his prose, remains an unforgiving critic and writes:

Cu tot aspectul lor lyric, poemele prezintă interes psihologic,

tocmai prin puterea de a fixa o experienţă pe care toţi o pierd.

Voluptăţile şi melancoliiele creşterii, inocenţele carnale, tulburările

ivirii unei vieţi sufleteşti mai complexă, în general faza de nelămurit

fizic şi psihic, acestea sînt temele statornice.  (751)

                       

With all their lyrical aspect, the poems present a psychological interest,

exactly through their power to fix an experience that everyone loses.

The voluptuousness and melancholy of growing up, the carnal innocence,

the troubling appearances of a more complex spiritual life, in general, the

phase when the psychological and physical are not explained, these are

(Teodoreanu’s) steadfast themes (trans. mine).

 

Teodoreanu addressed his critics in the preface to his novel Arca lui Noe through a dialogue between writer G. Ibrăileanu, a close friend, and himself:

Domnule Teodoreanu, domnule Teodoreanu, de ce atîtea flori,atîţia

zarzări, atîţia curcubee, atîtea fructe, în loc să te ocupi de oameni şi

de viaţă? Fă-mi plăcerea, domnule Teodoreanu, şi scrie-mi un roman

inofensiv, fără stil, fără frumuseţa mizerabilă, neglijent, în goana mare…(756)

 

Mr. Teodoreanu, Mr. Teodoreanu, why so many flowers, why so many

laments, so many rainbows, so many fruits, instead of occupying yourself

with people and life?  Do me the pleasure, Mr. Teodoreanu, and write a

novel that is inoffensive, without style, without miserable beauty, negligent,

in a hurry…(trans. mine).

 

(Teodoreanu’s response)

Aşeatptă, domnule Ibrăileanu. Sunt prea tînăr pentru a renunţa la talentul

meu, la acest involuntar abuz. Romancierii care au norocul să nu fie poeţi,

nici pictori ai vorbei, sunt simplu fără effort şi fără sacrificiu, directi ca o

cădere fără rezistenţă. Mîna lor e goală, fiindcă n-au inele.

 

Wait, Mr. Ibrăileanu. I am too young to renounce my talent to this involuntary

abuse. Novelists, who have the luck not to be poets, or painters of words,

are simply without effort and without sacrifice, directions, like a fall without

resistance. Their hand is empty because they have no rings (trans. mine).

 

In other words, no zero-degree writing for Teodoreanu.

Nicolae Ciobanu, writing in a 1970 edition of Ionel Teodoreanu, Viata şi Opera, acknowledges Calinescu’s observation that Teodoreanu “ar fi un autor care apare de la bun început incapabil de-a se proiecta în afară” “would be an author who appears from the start incapable of projecting himself outward” (my translation) in his discussion of Teodoreanu’s other works, but he quickly embraces the challenge to defend Lorelei as a remarkable novel that managed to flower late, but resplendently.  He goes on to say that Lorelei is a “budding branch broken from the rich wreath of the La Medeleni trilogy” (205) and continues to affirm, that with the exception of the Medeleni masterpiece, Lorelei is the only other work in which we “acutely” feel how “Inspiraţie prozatorului­-poet atinge tonalităţi lirice de mare tensiune, în măsură să suplinească, într-un fel, avantajele analizei detaşate şi ale examenului psilogic lucid condus” (206). The inspiration of the prose-poet touches a lyrical tone with such great tension that it supplies, in a way, the advantage of detached analysis and psychological examination lucidly conducted (trans. mine).

Interestingly, for me, at this point in my consideration of Calinescu’s criticism and the post-romantic writers that influenced Teodoreanu, I realized that a third component in my musical analogy of language and translation emerged: the writer as instrumentalist. In terms of Saussure’s langue and parole, Calinescu seems concerned with the overall system of Teodoreanu’s language, rather than the process of making meaning, or as Eisenstein would call it “the metaphor of performance.”  The density of Teodoreanu’s imagery is problematic because, structurally, the images are created in a linear progression; but that is not how the images are conceptualized.

To revert to music, here a non-Baktinian polyphony, a single melody line unfolds linearly, much like syntax. But notes have an added feature; they can be sounded together in the same place and at the same time, unlike language. Even though syntactically Teodoreanu’s prose, with its relentless imagery, consumes the syntax, the resulting image we apprehend as readers is not systemic; it is a composite image, or what we call a concept or, as Saussure would call it, a “psychological imprint” of the sign or signs.  Accordingly, Calinescu seems to make much of composite images juxtaposed together in a non-linear way, as if he objects to the way Teodoreanu played the notes. If some languages are tubas, better suited for a particular kind of sound, the very instrument can be played also in a way that foreignizes what tuba audiences might expect. In a rather defiant way, Teodoreanu was using the language in such a fashion as to make it inconsistent or unusual compared to that of other classical Romanian writers. He was, as Ricoeur might agree, impertinent. For example, an artist like Yo-Yo Man can do with the cello what an eighth-grade orchestra student or even a symphony–trained cellist cannot. Thus Teodoreanu arranged his prose with a kind of harmony and rhythm of words that literally “foreignized” what Romanian critics would have preferred a much more homogenized, or “domesticated” performance.  He disrupted the arbitrary nature of language by creating lyrically specific correspondences along the horizontal expanse of words, including not only the spaces between them, but above and below, as in a triad (three notes) or a chord. The first line of the poem and title of the first part of Lorelei reads, “Pe harfă răsturnată a ierburilor tale, Vară…”  Though the words follow a system of order — indifferent of the source and target language — the psychological impression does not; readers do not see first a harp, then see it overturned, then re-create the first harp as one made of grass, and then associate the harp with summer.  This very same image is detached from the text, yet involved with it. From a translator’s standpoint one could ponder the way the syntactical image functions in the larger arbitrary chain of language, but it would not contribute to process of meaning Teodoreanu initiates. Here it is useful to recall Deleuze’s discussion of the movement-image in Cinema 1, where he engages Henri Bergson’s thesis on the movement-image, and the time-image relative to the cinematographic image. Teodoreanu’s language—especially obvious in the translation and adaptation process—harks to Deleuze’s comparison of film directors to “painters, architects and musicians,” who “think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts.”  Movement occurs in the physical reality, image in psychic reality. This is essential to my approach to translating and adapting Teodoreanu’s imagistic prose, because Bergson (says Deleuze), is distinguishing movement from space, where space is past, or that which is covered, and movement is present, “the act of covering.”  The creative enterprise of writing images, as Teodoreanu and his mentors like Mallarmé and Verlaine did, seems to involve projecting prose in such a way as to invent something that was not (physically) experienced, or to use an experience to shape the language in order to recreate the event.  For example, Proust, and Joyce used memory as time-images, or individual frames that, separately, contained various elements bound to that particular moment.  But the idea of time can be conveyed by what Deleuze calls reconstitution only when succession is insinuated. Think of time-lapse photography, which functions by virtue of juxtaposition. Where juxtaposition takes place, movement is recreated, yet because it is reproduced, it is at best an illusion. This is the magic of cinema; the illusion of something taking place in space and time that takes it out of the realm of reality. Yet because it possesses space and time, we are willing to suspend belief and accept a stream of events as actually unfolding in our own reality. The point is that imagistic prose, compound metaphors, and similes juxtaposed at a lexicographical or syntactical level suggest the same kind of aesthetic quality as film: a succession of composites.  Time is recaptured by way of stringing composite frames together that make the styles of Joyce, Proust, and Dickens so becoming to film. 

A literal translation of Lorelei from Romanian into English makes for a sprawling version of the original, because of the exponential attributes of Teodoreanu’s imagistic and metaphorical style. The end result, however, still lends itself to a film adaptation precisely because of the movement-image and time-image quality of the figurative prose.  Here, then, is the entire poem that frames Lorelei as it is structured in the table of contents, appearing at the end of the novel:

                                    Partea întîia

            “Pe harfă răsturnată a ierburilor tale, Vară…”

                                    Partea a doua

            “…Trupul şi sufletul meu sînt începutul unui

                        mare cîntec…”

                                    Partea a treia

            “…Şi tremurul mînii care-l caută”                               

Partea a patra

                                    Prietenul Nathan* (not part of the poem)

                                    Partea a cincea

            “Anii mei tineri au sunat a cîntec…”

                                    Partea a şasea

            “…Dar am trecut pe lîngă el cu dragostea de

                        mînă…”

                                    Partea a şaptea

            “…Şi am rămas cu mîna întinsa ca a regelui

                        Lear”.

                                    Part one

            “On the overturned harp of your grasses, Summer…”

                                    Part two

“My body and soul are the beginning of a

great song…”

                        Part three      

“…and the hand’s tremor that seeks it”

                                    Part four (not part of the poem)

The Friend, Nathan

                                    Part five

“My young years sounded like a song…”

                                    Part six

“…But I passed by it holding love by the

hand…”

                                    Part seven

“…And I was left with hand outstretched as that

of King Lear.”

            Part one begins with a wonderful scene at a train depot where Lucica Novleanu, known variously throughout the novel as Cica, Luli, Luli-boy, Lucica, and Lorelei, meets Catul (Tani) Bogdan for the first time. She is 14, traveling with her best friend Gabriela, who is 18. Catul Bogdan is 37.  Teodoreanu says,  “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).  “That’s how they pass, in small letters, the verses of Francis Jammes, in a small gallop, taking towards the sweetest sky, and in the summery perfume of sweet clover, lavender, mint and chamomile the names of girls from another time.”  It is a small station, and only a three-minute stop. Yet Teodoreanu describes in lyrical detail, the arrival of a “vast” carriage, drawn by two scraggly horses, bringing Luli, Gabriela, a large worn suitcase “cinched” with rope, all manner of parcels packed, wrapped, and tied like in a pathetic way, and a small cage of chicks with “supra-soprano voices of swallows chirping under the eaves.”   The girls are on their way to the family vineyard where Gabriela will help Luli study for her examinations. Just as she prepares to board the train, the girl with the “merry laugh” trips and falls, spilling a basket of black cherries in front of the train. “Bombate şi elastice, hultoanele se risipiră ca o turmă de mînji sălbatece intr-o depărtare văzute de sus.” (8). Plump and elastic the pigeons scattered like a herd of wild colts seen from a distance up above (trans. mine). 

Catul Bogdan is on his way to proctor the examination Luli will take, though they have not met.

The first major decision I had to make as an adapter of a translated text concerned the structure of the script.  The mise-en-scène was receptive to Teodoreanu’s rich detail faithful to the scene description and action. Relying on Tolstoy’s intuition about film, as artistically capable of overcoming “the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed” so that the cinematic rendering is “closer to life” (Griffith, 16), I “heard” Teodoreanu’s multi-layered figurative passages as an MP3 audio file, within the full orchestral version. I eliminated truncated segments that would not affect the overall quality of the dominant and critical images. 

I then strove to isolate the most important dialogue according to the same MP3 rule; following Benjamin, Venuti, and Schleiermacher, I let foreignness prevail like the metaphor it is.  I did, however, opt for a stylistic innovation in creating a narrator to allow the spectator to share the same plane with both Teodoreanu and his characters: the disembodied voice is revealed to the readers of the script on the first page, because of the character name.  However, viewers of the film would have to wait until later to realize the narrator is that of Catul Bogdan’s deceased mother, with whom he has an intense emotional and psychological bond. I defend this as an abstract juxtaposition recuperated from the mind of Catul Bogdan.  The literary tense shifts so illusive to film, I solve by using flashbacks, and in the denouement, I add sparse dialogue, and a short dream sequence to preserve the legend-like component of the story.  In a way, I divide the whole praxis over the various three-model systems available to both translations and adaptations, vindicated, I believe, by an interdisciplinary gestalt. The letters and poetry that appear throughout the novel are as faithful to the original as possible, while I expand key instances of montage by brief, artistic special effects. To the best of my judgment, whatever I heard in terms of “hearing as” and saw in terms of “seeing as” during the five readings of Lorelei, over many years of an evolving semiosphere, contiguous with language, culture, and identity, I was finally able to read as the film that emerged.

