Intersemiotic Translation as a Fluid Text: from Vladimir Nabokov’s Kamera obskura to Tony Richardson’s Laughter in the Dark
p. 219-228
Entrées d’index
Keywords : Nabokov, translation, self-translation, intersemiotic translation, Kamera obskura, Laughter in the Dark
Texte intégral
1Vladimir Nabokov’s Russian novel Kamera obskura was published in 1933 and first translated in English in 1936 by Winifred Roy for British publisher John Long. Nabokov, however, disliked her work and decided to retranslate the book himself by paraphrasing Roy’s “dull” and “flat” English (Nabokov 1989: 13) into a more suitable version of his polished Russian style. The self-translation was published in 1938 with the title Laughter in the Dark and turned into a film in 1969. Directed by Tony Richardson and based on a screenplay by Edward Bond, the adaptation of Laughter in the Dark resulted in what can be defined in Roman Jakobson’s terms as intersemiotic translation (Jakobson 1959: 139).
2The present paper adopts an intertextual approach to the analysis of Richardson’s film with the aim of blurring the boundaries between translation and adaptation studies, thus placing the film adaptation within the flow of cultural products that form the afterlife of a literary text. Furthermore, the case of Kamera obskura allows to correlate a process of self-translation, a very particular type of interlingual translation, with the results of its film adaptation.
Literature overview
3Semiotician Peter Torop broadened Jakobson’s translation paradigm by stating that all types of communication in culture can be represented as “a process of translation of texts (or fragments) into other texts” and it is therefore possible to describe culture as “an infinite process of total translation” (Torop 2002: 72). A significant literary text is neither a static nor an isolated entity within a cultural system: its publication is usually followed by a series of translations, adaptations, rewritings. As argued by Wimsatt and Beardsley, after its publication a poetic text does not belong to its author as it is “detached from the author at birth […]. The poem belongs to the public” (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954: 5). Hence, seen from this perspective a film adaptation can be considered a part of what John Bryant calls the “fluid text”, a work that co-exists in multiple versions. These versions can be created “by writers, editors, readers and audiences, who reshape the originating work to reflect their own desires for the text, themselves, their culture” (Bryant 2013: 48). When someone adapts a literary work to the screen, he is collaborating “in the making of the work in its totality. Like translators, adaptors transform a text for a new or a different audience, address new conditions and problems in a culture” (Bryant 2013: 48).
4Kamera obskura and all its subsequent translations can therefore be studied as a fluid text, whose incarnations include the 1969 film adaptation and are intertextually connected with one another. According to Sarah Cardwell, both film and text are “part of the extended development of a singular, infinite meta-text” in which each new adaptation is “a valuable story or myth that is growing and developing, being retold, reinterpreted and reassessed” (Cardwell 2002: 25).
5This perspective appears especially helpful because it allows to leave behind two sterile issues addressed both by translation and adaptation studies: the problems of a translation’s fidelity and its inferiority to the source text. These preoccupations stem from the fact that a translation, be it interlingual or intersemiotic, inevitably lacks the authority which signs an original text. However, following Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory and the 1990’s Cultural Turn, which reinterpreted translation as a process of rewriting – or what André Lefevere also called refraction – of the initial text, adaptation studies have also turned their attention to the tools discovered by translation theorists.1 Adaptations can also be fruitfully contextualized within a wider cultural framework, which considers such problems as the relationship of adaptations with their cultural and historical contexts. The use of translation studies in the analysis of adaptations may thus enable us “to apply complementarity, to abstract from literature and cinema and regard their connections as proceeding from the translation process” (Torop 2002: 87).
