Subject
Translating a novel into film (fwd)
Date
Body
>Closer to the spirit of the novel?! In what way? An elaboration on Mr
>Miale's assertion will be greatly appreciated. Is it, then, my fault that I
>did not perceive the novel's "spirit" in Kubrick's film through which not
>even the novel's skeleton shows?
>Could one define that most elusive of notions as "spirit"?
>
Hmmm... Maybe not. Maybe you're right. I was thinking mainly about the
portrayals of the characters, and also about the means of translating words
into cinema. The Kubrick-Winters Charlotte was I thought possibly more
Charlotte than the author's. Same with Sellers' Quilty. They seemed to me
to embody the characters perfectly. Mason's Humbert was OK too, a
combination of charm and ick. There was more near-perfect rendition, as I
recall: Grey Star and the Schillers, Dolly's costume for The Hunted
Enchanters, the Farlows. And as for story elements of the "translation":
the ping-pong game, the incredible bathtub scene, Quilty's "home situation"
phone call, Quilty and Charlotte dancing.... The actual Nabokoveries, for
example the Poe-etry scene and the "Nurse that tooth line" (if I'm not
imagining it), worked well too.
>Nabokov admired the film as film, not as an adaptation of his novel,
>otherwise why did he publish his screenplay?
Well, it made good reading.
>N.B. Translations that don't read like translations are no translations, or
>words to this effect, VN remarked somewhere.
>
But can't they be great literature?
Seems to me that the Schiff-Lyne "translation," rather more "literal" than
the Kubrick perhaps, rendering the words but without the tune so to speak,
had the not quite sole virtue of presenting the horror of the affair more
unmistakably than the novel. The recent film however by turning Lolita into
a steamy seductress implicates its willing audience and itself --pardon the
hyperbole-- in the crime of Monsieur Humbert. It called to mind for me more
than anything a Shakespeareless Hamlet.