 

CHAPTER 2
LORELEI

Super: “upon the overturned harp of your grass, summer…”

EXT. TRAIN STATION, GALATI, ROMANIA -- DAY

A train comes to a lazy stop in a small station. A sullen CATUL BOGDAN leans out the open window of a first-class compartment, as he lights a new cigarette from the present cigarette. He is 37 years old, has a handsome youthful face, but grey hair combed straight back. A vast rustic carriage enters at the back of the depot. An OLD MAN with an ostentatious mustache snaps the reigns. He wears peasant attire. Two raggedy horses shake their heads, jingling the bells around their necks. Two burly dogs lumber alongside, burrs sticking to their fur, and their long rosy tongues dangle as they pant, except when they snap occasionally at a bothersome fly. The train comes to a full stop, and steam shoots out along the bottom.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER (V.O.)[1]

...this is how they pass, like the verses

of Francis Jammes,[2] lower-case letters in

a small cantor, carrying the names of girls

from another time on the summer fragrance

of linden flowers, sweet clover, lavender

and mint leaves up to the sweetest sky.

(Train WHISTLE) A three-minute[3] stop, only

three, but look what happened on that sunny

June day...

Sparrows are chirping with the blend of a girl's voice. LUCICA is an uncommonly attractive girl of fourteen, and she laughs with fresh white teeth. She has thick, long, dark curly hair. She is walking with GABRIELA, similar in height and shape to Lucica, but 18 years old, looking more mature and reserved. They are wearing flaxen dresses and woven straw hats floating in the sun like lotus flowers on the water. They are carefree and animated in their movements, smiling and talking as they head toward the ticket counter. Gabriela is cradling a bouquet of multi-colored wild flowers in her arms. Lucica is fastening the hat ribbon under her chin, as the wind makes the brim luff.

Suddenly an avalanche of packages, parcels, and bundles tumble from the coach, each one tied pathetically. As they hit the ground they scatter a crowd of pigeons that had been milling about. On top of the coach are more luggages and a litter of baby chicks crowded into a small cage. The old man dismounts, thrusts the whip handle into the top of his boot, and lowers down a mighty leather suitcase cinched with rope. Gabriela approaches and helps gather the fallen items. Lucica is hurrying along with the tickets. Baby birds peep wildly from the eaves of the station roof. The two dogs crawl in the shade under the carriage. DADAIE emerges from the coach. She is a tallish woman from the mountains of Bistriţa, with handsome features still evident in her older age. She is Lucica’s self-appointed nanny, and despite her sharp gaze Dadaie is devoted to Lucica. She begins taking up some of the packages and carrying them toward the train. The old man lugs the suitcase, and Lucica is hurrying along with the tickets, mindful of her hat. She carries a basket of dark cherries.

As they all rush toward the train, Lucica suddenly stumbles, and the cherries spill out in front of the train. The horses shake their heads, jingling the bells around their neck. Catul Bogdan watches intensely.

 

LUCICA

Oh, my goodness!

Gabriela urges her up and onward to the train steps.

GABRIELA

Come along, Luli, come on, the train

is leaving.

Lucica hesitates, leaning first towards the cherries, then the train like a balance. The sound of the shrill train whistle startles her, and Gabriela rushes her up the train steps. Two tears stream down Lucica's face as she boards the train. One of the raggedy horses turns his head toward the train, jingling the bells, while Catul Bogdan lights another cigarette. His eyes flash sudden emotion.

Bogdan's mother (v.o.)

A lied by Schumann stirs you like[4] the

presence of love at 18 without making

you feel the need to hold it tightly

in your arms, and have it only for

yourself, to say "you,” face to face,

breathing it into you possessively.

That is how Gabriela felt when she was

with Lucica, overcome by a refreshing

and contemplative delight that seduced

her, without giving her the impulse to

seduce.

 

When Gabriela had first seen her,

Lucica was only five...[5]

Flashback

INT. GABRIELA'S HOUSE GALATI, ROMANIA - DAY

The young Gabriela is a pretty child with braids, around nine years old. Her parents, Mr. NEI, a magistrate, and Mrs. NEI are middle-aged, middle-class types, very proper and respectable in their appearance and behavior. They are entertaining their new neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. NOVLEANU and their daughter, Lucica, five years old. The young Lucica is thin and pale. Lucica's mother is very striking in her youthful appearance, very trim with blond hair and blue eyes; her father, an attorney, is mild-mannered, very attentive, and also has blue eyes. It is apparent that he and his wife are lovingly disposed to one another.

MR. NEI

(nudging Gabriela toward Lucica)

Gabriela, you're going to have a new

friend. Be nice to her.

Gabriela looks nervously at Lucica, then cranes her neck to look back at her father, who is pushing her onward. The adults are polite but anxious; Lucica steps in closer toward Gabriela.

YOUNG LUCICA

(aloof)

So[6] who are you?

YOUNG GABRIELA

(restrained)

Gabriela Nei.

Mr. Novleanu coaxes Lucica from behind.

   Mr. Novleanu

Now be polite and tell her your name.

Lucica shakes her head no like a young colt whinnying defiantly, her dense curls unfurling. Gabriela peers at her. Lucica stares back at Gabriela with big dark eyes. Gabriela looks back over her shoulder at her father.

Mr. NOVLEANU (CONT'D)

(smiling broadly)

Her name is Lucica, but we call her

Cica. She's a little--wild, you know.

Gabriela is displeased. Lucica is haughty, her large expressive eyes defy Gabriela, who evaluates Lucica from head to foot, observing her scraped knees and drooping socks.

Mr. Nei

(graciously)

Come, Gabriela, show the little girl

your toys.

Gabriela dutifully takes Lucica by the hand, but Lucica's hand slips out quickly. Gabriela does a double take of her hand, as though bewildered at how quick her new friend is. Lucica flashes her big dark eyes, and almost startles Gabriela.

Young lucica

So, be my horsie.[7]

Gabriela's expression shifts from restraint to desperation, then restraint again as she complies obediently. Before she realizes, Lucica leaps on to her back, undaunted that she nearly knocks Gabriela over by surprise.

YouNG LUCICA (CONT'D)

So, you have dolls?

Lucica stares boldly as she clings piggyback to Gabriela, who squints her eyes as though in pain.

INT. YOUNG GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- MOMENTS LATER

The door swings open abruptly. Lucica has one arm encircled about Gabriela's neck, and seizes the braids of her companion with the other hand. Numerous dolls are neatly arranged, to the delight of Lucica's widening eyes.

Lucica scrambles down and grabs Gabriela by the arm.

Young gabriela

(pointing to the dolls,

and shushing Lucica

with her finger)

Shh! They are all in a deep sleep.

They have been bewitched.

For a moment Lucica looks at Gabriela with polite indifference and then bolts. Abruptly she gathers all the dolls together, trounces to the middle of the room and drops to the floor.

YouNG LUCICA

(seriously)

There's a war on, you know?

Lucica begins military maneuvers with the dolls to the horror of Gabriela, who is further startled when Lucica imitates the sound of a trumpet.

INT. NEI KITCHEN -- MOMENTS LATER

Gabriela rushes to her mother who is preparing a tray of hors d'oeuvre and has anticipated the crisis.

Mrs. Nei

(tenderly)

There, there, no use getting upset.

YouNG GABRIELA

(exasperated)

But, mama, you should see her, she's

like a winter cricket, jumping and

sticking to me, pulling my braids--

MrS. NEI

She'll grow on you soon enough, I

suspect.

 

YOUNG GABRIELA

She's doing horrible things to my

dolls!

Gabriela begins to cry.

MRS. NEI

(apologetically)

They've bought the house next door.

INT. YOUNG GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- MOMENTS LATER

Gabriela is horrified to see Lucica surrounded by dolls in chaos.

YOUNG LUCICA

(nonplussed)

So, do you have a doctor?

Gabriela slowly shakes her head in shock. Lucica springs to her feet and walks over to Gabriela, and casts a look over her shoulder at the mayhem.

YOUNG LUCICA (CONT'D)

(resolved)

Well, they're ready for burial, then.

EXT. NEI YARD NEXT DAY -- MORNING

Young Lucica hurries to the back door and slips inside without knocking. Two dogs wag their tails as she passes.

INT. NEI KITCHEN -- continuous

Young Gabriela is prattling in the kitchen. There is food cooking on the stove, vegetables strewn about on the table. She is surprised to see Lucica enter quickly and place a doll made up like a bride into Gabriela's arms.

YOUNG LUCICA

(awkwardly)

So, don't cry anymore about the war.

Gabriela is at a loss for words. Lucica runs out the same way she came in, knocking over a milk can by the door, and provoking the dogs outside to bark.

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. YOUNG GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- MONTHS LATER

Gabriela is reading from a book to a wide-eyed Lucica. Both of them are sitting on the bed. Their appearance and rapport suggests a passage of time, and a tender, evolving friendship.

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. YOUNG GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- MONTHS LATER

Gabriela is lying on her stomach across her bed, reading from another book to Lucica, who is lying on her back on the floor, with her feet on the edge of the bed. The girls are a little older in their appearance. Lucica is studying her fingers as she holds her hands at length, and Gabriela tickles her foot. They both laugh and reveal a growing camaraderie.

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. YOUNG GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- MONTHS LATER

Gabriela is alone in her room reading a book. Her window is open, and suddenly she is distracted from her reading by the sound of someone at her window outside. She lays the book down and moves toward the window, but before she has a chance to look out, a small hand tosses a storybook through the window.

INT. YOUNG GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- LATER

Gabriela is sitting in a chair near the open window. She is reading out loud from the book that came through the window. A small hand reaches to the sill from the outside, and deposits a stone, and moments later, a linden flower. Gabriela smiles as she reads.

EXT. NEI YARD NEXT DAY -- AFTERNOON

Gabriela is playing with a doll in the garden. Out of nowhere a mud ball splashes nearby. Gabriela pauses, sighs, then smiles and tosses the doll in the air, yelling.

YOUNG GABRIELA

Medic! Medic!

Lucica appears with a small shovel, and begins digging a hole. Gabriela protests for a moment, then relents as she looks at the quixotic Lucica with thick braids, smudged cheeks, scuffed knees and slouched socks.

INT. YOUNG GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- EVENING

Gabriela is sitting on the floor by the window. It is obvious she is waiting for something. Moments later Lucica's hand reaches the sill, again from the outside, and leaves a butterfly. Gabriela catches Lucica's hand before she withdraws it, and presses candy into her palm.

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. YOUNG GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- 3 YEARS LATER

Gabriela is writing at her desk. On the window sill are a small piece of candy and a piece of pastry. Within moments, Lucica's hand reaches in from the outside, and sets down a pine cone and a butterfly. Seconds later she retrieves the candy. Gabriela laughs, sets down her pen, and goes over to the window, staring at the butterfly, but not touching it. She softly blows on it, and it flies away. Then she takes the pine cone and sets it on a shelf with various objects from Lucica--rocks, sticks, bottle caps.

INT. YOUNG GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- NIGHT

Gabriela is reading, and suddenly the door opens and Lucica rushes in with both hands cupped together.

YOUNG GABRIELA

(curious)

What is it? What have you got

there?

YOUNG LUCICA

Shh!

Lucica looks around then crawls under the bed. Gabriela is slightly astonished, then shakes her head and follows behind.

YOUNG LUCICA (CONT'D)

Shh! Look.

Lucica shakes her hands, still cupped together, and then opens them slowly. Gabriela peers closer and sees fireflies lighting up in Lucica's palms. Close up of fireflies' light.

EXT. DARK SKY -- NIGHT

Stars twinkling. Sound of crickets chirping.

DISSOLVE TO:

EXT. NEI YARD three YEARS LATER -- MORNING

Dew sparkles on linden flowers. The garden has no holes dug up, and the milk can is standing secure in its place. There are no dolls strewn about.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER (V.O.)

In the seven years that passed since

she had moved next door, Lucica

Novleanu became less of a cyclone,

tamed by the stories Gabriela read

to her. She would listen for hours,

and soon Gabriela could no longer

even think of stories without

imagining her young friend listening,

with her chin collected in her small

hand.

 

Out in the yard Gabriela would hear

her singing and laughing, talking

with trees and rocks, dogs and cats,

engaging in every kind of skirmish

from which she did not emerge less

scathed than Gabriela's dolls. Her

knees, elbows, and forehead from

bumps to scrapes bore signs of her

heroism.

EXT. STREET IN FRONT OF NEI AND NOVLEANU HOUSES -- MORNING

Children are walking to school. Lucica enters the Nei yard and walks over to Gabriela's window. She is still robust in her appearance, with a beret slouched over one ear.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER (V.O.)(CONT'D)

At 16, Gabriela was now a young lady

with admirers. Lucica was only in

grade six, a Little Red Riding Hood

with rosy cheeks, splendid eyes, and

a nose as impertinent as her answers.

EXT. SCHOOLGROUNDS -- MOMENTS LATER

A group of Gabriela's friends are watching as Gabriela and Lucica approach. Lucica leaves her and heads towards the door, and Gabriela goes on to her friends.