6In Torop’s view any text can be situated between two infinities: its generation and its reception. The authorial intent, seen as a proto-text, generates the work, but is disconnected from the reader’s reception, which occurs according to the reader’s personal experience, cultural background, native language. Intersemiotic translation shares some traits with interlingual translation, while diverging in others. Standard translators and self-translators work as intermediators between an addresser and an addressee who do not speak the same language. In order to be translated, a text must be read in the source language and rewritten in the language of the target audience. A film or a theatre play are the result of the transposition of a written text into another semiotic system; however, when intersemiotic translation occurs, a message is also read, interpreted and recoded for the target audience. Both standard translation and intersemiotic translation can therefore be seen as communication processes with an initial message (the source text), an addresser (its author), a reception by the translator, a creation of a new cultural product (the translation or the film) and its final reception by the target audience.
7As far as Kamera obskura is concerned, the story of this text is outstanding in the sense that it also includes a retranslation made by the author himself. The self-translator remembers the authorial intent that generated his work years ago, but the original intent will be influenced by the author’s continuous development as an artist and will therefore cause alterations to the target text. Both Winifred Roy and Nabokov modified the source text, but the latter, as a self-translator who has access to the proto-text, the authorial intent, is granted the authority to introduce more modifications. Nevertheless, some of the changes introduced by Roy also became part of Laughter in the Dark’s text.2
8The filmmaker, like the standard translator, does not have access to the authorial intent that generated the source text. However, he shares with the self-translator a greater degree of freedom and can pursue his own artistic goals: since his task is not interlinguistic mediation but intersemiotic transposition, the filmmaker may choose to adhere as closely as possible to the source text or focus on developing a single significant theme, a character or a problem posed by the literary source he adapts to the screen.
Main analysis
9Tony Richardson’s adaptation of Laughter in the Dark is set in the 1960’s swinging London. While its plot may still be summarized by the opening lines of Nabokov’s novel, “detail is always welcome” (Nabokov 1960: 1). Indeed, details shift the focus of the film and provide a different take on the same story.
10Not unlike the book, the film represents the protagonist’s descent into darkness as a consequence of his inability to make the right choice between spiritual and possessive love. The film is characterized by an ever-growing atmosphere of tension, and, despite some apparently joyful moments such as rock’n’roll parties and seaside holidays, culminates in Edward’s final physical descent into the dark cellar of his villa.
11Jane Grayson’s comparative analysis of Nabokov’s Russian and English prose (Grayson 1977) has shown that the process of self-translation of Kamera obskura resulted in a tendency to mitigate its German atmosphere. For example, the main characters’ names became more abstract and even acquired fable-like qualities: Bruno Kretschmar became Albert Albinus, whereas his antagonist Robert Horn was named Axel Rex, a surname that reminds of an axe or a king, all “fitting allusions to the role of cruel omnipotence he will play in the novel” (Grayson 1977: 34). Cinematic Albinus shed what was left of Bruno Kretschmar’s German skin by becoming a British aristocrat, whose new name Sir Edward More is reminiscent of “long, aristocratic traditions and artistic and intellectual pretensions” thanks to associations with Henry Moore and Sir Thomas More (Mazierska 2011: 57). The main character’s past – narrated in the second chapter of the novel – is omitted from the film; nor do we witness the first time Edward notices his future lover in the cinema hall. In the self-translation, Nabokov sprinkled this crucial location with pointers to Albinus’s future. A poster outside the theatre which “portrayed a man looking up at a window framing a child in a nightshirt” (Nabokov 1960: 10) replaced a random one in Kamera obskura, thus foretelling Albinus’s daughter’s fatal cold; the film Albinus watched absent-mindedly was not meaningless: on screen “a girl was receding among tumbled furniture before a masked man with a gun” (Nabokov 1960: 20). Interestingly, Winifred Roy omitted this sentence in her translation, whereas Nabokov restored and slightly expanded it in Laughter in the Dark, as if highlighting its importance. Richardson opted for a different but no less interesting solution. In the adaptation, instead of the film we see a close-up of Edward’s distracted face illuminated by the flickering lights of the screen. Here the filmmaker communicates through visual and auditory perception: in the darkness of the hall we see dimly illuminated faces and hear the sounds of the film – screams and gunshots – and, quite unexpectedly for what sounds like a dramatic scene, the audience laughing in the dark. Those who have read the novel may notice that this scene can be interpreted as both a prophecy of Edward’s murder by a gunshot and a criticism of his behavior: in this episode, the novel and the film complement each other.
