Translation

Having read Dale and Crow, I ponder translation. D saw Captain America, which he enjoyed, as a comic book geek, for being neither too slavish, nor too alienated from the original material. I remember Charlotte's Web, animated, when I was small, and being aware even then of the difficulty of taking a literary form and turning it into a movie.

I saw Winnie the Pooh before reading it, and started off preferring the Disney version. But when I got older, I began to appreciate the subtly and grace of the Shepard illustrations, and the charm of the writing. Especially after the Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. D had never been read any of it, so when we listened to the Richard Briers version, we both fell in love, me - all over again. So, the process worked backwards. I found the facile animation pleasing when I was small, I found the words and full story satisfying as an adult.

Moving from one medium to another is never a straightforward word by word analysis. Always, there must be a complete rethinking of the story, and how it will read in a different form. Moving from painting to sculpture means an added dimension. Just as taking a novel and turning it into a movie is not a straightforward proposition. The televised version of Going Postal lost sight of this completely, giving up the story, and the characters, for the sake of the "look" of the thing. Disaster. The series of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. and Smiley's People, manage to both streamline and translate the story rather well, even as they trimmed everything that works in a novel, but flounders in a movie. The new version looks to have lost the plot.

The danger is always in being too slavish to the source, versus just getting a motif, and going off on a far tangent that alienates those who love the source, and confusing to those unfamiliar. Some stories are best as novels, some as film, some art works best in oils and two dimensions, some as sculpture. Whatever works best, but even if the theme is pervasive, it must change with each incarnation.

So, we must re-tell our stories, re-write our poems, re-paint our images, as each generation has a different context. Context is everything. Rare are the artists who happen to hit upon something so spare, so flexible, that it can be eternal. Like Shakespeare, or the cave artists at Lascaux. Poets are copied, and seem derivative. Citizen Kane is so copied it appears clichéd,
Picasso so reproduced he is passé. Leonardo become a kind of shorthand joke for genius. How many lost poets, who spoke so clearly to their own times, that everyone built on them to the extent that they are mocked and surpassed?

We live and die by our stories, so they must be kept current, comprehensible. No one understands about sheep and shepherds in our modern life, and we need a new, perhaps urban, savior. Or better yet, how to save ourselves.