BOGDAN’S MOTHER (V.O.)(CONT’D)                                                 Gabriela called her young friend                                                 “Luli-boy" when she began studying                                             English, and everyone was aware of the                                    friendship that was growing between them.

First girl

What could you possibly have in common

with that devil child, Gabriela?

Second girl

Really! She seems more like an army

brat than the daughter of a magistrate.

Third girl

Have you seen her with swords? And--and

the way she plays? Anyone who gets near

her leaves with a scar!

yOUNG GABRIELA

Oh, don't be so unkind. She's quite

well-behaved when she's with me.

She talks--

FIRST GIRL

Be serious, Gabriela, she's just a

child. What can she talk about?

War? Bugs?

YOUNG GABRIELA

You don't know her as I do.

Lucica is across the schoolyard, burrowing through groups of elementary students. She looks back over her shoulder at Gabriela, then shakes her head full of long curls like a pony and bolts off.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER (v.o.)

It's true, no one knew Lucica Novleanu

the way that Gabriela did. And it didn't

seem to matter that Gabriela's peers

judged her foolish for her bond with the

school tom-boy. What did matter was the

way Lucica's eyes opened with fire and

gravity the way they first did when

Gabriela would tell her stories. It was

as if she were two beings: one living on

the exterior, passionate and childlike,

talkative and aggressive, restless,

and another that listened to Gabriela's

transmissions with a kind of

premature concentration in her

eyes.

CUT TO:

INT. GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- EVENING

Lucica enters quietly and assumes her place on the floor beside the window, leaning against the wall. Gabriela is at her studies, spying Lucica out of the corner of her eye, smiling askance. Lucica watches her with great concentration, and then throws her head back and gazes upward, as though removed a million miles away.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER (V.O.)(CONT’D)

To Gabriela, Lucica was like the

starlight shining from the same place

in the sky, night after night. Here

she sat on the floor against the wall,

and yet she originated from

somewhere far away.

YOUNG GABRIELA

What are you thinking about, Luli-boy?

YOUNG LUCICA

You know...just...just far away,

just like that.                                             

 

CUT TO:

EXT. NEI YARD -- CONTINUOUS

Gabriela and Lucica are sitting in the grass, back to back, talking and listening to one another, nodding, rubbing the backs of their head together.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER (v.O.)

Lucica was now completely assumed into

Gabriela’s intimacy; she was, as she

had long since been, an ardent listener.

Gabriela gave endless lectures about her

studies, from Dumas' Musketeers and

beyond, through Loti, Farrere and

Turgenev, all the way to Dostoevsky. And

              Gabriela thought to herself how Lucica's

small frame and the names of Dostoevsky's

              characters in her mouth gave the

impression of ants carrying huge strands

of straw with great seriousness.

Lucica is reciting Russian names back to Gabriela.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER (V.O.) (con't)

One spring morning, Luli-boy disappeared.

INT. GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- EVENING

Lucica enters in her usual fashion. Gabriela looks curious.

YOUNG GABRIELA

Why didn't you come last night?

YOUNG LUCICA

I had other business.

EXT. NEI YARD -- NEXT EVENING

Gabriela is looking for Lucica. She is about to give up when suddenly she spies her up on the roof.

YOUNG GABRIELA

What are you doing up there, Luli-boy?

YOUNG LUCICA

Shh!

Gabriela watches as Lucica climbs down. Lucica then whispers something in Gabriela's ear. Gabriela nods, and then casts a glance to the evening sky.

YOUNG LUCICA (CONT'D)

(whispering out loud)

I can see my own hand out there,

stretching out, but I can't reach it.

CUT TO:

EXT. TRAIN STATION - GALATI -- MORNING

People are milling around, departing and arriving. Gabriela is saying good-bye to her parents, looking around as though expecting someone else.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER (V.O)

When the hour of separation came

Lucica was still in grade school.

Gabriela had graduated, and her

father obtained a position as

attorney with the National Bank of

Bucharest. In the moment of flight

toward life, Lucica was the empty

chick left in the nest. Gabriela

was off to college, leaving her

childhood home, her friends,

and Luli-boy. If Lucica was

feeling the slightest heartache

at being left behind, it was

not apparent as she helped

Gabriela pack her belongings.

But at the station, Lucica was

nowhere in sight.  

INT. SECOND CLASS COMPARTMENT -- continuous

Gabriela struggles to open the window and notices Lucica across the tracks, crying, staring at the train, as it begins pulling out of the station. Suddenly Lucica starts running alongside the train. Quickly Lucica throws a flat package through the train window. Gabriela laughs with mixed emotion.

YOUNG GABRIELA

(smiling with tears in her eyes)

Be careful the train doesn't run

you over!

Lucica shakes her head and sticks out her tongue.

YOUNG GABRIELA (CONT'D)

(waving, and shaking her

head, she says to herself)

I didn't even have time to kiss

you goodbye.

Gabriela opens the package. It is a novel by Catul Bogdan. She turns to a page and reads out loud.

YOUNG GABRIELA (CONT'D)

"A woman would never cut her lashes...

her power is in her silence, her

mystery is in what she doesn't say."

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. GABRIELA'S APARTMENT BUCHAREST FOUR YEARS LATER -- AFTERNOON

Gabriela, now grown up, is packing a few boxes. She is clearly in the process of moving, and indicates she has finished her university studies as she looks over her diploma, which she carefully places in one of the boxes. As she sorts through a few books, she comes across the one Lucica had tossed through the train window when she left. She runs her hand over the cover, and smiles.

INT. SECOND CLASS COMPARTMENT -- MORNING

Gabriela is thoughtful, smiling to herself.

FLASHBACK

Ext. TrAIN STATION, GALATI, ROMANIA -- DAY

Gabriela sees Lucica through the window, alone and crying.

Flashforward

Ext. TrAIN STATION, GALATI, ROMANIA -- DAY

Gabriela moves through the crowd, searching the faces. She sees a grown up Lucica, and is astonished.

GABRIELA

(softly)

Luli...

Lucica opens her arms, but Gabriela is still overcome.

LuCICA

I'm so happy to see you again, Gabico.

Gabriela and Lucica embrace.

GABRIELA

(with emotion)

Why, you're all grown-up. I scarcely

recognize you, except for the hair,

and those eyes of yours.

Lucica cocks her head, looks down, and then up again, smiling at Gabriela.

GABRIELA (CONT'D)

Why do I feel like you're the one

coming home from some mysterious

journey.

Lucica smiles quizzically, subtly shrugging her shoulders.

GABRIELA (CONT'D)

I guess I can't call you Luli-boy

anymore. Just look at you!

INT. CARRIAGE -- LATER

The two young women are sitting next to each other, just arrived at Lucica's home. It is the same house. Gabriela observes Lucica in silence. Lucica is aware she is being studied.  Her expression changes to a half smile, she is self-conscious, enigmatic.

GABRIELA

(confessing)

After I had left you behind, all

those wonderful childhood memories

with you began to slip away from me.

All those years together with you—

you were like an amulet I wore

around my neck, sharing my life.

I made you share my age with me.

LUCICA

And now?

GABRIELA

Age is an ocean between us, and yet

you are like a small point on the

horizon, barely visible.

LUCICA

My mother and father are very happy

you agreed to stay with us. It will

be wonderful, I mean, hardly anything

has changed since you left.

GABRIELA

Oh, but you have changed.

LUCICA

Have I?

The driver unloads the luggage, and opens the doors, interrupting the moment. Lucica and Gabriela exit the coach and look at the house.

GABRIELA

I can't believe it!

LUCICA

I know, it's not Bucharest!

GABRIELA

Don't make jokes, Luli. I shall

have to make enormous

adjustments. I've been on my own,

you know. I feel like a little

girl coming back home.

Lucica lowers her chin and raises her eyes to Gabriela, with a serious look.

LUCICA

So, be my horsie?

They burst out laughing and collide into each other.

EXT. NOVLEANU YARD -- EVENING

Gabriela and Lucica are sitting on the back steps.

GABRIELA

(in a confiding tone)

His name is Matei. I'm afraid he is

in love with me.

LUCICA

What's wrong with that?

Gabriela is irritated. She fidgets with her fingers. Lucica is playing with a twig.

GABRIELA

I feel sorry for him, that's all.

I mean, we do everything together—

go to the theatre, to dinner, tennis,

concerts--he's a wonderful companion.

LUCICA

There you are.  And is he handsome?

GABRIELA

Yes, yes, I suppose he his. And he's--

LUCICA

What?

  GABRIELA

(laughing, a little embarrassed)

I keep forgetting you're younger

than I am!

Lucica smiles and looks away.

GABRIELA

Oh, I don't know. It's hard to explain.

When we are together, everything is so

comfortable. When we are apart, it's as

though I am simply not with him--do you

know what I mean? 

Lucica smiles, and shakes her head no.

GABRIELA

Look at you and me.  We can talk about

anything, no? I feel so close to you—

I always have, you know that.

LUCICA

(tinge of emotion)

I didn't think you'd ever forgive me

for ruining your dolls. What a horrible

creature I was.

GABRIELA

(reflecting)

I admit I was upset. But you weren't

horrible, Luli, you were--wonderful!

So alive, so intimate with life.

Lucica's expression changes into subtle self-reproach.

LUCICA

You knew how to calm my spirit, Gabico.

How I loved listening to you read to me,

and tell me things, how I envied you.

GABRIELA

It's true, I figured out how to tame you,

but you didn't envy me, silly girl. You

needed me.

Lucica is embarrassed. She changes the subject by pointing to something.

LUCICA

Look--did you see it?

GABRIELA

See what?

LUCICA

A firefly.

Gabriela shakes her head.

GABRIELA

I confide so many things in you, and

yet you are so secretive, so like

the little girl you were, full of need

and longing, and so distant.

LUCICA

What shall I tell you about myself,

Gabico, I'm a girl like all girls.

Nothing interesting.

Lucica abruptly goes inside.

GABRIELA

She must be in love.

Gabriela walks around the yard, as though looking for something.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER (V.O.)

Gabriela had never felt such a profound

aspiration toward this obscure splendor

of love, as this time with Lucica. She

was so intrigued with the thought of

Lucica being in love that she sought in

her enigmatic young friend another veil

of St. Veronica, with the image of an

unknown man impressed upon it. 

INT. LUCICA'S BEDROOM -- MOMENTS LATER

Gabriela enters mysteriously, her hands cupped in front of her. She looks around the room. Lucica is at her desk.

LUCICA

What are you doing?

Gabriela motions with her head to come closer

GABRIELA

(shaking her hands

lightly, but briskly)

Look.

LUCICA

(she realizes what

it is)

A firefly! I thought you would

have forgotten.

GABRIELA

(with emotion)

I couldn't have even if I wanted to.

Lucica is moved but self-conscious.

LUCICA

(remembering suddenly)

Oh! I almost forgot. A letter came

for you today.

GABRIELA

Matei?

LUCICA

It's on the table in the hall.

GABRIELA

Poor Matei.

LUCICA

He misses you.

GABRIELA

(releasing the firefly)

Here. Someone to keep you company.

LUCICA

But I'm not lonely.

GABRIELA

No?

Lucica is evasive. She nervously fumbles with her pen, touches her desk, and surreptitiously turns a sheet of paper face down. Gabriela notices torn bits of paper scattered on the floor.

LUCICA

Gabico. There's nothing to tell,

believe me. You think you know me,

but you don't see me...not really.

INT. GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- NIGHT

Gabriela is sitting on the bed reading the letter from Matei, then puts it aside. She lies down, and settles into thought.

GABRIELA

(to herself)

Who could it be? Who has made a

passionate woman out of a tom-boy?

EXT. GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- NEXT DAY

Gabriela is looking out of the window at a coach stopped in front of her house. She watches Matei step out. He is a young man of medium build and plain attractiveness. He appears nervous but resolute, looking at the house; he spies Gabriela at the window and then pays the coachman.

EXT. NOVLEANU YARD -- MOMENTS LATER

Matei and Gabriela are walking near the garden. They are awkward, there is an implied tension between them.

Matei

But once before--five months ago

in fact, I wrote to you and asked

your permission to come and visit.

GABRIELA

And I explained I was busy working

on my dissertation.

He stops abruptly, faces her and takes hold of her by both her arms.

MATEI

(desperately)

Gabriela, when you left Bucharest

you told me to wait, and I did.

It's been almost a year. You hardly

write, and you were supposed to

come back on weekends. I don't

understand.

