Discussing Enemy (2013), his adaptation of Portuguese novelist José Saramago’s The Double (2002),... more Discussing Enemy (2013), his adaptation of Portuguese novelist José Saramago’s The Double (2002), French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve remarks: ‘the best way to respect an author is to be very honest about the way you adapted [their work] and to totally destroy the original and make it your own’. Villeneuve’s recreative (translational) use of ‘respect’ reverberates intertextually with André Bazin’s description of respect-based fidelity. For Bazin, utterly faithful yet completely original adaptations could be achieved through ‘a ceaselessly creative respect’ in which faithfulness and unfaithfulness paradoxically converge in translational acts of recreation. I term this paradoxical doubling the paradox of adaptation in Bazin. In part 1 of this article, I explore how Bazin illustrates that paradox in his essays about adaptation with examples of translation, and particularly with examples of Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe (an emblem of intertextual rewriting in French literature). Bazin’s references to translation provide an aperture into a wider understanding of adaptation’s intertextual and heteroglossic nature. Bazinian adaptations are faithful reconstructions and unfaithful transformations. As I discus in part 2 of this essay, Villeneuve capitalizes on this paradox in his recreative translation of The Double. The film reflects and ‘destroys’ (as Villeneuve would say) Saramago’s novel in order to recreate it. Through its re-theorization of Bazin’s fidelity as a translational prism of recreation, this essay contributes to the ‘resurgence of (pro)fidelity criticism’ (Hermansson) as well as to ongoing calls (Krebs, Venuti) for greater attention to the hermeneutic synergy between translation and adaptation studies.
Abstract:This essay, through a reading of Ernest Hogan's Smoking Mirror Blues (2001), challen... more Abstract:This essay, through a reading of Ernest Hogan's Smoking Mirror Blues (2001), challenges the entrenched subordination of fantasy and supernatural to the supposed rationality of science fiction. It explores how Chicanx and Latinx futurisms, of which Hogan's novel provides an exemplary text, reimagine the present as a world that no longer adheres to or is strictly determined by the tenets of western rationalism and scientific thought. Smoking Mirror Blues opposes a strictly scientific way of looking at and understanding (organizing and hierarchizing) reality that has roots in the racist and patriarchal histories of modernity and colonialism. Drawing on the groundbreaking work of Catherine S. Ramírez, Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson, B. V. Olguín, and other scholars of Latinx futurism, I argue that Hogan's novel twists the scientific and the supernatural together into a Möbius-like strip, not only to exemplify the combinatorial poetics of Latinx futurism, but to demon...
APOCALYPTIC ALLEGORIES AND POST-APOCALYPTIC UTOPIAS: SARAMAGO'S A CAVERNA AND SÁNCHEZ AND PITA'S ... more APOCALYPTIC ALLEGORIES AND POST-APOCALYPTIC UTOPIAS: SARAMAGO'S A CAVERNA AND SÁNCHEZ AND PITA'S LUNAR BRACEROS
Discussing Enemy (2013), his adaptation of Portuguese novelist José Saramago’s The Double (2002),... more Discussing Enemy (2013), his adaptation of Portuguese novelist José Saramago’s The Double (2002), French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve remarks: ‘the best way to respect an author is to be very honest about the way you adapted [their work] and to totally destroy the original and make it your own’. Villeneuve’s recreative (translational) use of ‘respect’ reverberates intertextually with André Bazin’s description of respect-based fidelity. For Bazin, utterly faithful yet completely original adaptations could be achieved through ‘a ceaselessly creative respect’ in which faithfulness and unfaithfulness paradoxically converge in translational acts of recreation. I term this paradoxical doubling the paradox of adaptation in Bazin. In part 1 of this article, I explore how Bazin illustrates that paradox in his essays about adaptation with examples of translation, and particularly with examples of Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe (an emblem of intertextual rewriting in French literature). Bazin’s references to translation provide an aperture into a wider understanding of adaptation’s intertextual and heteroglossic nature. Bazinian adaptations are faithful reconstructions and unfaithful transformations. As I discus in part 2 of this essay, Villeneuve capitalizes on this paradox in his recreative translation of The Double. The film reflects and ‘destroys’ (as Villeneuve would say) Saramago’s novel in order to recreate it. Through its re-theorization of Bazin’s fidelity as a translational prism of recreation, this essay contributes to the ‘resurgence of (pro)fidelity criticism’ (Hermansson) as well as to ongoing calls (Krebs, Venuti) for greater attention to the hermeneutic synergy between translation and adaptation studies.
Abstract:This essay, through a reading of Ernest Hogan's Smoking Mirror Blues (2001), challen... more Abstract:This essay, through a reading of Ernest Hogan's Smoking Mirror Blues (2001), challenges the entrenched subordination of fantasy and supernatural to the supposed rationality of science fiction. It explores how Chicanx and Latinx futurisms, of which Hogan's novel provides an exemplary text, reimagine the present as a world that no longer adheres to or is strictly determined by the tenets of western rationalism and scientific thought. Smoking Mirror Blues opposes a strictly scientific way of looking at and understanding (organizing and hierarchizing) reality that has roots in the racist and patriarchal histories of modernity and colonialism. Drawing on the groundbreaking work of Catherine S. Ramírez, Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson, B. V. Olguín, and other scholars of Latinx futurism, I argue that Hogan's novel twists the scientific and the supernatural together into a Möbius-like strip, not only to exemplify the combinatorial poetics of Latinx futurism, but to demon...
APOCALYPTIC ALLEGORIES AND POST-APOCALYPTIC UTOPIAS: SARAMAGO'S A CAVERNA AND SÁNCHEZ AND PITA'S ... more APOCALYPTIC ALLEGORIES AND POST-APOCALYPTIC UTOPIAS: SARAMAGO'S A CAVERNA AND SÁNCHEZ AND PITA'S LUNAR BRACEROS
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