Newsgroups: bit.listserv.cinema-l
Date:         Sun, 27 Sep 1992 19:36:57 CST
From:         Rick Francis <C47805NF@WUVMD.BITNET>
Subject:      Shallow and hopeless...

Peter, I've got to straighten out a few misunderstandings.  First, I
thought the "irony-impaired" note would suffice; apparently I was
wrong.  I love libraries, and spend probably 6-8/hrs per week in them.
My wife has worked in libraries for years, and I often hang around in
hem for fun and pleasure.  Thanks for the pity, but it isn't needed.

The point was pretty simple, really, but bears repeating.  No one, myself
included, has been defending colorization.  Got it?  What I did was try
to show folks why I think their basis for attacking it was misplaced.
The internal consistencies in your own comments indicates why.  You admit
that some films have the capacity to offer a meaningful interpretation of
a literary work, even granting that some films can
"stand alone as separate artistic achevements in their own right".  It would
seem at this point that you grasp that even a translation can be a valid
literary work, a notion that some have understood since reading The King
James Bible.  Great.  You seem to have it clear that even the sacred status
of the source text does not necessarily doom its translation.

But then you quote Weaver (and the "et al" is quite disingenuous, since
Weaver's view is NOT at all  the only view on the subject, not even in
the book you mean!), and tell us that doggone it, you
" realized how shallow and hopeless any translation of a literary work is."

What the hey?!?!?  Which is it?  So Pound's translation are shallow and
hopeless?  The Wizard of Oz is hopeless as a film?  _One Hundred Years
of Solitude_ in English is shallow and hopeless, or the original is not
a literary work???  That's backsliding, an inability to concede the
consequences of the examples you yourself gave!   And for an important
reason, the same reason this has to do with colorization of b&W films:

You are not distinguishing between the act of translation, and unsuccessful
examples of translation.  When folks on here say that colorizing b&w films
is a moral outrage etc because of the status of the originals, they miss
the point.  In fact
In fact colorizing B&W films IS a very bad translation, but not for those
reasons.  Not for the status of the original, and not for the point of
accessibility.  Colorizing is bad translation because superfluous and
non-interpretive.  In fact, that last sentence contains a redundancy:
non-interpretive MEANS superfluous in translation.

That's why I keep pointing out all of these analogies that you say don't
work with colorizing.  The analogies I'm giving ARE valid for all these
types of translation that you and others admit are legit, good examples of
transformation of originals (often literary originals),  BUT
BUT which would be disallowed under the reasons folks are giving against
colorization.  To me that means that they have the reasons wrong.


Look Peter, accessibility is a valid issue here, but you still haven't
addressed it.  That high school junior can READ The Maltese Falcon too.
When no one can really READ it anymore, then (and only then) will it go
from Art to Artifact.  I don't believe libraries are filled with fossilized
artifiacts, but I DO believe that if I REALLY believed in the sanctity of
the original piece (the concept leading to the false reasoning on colori-
zation), then they would be for me.  If I really believed that we weren't
constantly remaking the past by rereading it, refilming its literature,
translating it literally or figurativally, then I would consider it dead.
And if only a scholar could read Gilgamesh or other work, I would con-
sider it an artifact, fossilized until some TRANSLATOR could resurrect it
and make its SURVIVAL via translation.  By the way, I'm not far off here
from Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Task of the Translator".  If you are
going to quote Weaver (whose shallow and hopeless translation of _The
Name of the Rose_ certainly was well received, eh Peter?  How about its
translation to the screen?  Was that a shallow and hopeless translation of
the shallow and hopeless translation made by Weaver?), then you should
know some of the more established works in translation theory.
Ever read Paul de Man on Benjamin's essay?  Or Carol Jacobs, if you don't
like de Man's personal life.


As several scholars have pointed out, many translations were done in the
late Middle Ages and the Renaissance not because the intended audience was
unable to read the source, but precisely BECAUSE they could read BOTH
languages.  It was a means of offering an interpretation for the enjoy-
ment of the audience.  With film adaptations we often have a translation for
an audience with access to the source.  How do you explain that that is
not redundant, given your claim that you realized
" realized how shallow and hopeless any translation of any literary work
really is"?  It doesn't hold up, unless you think you're the only one
who realized this.  Incidentally, there are numerous examples in which
credible writers or critics find translations superior to the original.
Jorge Luis Borges (whom I read in the original ;) ) remarked about the
"superstition  supporting the idea of the necessary inferiority of the
translation"  *(my translation, albeit weak and shallow).  Borges else-
where commented that a translation, being a later draft of the original,
which was itself a draft, really OUGHT to be superior.  You ought to
try some of Borges's stories, even in translation.  Try Pierre Menard,
author of the Quixote.

By the way, Garcia Marquez said he thought _Cien a~nos_ read better in
English.  Heh.  Also Poe in French via Baudelaire.
      1
______________________________________
|  Rick Francis  C47805NF@WUVMD      |
|  Dep't of Comparative Literature,  |
|  Box 1107                          |
|  Washington University             |
|  St. Louis, MO  63130              |
______________________________________
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