GABRIELA

(turns rigid)

Matei...

The SOUND of the back door and Lucica appears, waving.

GABRIELA (CONT'D)

(relieved, pulling

away from Matei)

Luli--may I present an old friend

--Dr. Dima.

MATEI

(distracted, but

polite)

How do you do.

LUCICA

Gabriela has told me all about

you.

MATEI

Has she indeed? I don't recall her

mentioning you. You must be a new

student of hers?

LUCICA

(with mixed reaction,

but smiling)

Yes, I am. Won't you excuse me then.

I have some lessons to do.

GABRIELA

There's plenty of time for that

later. Come. Walk with us.

LUCICA

(awkwardly)

Well, perhaps Dr. Dima--

MATEI

--Matei.

LUCICA

--would like some tea.

MATEI

Don't trouble yourself.

GABRIELA

(brightening)

Yes, yes, some tea. I'll help you Luli.

Matei is visibly disheartened as he follows the women back to the house. But before Gabriela has a chance to slip in the door behind Lucica, he catches her by the arm.

MATEI

Tell me, Gabriela, do you love

someone else?

GABRIELA

(vague and cool)

I love no one.

INT. LUCICA'S BEDROOM -- NIGHT

Lucica is staring out the window at the sky. She hears the door open, but doesn't turn around. Gabriela enters leaving the door ajar.

LUCICA

Shh!

GABRIELA

What is it now?

LUCICA

(whispering)

Did you hear it?

GABRIELA

What?

LUCICA

A falling star.

Gabriela seems comforted by Lucica's usual quixotic behavior. She moves closer to her friend, but seems preoccupied too.

LUCICA (CONT'D)

You look as though you are ready

for summer vacation.

GABRIELA

The thought of going back to Bucharest

terrifies me.

LUCICA

But why? You haven't been back since

you came to Galaţi, and poor Matei—

I could see how much he cares for you.

GABRIELA                                                                      And what do you know of such things?

Lucica is affected by this. Suddenly Mr. Novleanu raps the door. Lucica turns around and smiles at her father.

MR. NOVLEANU

How are my girls, then?

LUCICA

    (recovering)

We are wondering if we should holiday

in Paris, or London!

They all laugh at the obvious joke.

MR. NOVLEANU

You know, I have an idea. How about

if you went to the vineyards for a

while? Fresh air, peace and quiet...eh?

Gabriela and Lucica gaze at each other smiling.

GABRIELA

I can help you prepare for your exams!

LUCICA

But then you won't be able to

visit Bucharest.

GABRIELA

Don't be silly. This is more

important.

EXT. TRAIN STATION - TUTOVA -- AFTERNOON

Lucica jumps from the steps of the train before it has stopped moving. An old man with a carriage is waiting. She runs over to the horse, and throws her arms around its neck, nuzzling her face in his fur.

LUCICA

Oh, you poor things! Little horse-men

with rabbit ears--Gabico--look at them!

Gabriela shakes her head in amusement. Lucica's childhood nanny is chaperoning the girls. She is tending to the luggage, while Lucica is searching through the bags to the obvious dismay of the nanny.

LUCICA

Please, dadaie! It's here--I put it

there, I'll find it myself.

GABRIELA

(reprimanding)

Luli!

Lucica quickly locates some pieces of sugar and feeds them to the horses.

EXT. COUNTRY ROAD -- LATER

Lucica is leaning over Gabriela, and back, looking out the windows with great excitement.

EXT. VINEYARD -- LATER

There is a large wooden gate that opens to the Novleanus’ vineyard in Tutova, outside of Galaţi. The carriage stops, the old man dismounts, and opens the gates. There is a summer house with a wrap-around veranda, and a water well off to the right. There are vineyards in the background to the left, and a fruit orchard in the back to the right. Lucica bolts from the carriage before it has come to a stop inside the gates, and runs off to greet one of two mangy dogs, Gavrila I and Gavrila II.

EXT. ORCHARD -- DAY

Gabriela is helping Lucica prepare for her exams outside on the grass. Books are strewn about, fresh fruit is in a pile next to Lucica's hat. Gabriela is sitting poised, holding a pencil as she scours over a page, flinching every time an insect flies by, holding her hat protectively. Lucica is sprawled on her back, fingering the grass with one hand, and feeling for cherries with the other. Gabriela is drilling her in Latin.

GABRIELA

Vides tu alta stet...

LUCICA

...stet nive candidum...

Gabriela is nodding, flipping pages, and unaware that Lucica is becoming distracted by a butterfly that she begins chasing.

GABRIELA

(unaware, still

studying the page)

...continue, Luli...Luli?

(she realizes Lucica

is gone.)

EXT. BACK OF ORCHARD -- continuous

The sun is streaming through various fruit trees. The wind moves the branches.

GABRIELA (CONT'D)

Lucica?! (now talking to

herself, and searching

among the books and

papers scattered in front

of her) Now where have I mislaid

my pen this time?

She reaches over and looks under Lucica's hat, then makes the correlation that Lucica is missing, and so is her pen.

EXT. VERANDA -- LATER

Gabriela is reading on the porch when Lucica suddenly appears up from the orchard side of the house. The mangy dog Gavrila I, is lumbering beside her.

GABRIELA

(thoughtfully

reproaching)

And where are you coming from

after all this time?

LUCICA

I went for a walk.

FADE OUT.

SOUND of crickets chirping. Random BURST of fireflies.

EXT. VINEYARD -- MORNING

Lucica is walking in the vineyard, unaware that Gabriela is following at a distance. Lucica stops and caresses clusters of grapes, gently, sensuously, looking about as though trying to find the perfect spot. She then removes a folded sheet of paper and a pen from her dress pocket, and sits down to write. Gabriela peers at her from behind some vines, and suddenly Lucica springs to her feet and heads off towards the orchard.

EXT. BACK OF ORCHARD -- CONTINUOUS

Lucica stretches out on her stomach beneath a cherry tree, and props her chin in one hand, then begins writing with the other.

Gabriela is still spying.

GABRIELA

(to herself)

I knew it! She's writing love

letters. Lucica's in love!

The wind moves the branches. Lucica suddenly tears the paper she is writing, casts it away, then springs to her feet and leaves the orchard. Gabriela conceals herself as she watches Lucica leave. After she is gone, Gabriela walks over and collects the torn pieces of paper. Then she goes to the spot where Lucica had been lying, and studies the impression in the grass from Lucica's body with great concentration. She lies down carefully in the same fashion, and begins to piece together the bits of paper and reads the lines.

GABRIELA (CONT'D)

"Upon the overturned harp of your

grass, Summer, my body and soul

are the beginning of a great song,

and the hand's tremor that seeks it."

Suddenly the wind blows the torn pieces of the paper from Gabriela's fingers.

GABRIELA

Luli!

EXT. VERANDA -- LATER

Lucica is sitting on the steps, playing fetch with Gavrila the first. Gabriela approaches from the vineyard side.

LUCICA

(curious)

Gabico--where have you been?

GABRIELA

(coy)

For a walk.

Gabriela smiles as she sits down next to Lucica and observes her in a subtle fashion. She nudges her friend and waits for a reaction.

GABRIELA (CONT'D)

What are you thinking about,

Luli-boy?

LUCICA

(acknowledging,

but not making

eye contact)

...you know, just like that.

The same. I'm far away.

GABRIELA

(gently)

Do you remember when you were a

little girl and you used to wait

for the storks on the roof of the

house?

Lucica glances at Gabriela, smiling.

GABRIELA (CONT'D)

Maybe you're still waiting for them,

in there, inside yourself.

LUCICA

Don't be silly. I'm not a child anymore.

GABRIELA

No, you're not, are you.

Gabriela gives her an affectionate hug, and then goes inside the house.

EXT. VERANDA -- NIGHT

Lucica and Gabriela are dragging their mattresses outside on the porch so they can spend their last night outside. The nanny is sleeping at the other end on a small cot. The old man is down on the grass, asleep on a large animal fur. Gavrila I, is making his rounds, Gavrila, II is sound asleep next to the old man. The wind rustles the trees, and the rising moon is casting a bold light on the veranda. A flock of night birds takes wing, and the women flop down on their respective mattresses.

Later

Gabriela is asleep, then opens her eyes to the moonlight. She looks sleepily over to Lucica's bed, and sees it is empty. She settles back in thought, puts her arms behind her head, and the moon shines her light on her neck as it climbs higher.

EXT. ORCHARD -- LATER

Lucica is sitting on a tree stump in her nightgown, her knees drawn up to her chest. We hear the sound of crickets and see the spray of fireflies as Lucica gazes up at the sky. Gabriela approaches.

GABRIELA

(urgently)

I followed you. Forgive me, Luli,

but the other day in the orchard--I

had a feeling, so I followed you.

And I found your paper.

LUCICA

(indifferently)

I tore it up.

GABRIELA

I read it just the same.

Lucica shrugs her shoulders in resignation. She sighs.

GABRIELA (CONT'D)

Since when have you been writing?

LUCICA

(angst)

Gabico, I'm not "writing". You say

it with such judgment. It was just

a phrase, a simple phrase.

Lucica huddles closer to herself and rests her cheek on her knees, looking away from Gabriela. Gabriela extends her hands towards Lucica, hesitates, then begins to withdraw them when suddenly Lucica seizes them. She pats them gently. Her face is sad.

GABRIELA

(with empathy)

Oh, what is it, Luli? Is it so awful?

Lucica releases Gabriela's hands, and begins to gesture wildly all around her, and at the sky.

LUCICA

(Conflicted)

Look here. Do you see this? The moon,

the sky, life, nature everywhere,

everything---all of this--

She brings her closing fist to her forehead.

LUCICA (CONT'D)

--fights with this. What can I do?

GABRIELA

Still the wild child, full of life.

So much energy, so possessed, and

yet so free. You have always had this

fever--so intimate with life, bugs,

rocks, stars, oh, Lucica! Have you

no idea how I've envied you, your

spirit, your passion! I can still

see you, how your eyes got so big with

wonder when I read you stories, that

I thought they would swallow me.

I actually felt more alive just being

near you. Imagine!

LUCICA

(moved)

              Gabico!

Gabriela's face is lit with moonlight.

LUCICA (CONT'D)

(softly)

...Gabico, let's take a walk.

GABRIELA

(suddenly distracted)

Like this? In pajamas and slippers at

night? Are you mad?

Lucica stands and starts to walk, motioning with her head, and holding out her hand. Gabriela takes it.

EXT. ORCHARD -- CONTINUOUS

Lucica and Gabriela are walking slowly, close together.

BogdaN'S MOTHER (V.O.)

When you sleep outdoors, it's very hard

to know if you've woken up, or if you

haven't slept. The summer night, despite

the stars, is no longer than the lashes

of your closed eyes at midnight.

 

 

LUCICa

You're right, you know. I've gone mad,

Gabico. I would want to tell you

everything, and yet, I see I have

nothing to tell. It's not so easy for

me to talk about myself.

Lucica pauses to stare up at the sky again.

GABRIELA

Tell me, then, how long have you

been writing, writing like "that".

LUCICA

(intimately)

Do you know the sensation?

That it's too tight to breathe, as

though there were no room inside of

you? You want more, much more and you

want it right away. You know in your

heart that the firefly is in the blood

pumping through you. So I write two

or three words--a phrase, perhaps, but

then I tear it up. Then I am left with

nothing.

GABRIELA

But why? Luli, do you tear everything?

LUCICA

(beaten)

Everything.

GABRIELA

How so? I don't understand.

LUCICA

Ah...

GABRIELA

You mean you have nothing of what

you've written? You didn't save one

line?

LUCICA

(agitated)

Please, Gabico! I haven't written

anything. I can't seem to get past

feeling it, as if I'm intimidated by

my own sensitivity. It's really the

strangest thing. It's as though I

write to be a part of what I'm feeling,

and sometimes, sometimes it's as if

I'm not even the one who's feeling it.

Gabriela smiles and caresses Lucica's face.

GABRIELA

That explains the way you fret like

a wounded lover, my poor passionate

friend.

LUCICA

(forlorn)

Yes, Gabico, console me. You are the

only one who ever knew what to do with me.

An idea comes over Gabriela. She puts her hand on Lucica's head.

GABRIELA

I will do better than that. I will

baptize you the way John baptized

Jesus in the Jordan. I will give you

a proper name, a writer's name, an

identity to keep you safe from your

intensity.

LUCICA

Don't tease me, Gabico.

Gabriela looks hard at Lucica. Lucica is confused. Gabriela thinks harder still.