12The episode continues with another example of such complementary approach. In the book, when Albinus sees Margot in the cinema hall, the narrator switches to internal focalization and rather grandly (but obviously ironically) describes through Albinus’s eyes the image of a girl in the darkness of the hall, as if it were a baroque painting with its characteristic light and dark shadows: “the limpid gleam of her eye as it chanced to catch the light and the melting outline of a cheek which looked as though it were painted by a great artist against a rich dark background” (Nabokov 1960: 20). The film adaptation of the written text allows to replicate this image when the girl enters a spotlight, which accentuates the chiaroscuro: she is dressed in black, with black hair and pale skin on a dark background. The female protagonist of Kamera obskura was named Magda and became Margot in Laughter in the Dark. This name was maintained in the film, but Margot’s “vulgar” German accent was substituted by Anna Karina’s Danish accent.
13Intersemiotic translation can generate intertextual connections with previous works that belong to the new semiotic system, in our case to cinema. Thus, as argued by Julia Trubikhina, the intertextual context of a film includes “its actors in previous films and previous roles” (Trubikhina 2015: 182). The choice of Anna Karina is eloquent per se and influences the audience’s perception of the character she plays. It is difficult not to associate Karina’s Margot with the actress’s previous roles in classic French films such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962).3 In 1969 Karina was a star of French nouvelle vague, but also “a symbol of sincerity in acting, of cinema in its purest and noblest form” (Mazierska 2011: 62). Unlike her literary predecessor, Richardson’s Margot is not obsessed with Hollywood divas and a career in cinema. She is instead represented as a rather simple girl, more innocent in her tantrums, despite the immoral way in which she uses Edward as a stairway to wealthy life. Karina’s previous roles may influence the perception of her character: she enjoys a good laugh and simple activities such as listening to pop music (the jukebox scene at the café reminds of Nana’s iconic dance in Vivre sa vie), shopping and having fun in the sea. She is naturally drawn to the pleasures of sex with her lover. Richardson shows the sexual attraction between Margot and her lover Hervé, whereas her sexual relationship with Edward is hardly mentioned. Incidentally, the latter element continues Nabokov’s own tendency to downplay erotic scenes in Laughter in the Dark, following Winifred Roy, who, as noticed by Jane Grayson, was the first to “tone down the erotic content of the novel” (Grayson 1977: 29). Besides, it was also Roy who increased Magda’s age in the first place. In Chapter 2 of Kamera obskura, Kretschmar guessed Magda’s age to be fifteen-sixteen and she was indeed sixteen years old. In Winifred Roy’s text Magda was “eighteen years of age” (Roy 1936: 20), whereas in the parallel passage of Laughter in the Dark the narrator does not directly address this issue, but Albinus “guessed her age to be about eighteen” (Nabokov 1960: 21). Karina’s character’s age is not mentioned in the film, but in 1969 the actress was 29 years old. This further shifts her relationship with Edward from a proto-Lolitaesque affair to a utilitarian liaison in which a common girl’s beauty and sexual availability are exchanged for a British aristocrat’s wealth, prestige and, ultimately, life. In the novel (especially its Russian version), Nabokov describes the man’s secret dreams of young girls, and thus Magda’s youthful simplicity and even her vulgarity turn out to be exactly what his marriage lacked. In the film, the social divide between the lovers stands out more intensely than their age gap.
