Abstract
The possibilities and complications of making and interpreting intersemiotic translation are broader even than those of interlingual translation, partly due to the paucity of literature offering insight and guidance for encountering such work. It is the contention of this text that Antoine Berman’s Translation and Trials of the Foreign, written for translators of literary fiction, offers a yardstick for makers and interpreters of intersemiotic translation. Considering Berman’s ‘twelve deforming tendencies’ allows the difficulties and opportunities of intersemiotic translation to be tested and reflected upon. This process is valuable to makers and critical audiences of intersemiotic translation and provides a useful pedagogical tool. That the terms must be re-thought for non-interlingual translation results in a widely applicable and generative framework; an analytic of making.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this text ‘reiteration’ indicates any act of making something again, in whatever form. This could be an adaptation of a film from a book, the performance of a play or a piece of music from a script or score, cloning, photocopying, a translation of a book from one language to another, or a drawing of a photograph. It is an umbrella term that covers a huge field, only some of which would be categorised as either linguistic or intersemiotic translation.
- 2.
All of this is, of course, also true of interlingual translation but the intersemiotic translator, working (perhaps) between two non-verbal sign systems generally has more freedom to move, as it were. This may also reflect the less commercial nature of intersemiotic translation as a commodity. On this point, see also Chapter 16 by Jen Calleja in the present volume.
- 3.
Artists working in this field include Elaine Sturtevant (who made near-identical versions of works by Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and many others), Sol LeWitt (who produced instructions for large wall drawings that could be made and remade in different locations), and Sherrie Levine (who photographed the photographs of Walker Evans and, while acknowledging him, presented them as her own work), as well as my own drawings of works by Caravaggio and others.
- 4.
‘Making’ is used throughout this text in its widest and plainest sense: the generation of something new. It should be clear from the broad definition offered in the chapter’s introduction that the scope of intersemiotic translation can be read as extremely broad.
- 5.
24 Hour Psycho is also a rationalisation of its source material as it is silent.
- 6.
In the original, French, version of Berman’s essay the example is the same: ‘papillon’.
- 7.
By ‘medium’ I mean such things as water-colour, carved wood, clay, oil or acrylic paint, digital video, dance, or theatrical performance. This is not an exhaustive list and could be extended to include specific literary forms like haiku, sonnet, thriller, or limerick, etc.
- 8.
While visual works of art don’t have footnotes as such, they do often come with an accompanying text and it is here that some explanation can occur.
- 9.
Berman’s “cultivated” is a problematic term here, but I take it to be a synonym for sophisticated indicating that users of such a language are capable of nuanced expression and that the language supports and is supported by a pluralistic literature.
- 10.
Other examples that can be considered: Durational works (film, performance, etc.), unfold in real time, whereas a static image can be lingered over, or only glanced at. Oil paint and acrylic paint behave differently, meaning that certain painterly effects can more easily be achieved in one or other medium.
- 11.
There is also a visual allusion to a frame from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), which expands the rhetorical reach of the work even further.
- 12.
It is interesting to see how a BBC comedy—‘Allo ‘Allo!—solved this problem. A British airman masquerades as a gendarme in occupied France but speaks heavily accented English (as did all the ‘French’ speakers, but replaces ‘Good Morning’ with ‘Good Moaning’ and other malaprops to establish his lack of fluency.
References
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Eccleshall, B. (2019). An Analytic of Making: Translating Berman’s Twelve Deforming Tendencies. In: Campbell, M., Vidal, R. (eds) Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97244-2_12
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