GABRIELA

You need a new name, don't you see?

Lucica lowers her eyes.

GABRIELA (CONT'D)

"Lorelei..."

Your pseudonym.

LUCICA

You're joking. (she pauses) "Lorelei"...

  (Thinking) yes, it is a nice name.

GABRIELA

Do you know Heine's ballad?

              LUCICA

Something about a fairy maiden

that sings on a cliff off the

Rhine?

GABRIELA

The very one.

LUCICA

--and she provoked mortal accidents

by seducing the sailors with her song?

GABRIELA

Isn't it wonderful? I feel such

a release.

LUCICA

Like coming out of church when we

were little?

GABRIELA

Yes--are you sleepy?

LUCICA

I think we can outrun it.

GABRIELA

Let's.

Ext. Veranda -- continuoUs

Lucica and Gabriela are drinking coffee from a thermos, and eating bread and leftover food. The dadaie stirs and they giggle with their mouths full.

Int. train SECOND CLASS COMPARTMENT -- afternoon

Lucica opens the window and feels the wind on her face. She leans out of the window and sees the spilled cherries then she waves to the little horse-men. Gabriela has fallen asleep by the drawn window shade.

SUper: my body and soul are the beginning of a great song…

Int. train first-class compartment.

Catul Bogdan lights a cigarette, leans out the window, resting his elbows on the ledge. He is compelling, tall, slender. His hair is prematurely white and combed straight back, deep set eyes, prominent forehead. Two women pass by the compartment in the corridor.

First woman

Oh, my God! It's Catul Bogdan.

Second woman

I met him once. He's very charming.

He has wonderful hands--Byzantine

hands.

The train slows down at the next stop.

INT. SECOND-CLASS COMPARTMENT -- MOMENTS LATER

Lucica makes eye contact with Bogdan, then breaks it.

LUCICA

(to herself)

A young man and an old man.

She turns from the window to tell Gabriela, but Gabriela is still asleep.  The train pulls out.  The suffused light within the compartment is interrupted by the rushing shadow of chestnut leaves on the trees outside the station.  Suddenly the compartment fills with sunlight. Bogdan sees Lucica's head appear in the window. Lucica catches a glimpse of Bogdan's white hair.

INT. TRAIN FIRST-CLASS COMPARTMENT -- CONTINUOUS

Bogdan is still smoking his cigarette. The scenery moves and shrinks from view through the window.

Lucica leans out, the wind blows through her tresses sensually. She gets a glimpse of Catul Bogdan, but he doesn't look at her.

Now Catul Bogdan leans out, and she looks back at him, smiling. Moments later she looks out, and he looks back directly into her eyes, and a slow smile breaks over his face. She blushes, and withdraws. Moments later, she sees his head leaning against the window frame.

Int. Train FIRST CLASS COMPARTMENT -- CONTINUOUS

Catul Bogdan is stretched out on the bench, his head against the window frame, his facial expression indicates distress. He rubs his forehead, his eyes are closed.

Second flashback

Ext. Train station -- years ago

Bogdan as a young boy on the steps of a train, Steam is blowing from under the tracks, engulfing the figure of his MOTHER, whom we do not see clearly, then dissipates. She lays her hand on his shoulder as he descends. She is young, attractive, dark-haired.

BogdAN'S MOTHER

Little Tani, climb down slowly, my darling, so you don't trip.

   FLASHforward to opening scene

Ext. Train STATION, GALATI, ROMANIA -- DAY

Lucica stumbles and the cherries tumble form the basket on the ground in front of the train.

Return to present

Int. TraIN FIRST-CLASS corridor -- continuous

Lucica appears nervous, but driven as she opens the door to the first class cars. From the access door she sees Bogdan, whose head is resting against the window frame. He looks ill, pale, perspiring.

Flashback

Int. Young bogdan's bedroom -- years ago

Young Tani is lying in bed, feverish. His mother is pressing a compress to his forehead.

     FlashFORWARD

Int. TRAIN FIRST-CLASS COMPARTMENT -- CONTINUOUS

Catul Bogdan is slouched feverishly against the window. Lucica is pressing her hand against his face. Lucica helps him stretch out on the bench-seat. He seems delirious. She loosens his tie, unbuttons his collar. Then she draws the window shade shut. He opens his eyes. He sees Lucica's face.

LUCICA

(calmly)

I'll be right back.

Catul Bogdan reacts with a desperate, delirious look, as though afraid she will not return.

LUCICA (CONT'D)

Shh. I'll be right back. I promise.

FlASHBACK

Int. YOUNG BOGDAN'S BEDROOM -- YEARS AGO

Young Tani is delirious, desperate. His mother comforts him, cooling his forehead with a compress.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER

Hush now, be still. I'll bring some

more cool water.

Young tani

(terrified)

Mama, don't leave me.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER

(consoling him)

Shh. It's all right. I'll be right back.

I promise

FlASHFORWARD

Int. train FIRST-CLASS COMPARTMENT -- CONTINUOUS

Lucica returns with a compress, a lemon, and a cup with steam rising from it. She presses a moist compress against Catul Bogdan's face and forehead.  Then she squeezes a lemon into a cup of steaming black coffee, which she has brought back with her. She reaches behind his head and steadies it, and helps him sip the drink.

Tani

That smell...

LUCICA

Lemon.

TANI

No, no, coming from outside.

LUCICA

Linden flowers. They must be

everywhere. Now rest quietly.

She studies him, and looks closely at his face as she tracks his features from the wisps of white hair, his prominent forehead, damp cheeks, dry lips. She seems relaxed, though concerned. Catul Bogdan is semi-conscious, drifting in and out of awareness.

FLASHBACK

Int. Orthodox church - funeral mass -- morning years ago

Catul Bogdan's mother is lying in a casket. Young Tani watches with an intense expression, observing funeral rights. Many people, many candles, sound of bells, chanting, weeping.

YOUNG TANI

(sorrowfully)

Mama, don't leave me...

Flashforward

Int. traIN FIRST CLASS COMPARTMENT -- later

Catul Bogdan awakes, his color returned to his cheeks. He realizes he is alone in the compartment. The shades are drawn closed. He gets up and opens the shade to look out. The train has pulled into the station at Galaţi.  He straightens his tie, smoothes back his hair, puts his hat on and exits the car.

ext. TraIN STATION, GALATI, ROMANIA -- DAY

Steam billows from underneath the train, a flock of sparrows bursts into view, and we hear the sound of a train whistle. Bogdan steps down from the train, looks anxiously in all directions when suddenly Lucica and Gabriela pass by him. They walk by smiling. He touches his hat and bows his head, locking his gaze on Lucica. She smiles. Gabriela observes and does a double take of Bogdan as they pass him.

GABRIELA

(curious)

How do you know him?

LUCICA

(blushing)

I don't.

GABRIELA

Honestly? You really don't know

who that is?

LUCICA

              No, I don’t.

GABRIELA

Catul Bogdan! Lucica!

LUCICA

The writer?

Gabriela smiles and slips her arm through Lucica's, and leans toward her.

GABRIELA

(whispering)

Your "colleague", Lorelei.

Lucica removes her hat and shakes her luxurious black tresses like a stallion, as she throws back her head and laughs.

super: and the hand’s tremor that seeks it…

INT. HOTEL LOBBY -- LATER

Bogdan walks across woven rugs, overhead there are chandeliers, wood paneling. He checks in. Everyone recognizes him. 

INT. HOTEL SUITE -- MOMENTS LATER

A spacious room, heavy velvet curtains at the windows, suffused light. Catul Bogdan has been lying in bed; his tie is off, his shirt opened at the collar. He gets up, walks to the balcony and looks out over a city with twinkling lights.

EXT. CITY STREET -- EVENING

Moderate activity, carriages, people walking, sounds of cafes. Bogdan rounds a corner. It is as if he is looking for something or someone. The streets are lined with linden trees, which he observes by frequently touching them, as though guided by them. He finally stops at an outdoor cafe and sits at a table. He motions to the waiter. Women take notice of him. One woman sits at his table, and flirts. He is aloof. She moves her hand closer to his, but he only pats it as he stands up. He leaves a generous tip on the table and walks away.

INT. HOTEL SUITE -- MORNING

Bogdan is writing at his desk. There is a KNOCK at the door.

TANI

(Annoyed)

Who is it?

Costel (O.S.)

It's Costel. Good Morning,

Professor Bogdan.

TANI

Good morning, Costal. Just

a moment.

He walks over and opens the door. The young man standing in the hallway removes his hat ceremoniously, and extends his hand.

COSTEL

You forgot to telegraph me when

you arrived in Galaţi, Professor.

And we have a slight problem....

Bogdan smoothes back his hair, self conscious of Costrel’s vibrant youth. An attractive woman passes in the corridor, and Costel watches her as she looks past him, and directly at Bogdan.

TaNI

I'm sorry, Costel. What were

you saying?

COSTEL

Mrs. Nemoianu, the Director of

high school had organized a formal

reception for you, only when you

didn't telegraph, we didn't know

when to plan the activities.

Anyway, I managed to find out you

were on your way to Galaţi, so we

thought you would be on this

morning's train. Well, as you can

imagine, everyone was there to

greet you, except that you weren't

on the train. I don't have to tell

you how embarrassing this is—

please forgive us--forgive me.

TANI

Not to worry, Costel.

COSTEL

The reception is already under way—

I'm to take you there.

INT. LARGE CONFERENCE ROOM -- LATER

A noble setting, many students and faculty, tables with food and beverages. People are chatting, eating, and drinking. Bogdan is standing near the doorway with his hat and his gloves in his hands. Gabriela is sitting with her back to the window, and meets Bogdan's eyes from across the room. He doesn't salute her, but looks about casually for a glimpse of Lucica. Gabriela is quite involved in her observation of Catul Bogdan, so much so that a colleague notices and nudges her. She smiles, embarrassed, but resumes her gazing. Bogdan looks across the room again and meets Gabriela's gaze.

FLASHBACK

INT. TRAIN FIRST CLASS COMPARTMENT -- afternoon

Lucica stumbles and spills the cherries from her basket, Tani bends down to gather them, and he and Lucica exchange smiles. Gabriela affectionately puts her hand on Lucica's shoulders.

GABRIELA                                                                    Come on, Luli, the train is leaving.

FlASHFORWARD

Int. LARGE CONFERENCE ROOM -- continuous

SOUND of applause. Tani is startled from his daydream, and realizes he must speak.

Tani

                 (waxing poetic)

Thank you. You have honored me

deeply with your warm reception.

I have never been here to Galaţi

before. I do not know its museums,

its monuments, its theatres, or

its streets. But I know its linden

trees, and the perfume of their

flowers. It's not only in the air,

but on your clothes, your hands,

your hair, at night when you sleep

it covers you. Even now, in this

very room it gathers, a city of

Linden trees in bloom and summer

nights... 

Just as Bogdan concludes Gabriela makes her way through the crowd, and heads for the door as if to avoid confrontation with him alone.

EXT. CITY STREET -- LATER

There is moderate activity, people walking, an occasional automobile passes. Gabriela is walking as though possessed. The sound of the wind moving in the trees makes her appear nervous and hasty. She repeatedly looks back over her shoulder as though at any moment Catul Bogdan might be following her.

EXT. STREET IN FRONT OF NEI AND NOVLEANU HOUSES -- MOMENTS LATER

Lucica is walking toward Gabriela. Gabriela is relieved to see her friend. Lucica is carrying a fistful of linden flowers. They meet.

LUCICA

(attentively)

Gabico! You've never looked more

lovely.

GABRIELA

Nor you.

They both smile.

LUCICA

Open your hands.

Gabriela holds out her hands and Lucica pours from her hand what looks like gold dust. They smile at each other, then turn and head for home.

EXT. CITY STREET -- DAY

Bogdan is standing on a street corner. People are bustling, shops are doing business. He removes a handkerchief from his breast pocket and pats his forehead. He is visibly preoccupied, searching with his gaze. As he walks, people notice him.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER (V.O.)

Catul Bogdan spent his first few

weeks as visiting professor in Mrs.

Nemoianu's school preoccupied with

the young woman from the train. He

took relentless strolls through

the city hoping to see her face

in a crowd, or see her stepping

out of a carriage, or walking

through the front gate of a house. 

He was certain that Gabriela had

recognized him at the reception,

yet she had disappeared without a

trace. Was she a student? a

teacher? a sister, or friend?

Perhaps he was making a fool of

himself for the young women

from the train were so very young.

Still, he could not escape his need

to see her again, this tender young

creature who had captivated him at

the train station on a June

afternoon, and say her name.