14The real villain of the story is Edward’s nemesis, Hervé Tourace, the cinematic alter-ego of Axel Rex. Like Richardson’s Margot, he is obviously a foreigner,4 a mysterious and intriguing character with excellent skills in the field of visual art. In Laughter in the Dark, Nabokov stressed Rex’s passion for cruel jokes, stories and anecdotes, which play an important role in the representation of his perception of art and life. But the film, while portraying Hervé as a charismatic, intelligent and talented man (his fake art is just as successful as it is in the novel), does not feature any of these anecdotes in the character’s short but sharp dialogues. Nevertheless, combined with his cold nature and sadism, these traits make Hervé a perfect villain.
15The film separates two phases in the lovers’ relationship and their plot against Edward: first Margot and Hervé act like perfect partners in crime (their complicity is emphasized when the girl makes up Hervé’s “queerness”, whereas in the book it was Rex’s idea), but after the car accident, when the bizarre trio shares a villa in Southern Europe, Margot appears increasingly more hesitant and becomes frightened of Hervé’s cruelty.
16After the accident, the story becomes an escalation of psychologically humiliating torture for the main character. In the episode of Albinus’s stay at the hospital Nabokov switched to internal focalization to convey the man’s gradual understanding and acceptance of his blindness. The narrator reported mainly auditory and tactile impressions, whereas the visual information arrived only from Albinus’s thoughts and recollections about the accident and his own past. In a film this is quite impossible. Thus, to represent the man’s adaptation to his new condition, Richardson focused on Edward’s pain and his status in the surrounding world. Two lengthy close-ups on Edward allow the viewer to indulge on the blind man’s thoughts and emotions “mirrored on his face” (Nabokov 1960: 276), which was an activity Rex used to enjoy in the novel. One is a static medium close-up at the hospital, showing a crying and smoking Edward with a shaky hand, the other a 360-degree shot revolving around him on the villa patio: the man is immobile, absorbed in his attempt to hear the world, instead of seeing it. We – lucky owners of the gift of sight – observe Edward while he is trying to learn to use his ears, his hands and his nose to explore the darkness around him, but also to defend himself. A significant amount of time is devoted to showing Edward walking clumsily around the villa with his stick, sometimes almost pointing at Hervé by chance.
17The environment is intentionally beautiful and soaked in sunlight. Edward is dressed in a white outfit, which clashes with the black of his sunglasses and what Nabokov described as the “impenetrable black shroud” (Nabokov 1960: 257) wrapping his world. The house is also painted mainly white: as Margot happily and mercilessly promised Edward, “you’ll love the villa, it’s just by the sea and the views are so beautiful!” (Richardson 1969). All these details are meant to highlight the protagonist’s pain: he is now a helpless puppet in Hervé’s hands. Many episodes shot at the villa are taken directly from the book: Margot describes the house with the wrong colors as suggested by Hervé (“The fact that the blind man was obliged to picture his little world in the hues prescribed by Rex afforded the latter exquisite amusement” [Nabokov 1960: 261]); as in the novel, Richardson shows us the trio having lunch at the same table, Edward crawling into Margot’s bedroom at night through the window, Hervé whistling “like an oriole” (Nabokov 1960: 270), but also taking a photo of the blind man sitting in front of him (a detail made up by Richardson, absent from the novel). The final torture scene, however, is set outside. A naked Hervé tortures Edward from above by tickling him not with a grass stem, but with a big liana, on whose ending he will eventually place the spiny stem of a cactus. The high-angle is perfect here: while Hervé is shot from the back, we look down at Sir Edward More, crawling like a caged lion in a zoo, tortured and deprived of his dignity by an amused youngster.