EXT. PARK WITH SMALL LAKE -- MOMENTS LATER

People are walking, some sitting on benches, some, reading. Bogdan takes a seat on a bench near the edge of the lake. Two swans are gliding past. He watches them intently. Close up of the swan's neck dissolve into the next scene.

FlASHBACK

EXT. TRAIN STATION -- MORNING

Lucica and Gabriela are walking in slow motion. Close up of their necks in profile.

EXT. CITY STREET -- NIGHT

Catul Bogdan exits a cafe and hails a carriage. One stops and he opens the door and climbs in.

Coachman

Where to this evening, sir?

Tani

Around the city.

INT. AMPHITHEATER -- DAY

Desks in rows filled with students. Costel is calling the roll. This is the day of the baccalaureate exams. Bogdan is the proctor, sitting off to the right of the podium, gazing out the window.

COSTEL

Antonescu, Amalia...Dorosenko,

Xenia...Gaman, Lucretia...

Novleanu, Lucia...

Costel looks up, waiting for a reply when Lucica appears in the doorway. She smiles and enters.

LUCICA

Present.

At once Bogdan looks across the room and watches her walk to her desk. He is enchanted. Lucica doesn't notice him at first. She passes by an open window near her desk and looks out impetuously. She leans out to breathe in the fresh air.

COSTEL

(agitated)

Excuse me, Miss--please don't

communicate with persons outside.

You are in class now.

Lucica draws her head slowly back inside, and turns as though ready for battle.

TANI

(interceding

with authority)

Mr. Larian--

  COSTEL

(boldly)

Sir?

Lucica recognizes Bogdan, who demonstrates great charm and confidence.

TANI

Mr. Larian, what month is this?

COSTEL

June, Professor, but what does

that--

                   TANI

How old are you, Mr. Larian?

COSTEL

Twenty-four.

TANI

That old, eh?

COSTEL

Yes, Professor.

TANI

(smoothing his hair back)

Tell me, Costel, what does a young

man do on a June morning?

COSTEL

Do? How should I know?

TANI

I didn't think you did. Let me tell

you what he does. He strolls about,

he falls in love, he sings. Costel,

dear boy--you're young! Go!

COSTEL

(shocked)

Sir?

TANI

Go! Go and enjoy this glorious morning.

Pay my respects to every linden tree

in the city. Go!

Bogdan pushes him out the door. There is much giggling and commotion from the students.

TaNI (CONT'D)

And now, Ladies, allow me to introduce

the subject of today's essay.

INT. AMPHITHEATER -- LATER

Everyone is writing. Lucica looks up for a moment and meets the eyes of Bogdan who is gazing at her from the podium. He acknowledges her ever so subtly, and she quickly lowers her eyes to her paper. What follows is a montage of images that blend from one into the other beginning with Lucica's luxuriant black curls to black grape clusters; grape clusters with heavy dew drops dissolve into cherry blossoms, then bright white blossoms into swans. The swans arch their necks which dissolve into Lucica's bare arms motioning in the vineyard at Tutava in the moonlight. Close up Lucica's neck and shoulders, then face, and soft focus of her mouth which fades to black and white.

This shot bleeds into a close-up of Bogdan's mother's face. Color infuses the shot and as the lips fill to red, they dissolve into the red cherries spilling from the basket Lucica is carrying at the train station. A gust of steam saturates the shot and the montage ends with Lucica in the present, writing at her desk. During this montage of attractions, the narrator speaks.

BOGDAN'S MOTHER (V.O.)

Catul Bogdan was not a passionate man,

though he had a reputation as a

womanizer. It was his indifference to

his role as writer that made him so

enigmatic, and his detachment from his

role as a man that made him an

exceptional artist.  It was not Lucica,

the girl from grade 8 sitting before

him who enthralled him. It was Lucica,

the intriguing young woman from the

train who disarmed him so entirely, so

resolutely, that it made him shudder

to think that in thirty-seven years he

had never once realized what a desolate

              man he was.  Yet she did not seduce him;

rather, she restored him to a future he

had never anticipated as a writer, or a

              man.

The exam is over and students are turning in their papers as they exit the room, fawning over Bogdan as they pass. His forehead begins to glisten with perspiration as he nods indifferently as the students pass. He gazes out the window, unaware that Lucica has now approached the podium, holding out her exam. The papers luff in a stray breeze. The image bleeds into a flashback of her hat luffing in the wind at the train station, and a brisk return to the present with her papers falling on the desk. Lucica drops her gaze and Bogdan bows his head subtly. She leaves the room.

INT. CORRIDOR -- MOMENTS LATER

The halls are noisy with students. Lucica is making her way through the crowds.

INT. AMPHITHEATER DOORWAY -- CONTINUOUS

Bogdan looks out across the corridor.

EXT. SCHOOLGROUNDS -- CONTINUOUS

Bogdan is following Lucica, who is heading home unaware that he is behind her. 

EXT. STREET LEADING TO NEI AND NOVLEANU HOUSES -- CONTINUOUS

Houses with many flowers, trees in bloom. The wind is blowing lightly, we hear the sound of wind chimes and then an old woman beating an oriental rug draped over a railing. Bogdan is smiling as he follows Lucica's energetic gait. She turns a corner and for a moment he loses sight of her.

EXT. NOVLEANU YARD -- CONTINUOUS

Lucica opens the gate and her dog jumps up to greet her. She pets him affectionately, and as she plays with him, she spies Bogdan out of the corner of her eye. She blushes instantly, and the dog bolts toward him. The gate swings open and Lucica rushes after the dog, stumbles, and lands on one knee as Bogdan breaks her fall. She looks up at him.

LUCICA

(blushing, animated)

He's not a bad dog. He just

doesn't know you.

Bogdan doesn't say a word. He looks intensely at Lucica as though he is swallowing her with his eyes. Lucica rises and she and the dog bolt back toward the house.

INT. NOVLEANU KITCHEN -- CONTINUOUS

Dadaie sees Bogdan through the window. Carnations are swaying gently. Lucica enters under the suspicious eye of Dadaie, and kisses the old woman. Lucica has a couple of carnations in her hand.

Dadaie

Who is that?

LUCICA

Nobody. Just a man.

INT. GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- NIGHT

Gabriela is preoccupied at her desk. She is writing with a pensive expression the line "Dear Prof. Bogdan.” The door is ajar and Lucica slips her hand through, rustling the carnations gently. Gabriela is startled, then quickly hides the letter she is composing.

INT. GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- NIGHT -- later

Gabriela is in bed, but restless. The wind moves the curtains, and the carnations in a small vase on her desk. There is an envelope addressed to "Prof. Catul Bogdan.”

INT. SCHOOL CORRIDOR -- MORNING

Gabriela is peering in every direction, clutching the envelope addressed to Bogdan.

INT. ANOTHER SCHOOL CORRIDOR - MORNING

Lucica is peering in every direction as though looking for someone.

EXT. CITY STREET BOGDAN'S HOTEL -- LATER

Gabriela is peering in every direction, anxious, timid, preoccupied. She still clutches the letter. Near her is a mailbox.

EXT. PARK WITH SMALL LAKE -- LATER

Gabriela is sitting on a park bench near the edge of the lake. She looks at the letter in her hand, then tears it to pieces, scattering them in the wind. The flying bits of paper bleed into scattered linden flowers.

INT. HOTEL SUITE -- DAY

Bogdan is stretched out on the bed, somewhat distressed. The phone RINGS and he seizes his head immediately. He answers.

TaNI

...Nathan? Yes, yes...another

migraine, first one since the

train...I'm...yes, I'm lying down...

There is a knock at the door.

TaNI (CONT'D)

Let me call you back...I've

ordered  some black coffee and

lemon...something new, I know.

INT. NATHAN'S STUDY -- CONTINUOUS

It is a well appointed room, shelves with books, assorted tapestries, paintings on the wall, curtains drawn completely open. Nathan Sabbatei is tall, dark, with prominent features, nice looking. He is the same age as Catul Bogdan. He hangs up the phone.

INT. HOTEL SUITE -- LATER

Bogdan is sitting on the edge of the bed, looking somewhat revived. He checks his watch, walks over to the mirror and gazes.  Close-up of his face shows a youthful, handsome, but pale face. Reverse close up of the mirror--his POV shows a much worse reflection. In other words, Bogdan sees himself worse than he actually appears. He begins to wash up.

INT. AMPHITHEATER -- DAY

Professor Onisifor Brebu is administering a Latin dictation.  He is a thin, delicate, nervous man, oily complexion. He looks musty, and is round-shouldered.  A STORM is in the works: THUNDER and LIGHTNING distract the girls from their work. Lucica is continuously watching the door.  Lying on her desk above her paper is a red carnation. There is a whistling sound of the wind at the windows. Brebu is watching Lucica, then the door, and then Lucica. He is much annoyed.

Brebu

(pointing

persistently

at Lucica)

You--what is your name?

LUCICA

Novleanu.

BREBU

(irritated)

Why are you staring at the

door?

LUCICA

(challenging)

Is there a law against it?

BrEBU

HMM!

LUCICA

(indignant)

Where am I allowed to look then?

BreBU

At the paper in front of you.

There's where!

She behaves.  He continues to stroll oppressively about the room.  Suddenly the storm outside gathers strength, the students look about nervously, and a window BURSTS open from above, making an EXPLOSIVE sound.  The girls exclaim loudly, clapping their hands over their ears.

BrEBU

If anyone moves, they're out of

here immediately, understood?

The girls murmur, Lucica takes up her carnation and begins to smell it overtly. Brebu sees this and becomes incense.

BREBU (CONT'D)

What is this? Is this a school?

Or just a big joke at my expense?

He storms over to Lucica and snatches the flower from her hand. Just at this moment, the door opens and Bogdan enters. The girls react accordingly, Brebu shrinks always from Lucica, and turns to greet Bogdan.

TaNI

What has gotten you so upset,

Mr. Brebu?

Brebu acknowledges Bogdan with a polite, forced smile that quickly fades to disdain.

BREBU

Uh, that's "professor" Bre--

TaNI

--Of course.

BREBU

(recovering quickly)

Imagine, Professor Bogdan, a student

--that one there—-(he points

demonstratively

with the carnation)

has the audacity to fawn over a

flower while taking dictation. Have

you ever---

Bogdan smiles disarmingly and with the ease of a perfectly executed forehand captures the flower from Brebu, brings it to his nose, and inhales its fragrance deliberately while the girls look on in total delight and surprise.

TANI

There is a stale smell in this room,

don't you agree, sir?  But a carnation

has an altogether different aroma...

yes...please—-continue, I shouldn't

want to disturb your lesson.  What

theme have you given them?  Come,

Mr. Brebu, join me. (He slaps him

on the back and puts his arm

around his shoulder).

BREBU

--it's "professor"--

Bogdan motions to Brebu to talk with him. He turns his back to the students, and converses with Brebu, all the while holding on to the carnation, gesturing grandly.

The BELL RINGS, and the students collect and deliver their papers.  Lucica does not engage Bogdan's attention, but stumbles and upsets the papers on the desk.  She lowers her head, straightens the papers, drops a few, bends down to pick them up and nearly collides with Bogdan. Their eyes lock. She searches his face as if to break the spell. He parts his lips and smiles. She hurries out.

EXT. CITY STREET STORMY  -- LATER

Lucica is running through the heavy rain. The drops hitting the puddles bleed into cherries splashing in water around her feet.

A carriage pulls ahead of Lucica over the shoulder. She stops. The rain drenches her. Bogdan's hand extends out from the window, holding a carnation. She stands for a moment then approaches the carriage. The door opens, and she steps slowly inside. Thunder and lightning.

INT. CARRIAGE -- CONTINUOUS

Close-up of Bogdan and Lucica's profile as he takes her hand, raises it to his lips and kisses it. She lightly touches his forehead, as though recalling the scene from the train. He peers deeply into her eyes and she looks away. He turns her face gently back towards him. Their faces drift closer. She gasps quietly, her breast rises and falls. He brushes his face against her cheek. She arcs her neck as if to breathe and his fingers glide over her throat. She looks into his eyes gently leaning closer, pressing her cheek to his. Her lips part, a sigh escapes. He is still holding her hand, and she leads it to her breast and presses it against her heart. She contemplates his mouth, tips her head first one way, then another, then kisses him tenderly. A tear runs from her closed eye.

TaNI

(whispering)

Lucica...

LUCICA

Shh...

He plunges his hands into her hair, and nuzzles her temple with his face. The driver calls down.

Driver (O.S.)

Where to?

TaNI

Just drive.

EXT. STREET IN FRONT OF NEI AND NOVLEANU HOUSES -- later

The rain has stopped, and the carriage approaches Lucica's house. The door opens and Lucica steps out. She shakes her head, splaying her curls in her signature style. Bogdan's face emerges from the shadow and appears at the window of the carriage.

LUCICA

I need to think.

She cradles the carnation in both hands, brings it to her lips then leans towards the window, holding the flower between them. He takes it.

TANI

When?

LUCICA

(to the driver)

Driver!

The whip CRACKS and the carriage leaves.

Ext. City STREET -- LATER

Montage of the carriage stopping in front of a flower shop, and then another, and another. At each stop, a different florist carries out bunches and bunches of flowers. By the fourth stop, Bogdan has climbed up next to the driver to make room in the carriage for all the flowers. Bogdan hands the driver some money, and dismounts.

DrIVER

Shall I deliver these flowers

to the young lady's house?

TaNI

(smiling)

No.

DRIVER

Where then?

TANI

(smiling even more)

Just drive!

Bogdan slaps the hind-end of the horse. Carnations topple form the coach. People on the street are remarking at the sight of such a spectacle. Bogdan straightens his tie and walks away.

INT. NOVLEANU STUDY -- EVENING

Mr. Novleanu is working at his desk. Lucica appears at the window outside, propping her elbows on the sill. He realizes she is there, but doesn't look up. He smiles.

Mr. NOVLEANU

Good evening, Miss.

LUCICA

(doting)

Papa, may I speak with you?

MR. NOVLEANU

Of course, my dear.

She climbs in through the window as though it were the most natural thing to do. Her father is delighted.

MR. NOVLEANU (CONT'D)

(chuckling to himself)

'Cica,’ what's on your mind?

LUCICA

(motioning above

her and below

her, and all

around)

Oh, you know, mama, the moon and

the stars...and maybe someone else...

MR. NOVLEANU

(anticipating)

Do I know him?

LUCICA

(winsomely)

No. I only met him myself four

days ago.

MR. NOVLEANU

(raising an eyebrow)

Where? (motioning like Lucica)

Out there, perhaps?

LUCICA

(humbled)

On the train from the vineyard.

MR. NOVLEANU

(calculating)

Well, come on then, who is he? Not

the porter!

LUCICA

(smiling)

Catul Bogdan

MR. NOVLEANU

(immediately serious)

The writer?

LUCICA

Yes, papa, the writer, not the

porter.

MR. NOVLEANU

(showing

uncomfortable

emotion)

I've heard of him. Extraordinary

fellow, from what they say.

Lucica is waiting for a cue. Her father looks at her intently. She shakes her head, and then cocks it to one side. Her father stands, opens his arms and she embraces him.

MR. NOVLEANU (CONT'D)

(paternally)

How did you meet?

LUCICA

(settling

her head on

his shoulder)

Through the window, the window of

the train.

Mr. Novleanu stands back and looks at his daughter. She rubs her hands as he searches for his pipe. She darts towards him and retrieves it for him from his breast pocket, and then locates the tobacco pouch. Novleanu scratches his head and observes her. She meticulously loads the bowl and pokes it gingerly into her father's mouth.

MR. NOVLEANU

Ah, yes. Love always appears at

the window, first--that is, before

it knocks at your door.

LUCICA

(soberly)

Papa...

MR. NOVLEANU

I fell in love with your mother

that way. Did I ever tell you this?

I saw her through the window when I

was passing by the monastery where

she studied. One look at those blue

eyes, and I was hopelessly in love.

I remember I didn't sleep all night,

I just had to see her again.

Strangest thing.

LUCICA

(resolute)

He wants to talk to you.

MR. NOVLEANU

(acquiescing)

Then we'll talk.

Lucica kisses her father's hands and turns to leave.

MR. NOVLEANU (CONT'D)                                                Lucica—where do you want the

wedding?

LUCICA

(standing near the window)

At our vineyard, of course.

INT. CHANCELLORY HIGH SCHOOL -- MORNING

Bogdan is at his desk and there is a knock at the door. A young messenger enters with a note.

TaNI

What is it?

Messenger

The young lady asked me to give

this to you.

Bogdan rises abruptly and takes the note. He quickly goes to the window to look out for Lucica. He opens the note, reads it, smiles, and checks his watch.

INT. NOVLEANU KITCHEN -- DAY

Dadaie and Mrs. Novleanu are preparing food. The dog is barking, the door opens, and Gabriela enters.

GABRIELA

(curious)

Oh, my. What's all this?

Mrs. Novleanu

Hello, Gabriela.

DADAIE

We have company tonight for dinner.

MRS. NOVLEANU

Lucica's professor from school—

Catul Bogdan.

GABRIELA

(confused)

Catul Bogdan? The writer?

MRS. NOVLEANU

Yes, the same.

GABRIELA

(mystified)

What's the occasion

MRS. NOVLEANU

(exchanging

glances with

Dadaie)

Teo invited him.

GABRIELA

Really...?

Dadaie gives a darting glance to Gabriela.

INT. GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- MOMENTS LATER

Gabriela is looking at the books strewn over her bed. She sits down and takes one of them up.

GaBRIELA

(addressing

the book)

So, the mysterious stranger from

the train, at our dinner table.

(she smiles)

We meet, at last!

She beings to change her clothes, and admires her silhouette in the full length mirror. She brushes her hair, and leans closer to the mirror, touching her lashes.

GABRIELA (CONT'D)

(speaking

to herself)

You are right, Catul Bogdan.

A woman should never cut her

lashes. Her power is in her

silence, her mystery is in

what she doesn't say.

INT. HALLWAY OUTSIDE OF GABRIELA'S DOOR -- CONTINUOUS

Lucica presses her face against the door.

LUCICA

(confidently)

Gabico!

INT. GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- continuous

GABRIELA

(Beaming as she primps)

Lucico!

INT. HALLWAY OUTSIDE OF GABRIELA'S DOOR -- CONTINUOUS

LUCICA

What are you doing?

INT. GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- continuous

GABRIELA

(giddy)

I'm getting ready, silly. I

heard we're having company

for dinner.

INT. HALLWAY OUTSIDE OF GABRIELA'S DOOR -- CONTINUOUS

LUCICA

(softly)

Do you know who it is, Gabico?

INT. GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- continuous

GABRIELA

(playfully)

Who?

LUCICA (O.S.)

My fiancé!

There is a sudden transformation in Gabriela's composure. She drops the brush.

LUCICA (O.S.)(CONT’D)

(curious)

Gabico--aren't you going to

congratulate me?

GABRIELA

(forced)

Congratulations, Lucica...

INT. HALLWAY OUTSIDE OF GABRIELA'S DOOR -- CONTINUOUS

Lucica pauses, presses her ear to the door.

INT. GABRIELA'S BEDROOM -- continuous

Gabriela is lying across her books on her bed, weeping.

FadE OUT.

FADE IN:

super: THE FRIEND, NATHAN

EXT. PANORAMIC VIEW OF IASI, ASSORTED CITYSCAPES -- DAY

BogDAN'S MOTHER (V.O.)

Nathan Sabbetai is Bogdan's closest

friend--his only friend, in fact. 

Their rapport with one another

sprang from opposite philosophies

on every imaginable subject. They

went to high school together, and

forged a bond that continued

through university, and then

              Paris, in constant comment over

              life. Nathan assumed the duties of

literary agent and business manager

at the onset of Bogdan's success as

a writer.  With each book, however,

Bogdan withdrew deeper into himself,

and Nathan decided a change of

scenery might do his old friend good.

He arranged for Bogdan to take the

teaching post in Galaţi. The telegram

he received just four days after he

saw Bogdan to the train was the last

thing he had expected.  

EXT. BOGDAN'S HOUSE -- DAY

The scene is pastoral, the house large, with two spreading chestnut trees in the front of a center window. Tile roof, shutters, well kept. An HAZIAICA is BEATING the rugs in the yard. She was Bogdan’s nanny, and became his housekeeper since his mother’s passing. She is Armenian, and dressed accordingly.  Suddenly she looks up from her work. Nathan approaches.  She smiles and greets him affectionately.

Haziaica

(emotionally)

Oh, my goodness! Master Nathan, is

this you?

Nathan

(gallantly

kissing

her hand)

Haziaica! How beautiful you look

today!

              HAZIAICA

Oh, stop! I'm old and withered,

and forgotten, too. Have you

heard from Master Tani?

NATHAN

As a matter of fact, I have. Come.

Let's go inside and you'll make

me some coffee, all right?

INT. BOGDAN'S SALON -- MOMENTS LATER

It is a dark, austere room. Haziaica is off screen. Nathan is alone. There are photographs on the credenza, oriental rugs on the floor, heavy curtains and a large clock. Nathan opens the curtains and the sunlight illuminates the room. He looks around the room thoughtfully, and shakes his head. Haziaica enters, and reacts to the brightness of the room.

HAZIAICA

(maternally)

Tell me, is Master Tani well? I

worry so after that boy, ever

since his mother died.

NATHAN

(gently)

Haziaica, Tani is a grown man.

HAZIAICA

I suppose. But he still needs

looking after. At least when

he was here I could take care

of him. She would have wanted

me to.

NATHAN

You know, you've been like a

mother to Tani, and I know you

want him to be happy.

HAZIAICA

Of course. He was such a happy

child.

NATHAN

(resolutely)

Tani's getting married.

EXT. ORCHARD -- DAY

Catul Bogdan and Lucica are getting married. The orchard at Tutava is rich and varied. A traditional Romanian wedding service is in progress. A priest in gold vestments is officiating amidst swirls of smoke from incense, candles. A deacon assists in the ceremony. There are guests in attendance along with Lucica, Bogdan, Gabriela, Nathan, The Neis, and the Novleanus. Lucica is dressed in white, to the left of the groom, and Catul is in a dark suit with a sprig of flowers on his lapel. They are wearing silver crowns on their heads. Gabriela stands to Lucica's left holding a large lit candle. Nathan stands to Bogdan's right holding another large lit candle. A montage of highlights of the ceremony with its rituals.

Close up Gabriela and Lucica's faces in profile in focus against profile of Bogdan and Nathan's faces in profile alternately coming into focus. Bogdan and Lucica kiss.

EXT. MONTAGE OF WEDDING CELEBRATION -- LATER

This scene calls for several traditional aspects of a Moldavian wedding. Many toasts, orations, dancing, etc.

EXT. BOGDAN'S HOUSE -- DAY -- sometime later

Carnations grow in place of the chestnut trees. Everything is brighter. The steps lead to a neat wrap around covered porch, with arched facade. White sheer embroidered curtains are in the window.

The house is now bathed in sunlight, there are flowers in vases everywhere, glasses with drinks on the table, hors d'oeuvre. Elegant wood furniture. Nathan, Bogdan, and Lucica are sitting and chatting intimately.

LUCICA

(charming, more mature)

What do you think, Nathan?

NATHAN

(thoughtful)

Well, I should say that Tani

is a very lucky man.

TaNI

I agree.

Nathan is surprised to hear this and looks with astonishment at Lucica.

NATHAN

I don't believe it! Catul Bogdan

is actually humbled!

Lucica smiles and shakes her head, then glances furtively at Bogdan. Suddenly Nathan raps his knuckles on the table and interrupts the moment.

NATHAN (CONT'D)

A toast--I want to propose a toast

to the woman who conquered the

magnificent Catul Bogdan.

Bogdan reaches for Lucica's hand and kisses it gallantly. Haziaica peers in from the kitchen doorway.

*Haziaica serves as a connection to the past in this scene. When she peers in, thus, she is seeing the flashback that occurs from her point of view.

FlASHBACK

A young Bogdan is standing at the corner of the table, near his mother who is sitting. Her face is obscured by the camera angle. She extends her hand and young Bogdan kisses it.

FlASHFORWARD

EXT. DANUBE RIVER[8] -- DAY

Bogdan, Lucica and Nathan are walking along the banks of the Danube. Lucica and Bogdan are arm in arm, Nathan is on the other side of Lucica. Their voices are spirited, but muted. In the foreground two swans drift along the water. Close up of one swan craning its neck.

TaNI

Ignore him, Lucica. When he affirms

it means he doesn't believe; when

he believes something, he says

nothing, and when he says nothing,

he is lying.

LUCICA

(defensively,

addressing

Nathan)

Loti is not a "romantic.” He is a poet--

NATHAN

(rolling

his eyes

dramatically)

Tani! Are you listening to this? Do you

know what she's saying?