18According to Vladimir Aleksandrov, Nabokov’s novel resembles Lolita “in the way the villain Axel Rex views and treats all other human beings in terms of aesthetic criteria” (Aleksandrov 1991: 248). Nabokov likes to play with his readers, and his most famous game is hidden at the core of Lolita’s narrative structure: Humbert Humbert’s charismatic monologue may deceive the reader into sympathizing with the narrator despite his cruel actions. In Laughter in the Dark the omniscient narrator allows Nabokov to condemn Rex, but the reader’s response to Albinus’s character remains a more complex problem. The narrative structure immerses the characters in a world filled with recurring colors, motifs and images which, like in a Bruegel painting, divert the reader’s gaze from Albinus and his unfortunate fall. As argued by Leona Toker, these images are not mere “ornamental vignettes” and bear a precise function: they do not so much “convey the atmosphere of the scene as eclipse it; Nabokov evokes the hypnotizing detail at the expense of the pain that has caused a character’s fixation on it” (Toker 1989: 115). Albinus is often so clumsy and ridiculous that his life, “viewed in detail, [has] the features of a comedy, if one forgets its sad ending” (Toker 1989: 121). When switching to internal focalization on Albinus, the narrator often achieves an ironic effect, which may amuse the reader despite the character’s suffering. A disturbing amusement is indeed one of the possible reactions to Albinus’s misfortunes: in his study on The Comic and Laughter, Vladimir Propp describes this kind of comedy as a situation in which fun is basically a “gloating delight” at “a person motivated not merely by trivialities and superficial aspirations, but by selfishness and mean-spiritedness” (Propp 2009: 70). In such cases, failure can be perceived by the audience as a form of punishment. Albinus’s foiled plan of a happy life with Margot is blind, selfish and sought at the expense of his daughter’s innocent life so his punishment may appear in tune with this. However, feeling amusement at Albinus’s pain equals stepping into Rex’s shoes and being shaken by an evil kind of laughter.
19Albinus’s family is given modest space in the novel, but is no less important for its understanding. Nabokov’s Elizabeth is a motherly figure with a quiet inner world, mostly devoted to her daughter. After her separation from Albinus, she develops an “almost telepathic sensibility” (Nabokov 1960: 155) and somehow perceives that her husband is in trouble thanks to what Julian Connolly termed “multidimensional insight” (Connolly 1995: 224). The narrator is also sympathetic towards Albinus’s daughter Irma: as pointed out by Connolly, Nabokov portrays Irma with a “rare faculty that marks her as a Nabokovian favorite” (Connolly 1995: 223), i.e. the ability to derive pleasure from the simple fact of being alive in this world. Irma and Elizabeth represent the dimension of true love, which Nabokov saw as “a partial release from the essential isolation of the self” (Boyd 1990: 366), an isolation that is represented by Albinus’s blindness and in his case can only be escaped through death.
20In the film, Edward is not directly responsible for his daughter’s fatal illness and his family’s suffering is mentioned in passing. As a consequence of these omissions and modifications to the plot, the cinematic version of Albinus results in being more worthy of the viewer’s sympathy (Mazierska 2011: 66). Thus, if Edward appears ridiculous in the torture scene with the liana, it is mainly because of what Luigi Pirandello termed “feeling of the opposite”: in the film we see a member of the London elite in a clumsy, humiliating and almost carnivalesque situation.
21Along with blurring Edward’s family’s experience after the separation, Richardson devotes more attention to the sociopolitical dimension of the story. The aristocratic family with its spacious apartment, a country house, chauffeurs and maids, symbolizes a conservative and traditional world which Edward tries to flee for the sake of youth and modernity. His wife, named Pamela instead of Elizabeth, is granted a more marginal presence in the film than her brother Paul,5 but one can still perceive that her relationship with Edward is a rather distant one, stressed by separate beds in their bedroom. However, it is also suggested that Pamela plays a supporting role in their marriage: in an episode set at the shooting of a television program about art, Pamela reassures her husband and advises him. Pamela and Paul’s disgust at Edward’s betrayal is nevertheless, as in the book, the disgust of people with firm (and possibly old-fashioned) moral ideas of love, family and marriage.
22Through a juxtaposition of details and cultural artefacts, such as music, clothes, furniture and artworks, Richardson constructs a new opposition. In Nabokov’s text there is a strong moral-aesthetic contrast between Albinus’s family (Elizabeth, Irma and Paul) and the three characters involved in the love triangle. In the film the contrast is of a more sociological nature, between generations and social classes each with its own taste: when Margot moves to Edward’s apartment, she invades his space with a wave of colorful inflatable cushions, armchairs and matryoshka dolls, which clash with the classic style of his rooms. This selection of details is used by Richardson to suggest that we are in 1969 and the new world defeats the old world.
Conclusion
23Interlingual and intersemiotic translation are processes of communication that involve mediation between the author of the source text and a new target audience. While interlingual translation’s main scope is intermediation between two different literary systems, film adaptations mediate between different semiotic systems. In particular, a case of interlingual self-translation gives birth to what Susan Bassnett termed a fluid text (Bassnett 2013: 19), where original and translation complement each other and can be both considered as versions of the same story. Similarly, the film adaptation is another interpretation of the novel and, as such, becomes part of the novel’s afterlife, which is also a fluid process of complementarity and intertextuality. In his version of Laughter in the Dark, Richardson continued to explore such key themes of the novel as betrayal, obsessive passion, cruelty and sadism. However, as a consequence of the displacement in space and time, along with some changes in the plot, Richardson pursued his own artistic goals and used Nabokov’s story, set in 1920’s Germany, to focus on the social divides that characterized Britain in his own time, the late 1960s.
Bibliographie
Corpus
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NABOKOV Vladimir, 1936, Camera Obscura, translated by Winifred Roy, London, John Long.
NABOKOV Vladimir, 1938, Laughter in the Dark. Reprint: New York, New Directions Publishing, 1960.
NABOKOV Vladimir, 1989, Selected Letters 1940-1977, NABOKOV Dmitri and BRUCCOLI Matthew (éd.), New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark Layman.
References
ALEKSANDROV Vladimir, 1991, Nabokov’s Otherworld, Princeton, Princeton UP.
BASSNETT Susan, 2013, « The Self-Translator as Rewriter », CORDINGLEY Anthony (éd.), Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture, London, Continuum, p. 13-25.
BAZIN André, 1948, « Adaptation or the Cinema as Digest ». Reprint: NAREMORE James (éd.), Film Adaptation, London, Athlone Press, p. 19-28, 2000.
BOYD Brian, 1990, Vladimir Nabokov. The Russian Years, Princeton, Princeton UP.
BRYANT John, 2013, « Textual identity and adaptive revision: Editing adaptation as a fluid text », BRUHN Jørgen, GJELSVIK Anne and HANSSEN Eirik (éd.), Adaptation Studies. New Challenges, New Directions, London, Bloomsbury, p. 47-68.
CARDWELL Sarah, 2002, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel, Manchester, Manchester UP.
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Notes de bas de page
1 The centrality of fidelity in translation studies is long overcome and is not to be discussed here. As far as adaptation studies are concerned, a few words of explanation may be useful. As pointed out by Deborah Cartmell, “since the beginning of cinema, adaptations have been a staple of the business of film” (Cartmell 2012: 2), but cinema was and sometimes still is seen as a lowbrow democratic form of art which targets a mass audience and “adapts” the masterpieces of world literature to the simplified dimension of entertainment. To study an adaptation, fidelity was seen as a useful parameter. In Bazin’s words, instead of revolving around fidelity, it is more fruitful to examine adaptations as a form of dialogue, a “refraction of one work in another creator’s consciousness” (Bazin 1948: 20).
2 For more detailed information on the changes introduced by Roy that were maintained in Laughter in the Dark, as well as on the methodology of this retranslation see Grayson 1977: 23-59.
3 There are coincidences between Nana – Karina’s character in Vivre sa Vie – and Magda: both are pretty young women with a short dark bob and a dream to become a cinema star, who ultimately end up selling their prettiness to men’s sexual appetites.
4 In the book he had “a rather foreign” attire (Nabokov 1960: 32).
5 In the self-translation Nabokov follows an opposite tendency: he adds information about Elizabeth and omits information about Paul.
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