TaNI

Yes. She is saying that she wants to

go to the Black Sea, and then to

Constantinople, Athens, Egypt, Italy

--Nathan, we shall return in a year.

LUCICA

(startled)

A whole year?

INT. BOGDAN'S HOUSE PARLOR -- AFTERNOON

Nathan is having coffee with Haziaica, looking at postcards.

NATHAN

Lucica says they are bringing you

a special present.

HAZIAICA

Such a sweet girl. She's like a

young swallow that's flown in

through the window.

NATHAN

So she is. We must make sure to

finish the house before she—

before they return. Do you think

she will like the way we enlarged

the windows?

HAZIAICA

(proudly)

Oh, Master Nathan, of course she

will. And the terrace, the climbing

roses--Master Tani would be lost

without you.

NATHAN

(discomfited)

I had expected a word from Tani,

a card--something.

HAZIAICA

(sympathetic)

But Master Nathan, look at all

the notes--

NATHAN

(emotional)

Notes from Lucica, thank God at

least we know they're all right.

HAZIAICA

(comforting)

Master Nathan and old Haziaica—

we're old friends, aren't we?

Nathan lays the cards on the table, and drinks his coffee.

HAZIAICA (CONT'D)

Master Nathan, are you in love?

NATHAN

(smiling

in spite

of himself)

Be serious, Haziaica, I'm too

jaded for that.

SUPER: MY YOUNG YEARS SOUNDED LIKE A SONG…

EXT. BOGDAN'S HOUSE -- DAY -- One year later

Fallen leaves frame the stone tiles. Trees are semi-bare. Lucica and Nathan are standing together.

LUCICA

Iasi is such an intimate city,

don't you think, Nathan?

Nathan smiles. Lucica searches his face.

LUCICA (CONT'D)

Why are you smiling?

NATHAN

(embarrassed)

Can you believe that I was

thinking the same thing?

Lucica cocks her head, then gazes around, and looks at Nathan disarmingly.

LUCICA

(affectionately)

You've been wonderful, Nathan.

NATHAN

Hmm?

LUCICA

The whole year we've been gone, and

you've made this house beautiful,

as though it were--

NATHAN

(directly)

Yours? But it is yours, yours and

Tani's. Anyway, I'm glad you like it.

Bogdan arrives and appears at the terrace doors. Lucica goes to him and greets him affectionately. Nathan gives a casual salute without moving.

LUCICA

(sweetly)

How was your day?

TaNI

(aloof)

Fine.

NATHAN

Let's go inside, shall we?

TaNI

(abrupt)

Don't be silly. I've some work to

do yet. Please, keep Lucica company.

Lucica and Nathan exchange a brief glance.

INT. BOGDAN'S BEDROOM  -- NIGHT

Lace curtains hang in the windows, there are flowers in vases, tapestries on the walls, a woman's dressing table, a large oak armoire, oak bed with a large down comforter, and large pillows.

Lucica is brushing her hair at her dressing table, and then slips into bed next to Bogdan. He seems distracted.

LUCICA

(affectionately)

What's the matter, Tani?

TaNI

Forgive me, Lucica, I just can't

seem to get used to being a

professor again--not after a year

with you.

LUCICA

(propping

her chin

in her hand)

Regrets?

Bogdan kisses her hand, her forehead, her cheek. He is conflicted.

TaNI

Do you realize that for a year we

spoke only to each other? Every

word that passed between us was

like a new universe. And now it

seems I've forgotten how to talk

to other people. I want you, only

you.

LUCICA

(intense)

You mustn't say that.

Lucica is caressing his face, touching his lips, pressing her face against his cheek.

TaNI

(curious)

What do you mean?

LUCICA

(enigmatically)

You and I are two free souls. Our

love is not meant to humble us, our

love is something to be proud of. 

I don't want to keep you constantly

beside me, nor I beside you. I ask

for nothing but your love and that

it must be entirely mine and no one

else's. But beyond that--beyond the

love we share you are free to live

your life. If you want to work alone

in your study, then do so; if you

want to see your friends, then go;

if you want to go to your club, or be

alone with your thoughts, I don't mind.

TaNI

(mystified)

But, Lucica, I am a changed man, and

now you want me to be the man I was

before I met you?

LUCICA

(frustrated)

No, but I want you to be who you are.

I don't want to hold you back because

that would destroy love and me with it.

Do you love me?

TaNI

(urgently)

Luli, Luli, how can you ask me that?

Bogdan buries his head at her breast. She consoles him, leans her cheek against his hair.

INT. BOGDAN'S HOUSE PARLOR -- DAY

Nathan and Lucica are drinking tea, Haziaica serves them pastry. Nathan is smoking a pipe.

LUCICA

(intimately)

Nathan, is it difficult for a man to

give up tobacco?

NATHAN

When you are Nathan, impossible. But

when you are Tani--easy.

LUCICA

What's the difference?

Nathan takes the pipe from his mouth and draws closer to Lucica.

NATHAN

He loves you. That's all that matters.

LUCICA

But I never asked him to change--to

give up smoking, and coffee, when I

know he enjoys it.

NATHAN

Enjoys it? No, Lucica, dear. Tani

doesn't really enjoy those things;

it's part of a ritual he performs

when he "creates". You know all

too well how sick he gets from

migraines, and since he has given

up tobacco and caffeine, he's a

healthier man for it.

Lucica is not convinced.

LUCICA

Perhaps. But he seems to have lost

his inspiration, and for a writer,

that is a most unhealthy state of

affairs.

Ext. University -- day

Lucica and Nathan have come to meet Bogdan. Amidst a crowd of students, he walks down the steps from a building. Lucica leaves Nathan's arm and rushes toward Bogdan who is unaware, until she gets closer and falls into his open arms. A flock of pigeons burst into flight all around them. Close up of Nathan lighting his pipe as he watches.

INT. BOGDAN'S STUDY -- NIGHT

Somber colors, heavy oak furniture, bookshelves throughout. On the desk are piles of papers, a stack of books, but with the suggestion that it is a sight of inaction. There are two a sitting chairs, a chess table and a small table with brandy, and a stack of unopened letters.

EXT. BOGDAN'S TERRACE -- CONTINUOUS

Bogdan, Nathan and Lucica are drinking brandy. Nathan is leaning against the balustrade, and Lucica is sitting very close to Bogdan, who now rises and kisses her hand.

TaNI

Forgive me, darling, but I have

work to do. Nathan will keep

you company, right, Nathan?

Nathan nods and raises his hand in acquiescence, puffing on his pipe. Lucica bows her head and sighs.

INT. BOGDAN'S STUDY -- MOMENTS LATER

Bogdan enters with great ceremony as though humbled by his own solitude. He makes a survey of the room, beginning with the stack of letters, the brandy, the cluttered desk. He hesitates at first but then pours himself a brandy and instinctively reaches into his pocket for a cigarette. His temples are perspiring, he smoothes back his hair and reveals a slight tremor to his hands. Through the open window he hears the muffled sounds of Lucica and Nathan on the terrace. He closes the window, gazes out for a moment, and then seats himself at his desk.

EXT. BOGDAN'S TERRACE --  CONTINUOUS

Lucica is running her finger around the rim of her glass. Nathan is sitting opposite her, smoking his pipe and sipping his drink.

NATHAN

It's good to see him working again.

LUCICA

(curious)

What do you mean?

NATHAN

I mean it's good to see him getting

back to the business of writing.

He's been on an extended vacation

ever since you came back from your

trip.

Lucica pushes her glass away, and Nathan appraises the moment.

LUCICA

(self-conscious)

I envy how well you know him.

NATHAN

(supportive)

Almost as well as you do.

They trade smiles of consolation.

INT. BOGDAN'S STUDY -- LATER

Bogdan is struggling to write. There is a haze of cigarette smoke in the room, but he is not smoking now. There is a soft rap at the door, and then it opens and Nathan enters.

NATHAN

(casually)

So how goes it at the university,

really?

TaNI

(disarmed)

I'm thinking of resigning and

taking a leave of absence, a

long leave.

NATHAN

That good, eh?

TANI

You know, Nathan, ever since

I met Lucica I've never felt

better. I don't get migraines

anymore, I eat well, and yet--

NATHAN

Don't tell me you miss your old

life?

TANI

Don't be ridiculous. I'm a happy

man, happier than I've ever been

before.

(frustrated)

I just can't seem to think anymore,

I can't write, for God's sake, let

alone lecture without constantly

looking at my notes.

NATHAN

Give it time, Tani. You know,

Lucica is a little worried about

you. She blames herself for your

not having done any serious work

since you returned.

TaNI

I trust you've reassured her—

she respects your opinion, I know,

and a word from you means a lot

to her.

NATHAN

A word from you would mean more.

TANI

What are you saying?

NATHAN

Let her in, Tani, let her be close

to you. She's an extraordinary

creature--bright, sensitive,

passionate--you mustn't keep such

a woman at a distance.

TANI

(suspicious)

Why, she's closest to me already.

Nathan extends his hand and shakes Tani's hand fraternally, somewhat abrupt, yet casual.

NATHAN

Well, I've got to be going, Tani.

Good night.

INT. BOGDAN'S BEDROOM -- LATER

Lucica is in bed, awakes from her sleep, but does not stir as Bogdan enters. He approaches and strokes her hair. He does not see her face. Without turning towards him, she reaches for his hand and kisses his palm gently. He slips in bed next to her and nuzzles his face in the back of her neck, and caresses her tenderly. She responds and turns toward him. There is delicate interaction between them, an exchange of a spray of kisses.

TaNI

I need you near me constantly.

I feel a million miles away

from you when I am at the

university.

LUCICA

I'll register for classes. I'll

be your student, like before.

Bogdan's mood changes subtly.

TaNI

Don't be silly.

Lucica stops, her composure tightens.

LUCICA

(defensively)

Why shouldn't I?

TANI

(slightly impatient)

It's just not possible. Not

appropriate.

LUCICA

(indignant)

Not appropriate? Not appropriate

according to whom?

TANI

You're my wife, Lucica, besides,

you've enough to do taking care

of me, and this house--

LUCICA

--As it is Haziaica and Dadaie

bump into each other all the time.

Bogdan kisses her intensely. She wants to resist, but he prevails.

TANI

Then... (kissing her)we'll just

have to make...(kissing her again)

the house bigger.

INT. BOGDAN'S SALON -- DAY

Nathan is leaning against the mantle, smoking his pipe. Lucica is sitting close beside Bogdan, his arm around her, head leaning against him.

NATHAN

So, Tani, what's new at the

university?

TaNI

(laughing,

embarrassed)

I'm afraid I'm out of my element,

old friend. Things have changed

quite a lot since we were students.

Lucica becomes attentive.

TaNI (CONT'D)

The fact is, I think I took that

post too quickly. I can't even

deliver a simple lecture. It

shouldn't be this difficult.

LuCICA

(pulling

away and

turning to

face her husband)

What is it that dissatisfies you

so?

TaNI

(amused)

Oh, it's not the university, no,

no it's just me. I am

dissatisfied with myself.

Nathan rolls his eyes and shakes his head.

NATHAN

Oh, no. Not this thing again.

TANI

Be serious for once, Nathan. I

feel like I've lost my

intellectual edge.

Close-up of Lucica who reveals she is wounded by this remark. Her eyes fill quickly with tears; one escapes down her face, but only Nathan notices. Bogdan exchanges glances with Nathan, and Lucica rises abruptly and excuses herself. The two men shake their heads and share a somber, awkward moment.

INT. BOGDAN'S BEDROOM -- LATER

Bogdan enters and sees Lucica standing in front of the window. She is gazing out, and does not turn around to acknowledge him.

TaNI

(gently)

Won't you come to bed?

LUCICA

(not

turning to

face him)

Will you reconsider my going

back to school?

TANI

Luli, please.

LUCICA

I think it would be a good thing

--for both of us.

TANI

(alarmed)

What do you mean?

LUCICA

(still

facing away f

rom Tani)

I could learn new things. We

could discuss them, vigorously...

Bogdan smiles, scratches his head, and walks towards her.

TANI

(consoling)

You've taken our conversation

entirely out of context.

LUCICA

(passionate,

finally turning

to face him)

You don't even write anymore.

Tani, you haven't written

anything since we got married.

And as for myself, I've become

so isolated, it's as though--

TANI

(concerned)

I thought you were happy here.

LUCICA

I am.

She rushes to him and throws her arms around his neck, kisses his temples and his face. She gathers him closer and closer and then continues speaking.

LUCICA (CONT'D)

But lately I feel as if a shadow