Texts and Translations

Merry Christmas!

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph

I think I first read about Diane Arbus (1923-1971), when already in England. As Frank van Riper indicates in his article, she indeed is often introduced as someone who documented "the lives of the freaks", with little else to go beyond that. Whilst it is possible to get too agreed with this image of Arbus, already her Aperture monograph has shown a complex artistic character through the numerous citations from Arbus's talks and interviews. The book has provided my personal quotations notepad with many valuable additions, some of which I gathered in the post Diane Arbus: "The Gap Between Intention and Effect". At the same time, studying the photos in the book and contemplating on the excerpts from her talks led to the lengthy philosophical meditation on the subject of human identities and language. 

Freud in Love

There is something about reading the love letters of the great thinkers, artists, politicians. This probably has to do with the very way of how we see Love. Although it can be not always happy or tender, we do expect it to make people who experience it tenderer and happier. And even if we know that those great people may have had the character difficult to live with, or were indeed powerful and even authocratic, in their love letters they suddenly appear to be just as vulnerable, insecure and hopelessly devoted, as we expect a lover to be.

This is precisely the case of Sigmund Freud, whose letters to his future wife span the years from 1882 (their engagement) till 1886 (the year of marriage). I am currently reading In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Zizek, who - if I may be allowed such simplification - stands on the crossroads of Marxism and Freudism. In fact, Marx is very appropriate to mention here, for, surely, at no point when he had been composing his works would he have thought that one day the body of work would be converted into an ideology. Likewise, Freud, as we can trace through some of his letters to his bride, had some inklings about the importance of his research, yet again he could hardly imagine that almost 70 years after his death (he died in 1939) people would still be making up their mind about his findings. Yet in his early letters to the girl five years his junior he is still at the threshold of his research, and one can safely say after reading the letters that Love made Freud.

Freud met his future wife, Martha Bernays, at the house of his parents. Martha's grandfather, Isaac Bernays (1792-1849) was the chief rabbi in Hamburg. In his letter from Hamburg on 23 July 1882, which begins with a citation from Lessing's poem, Freud narrates the story of his visit to the Jewish printer who kindly agreed to produce specially monogrammed writing paper for Freud and his wife-to-be: the paper was to bear the initials "S" and "M". The printer happened to have known the Bernays family (he had grown up with Isaac Bernays's sons), and Freud meticulously retells everything he had heard from the old man.

The original 1968 German edition of Freud's letters to Martha (edited by Ernst Freud for Fischer).

Freud's "despotism", which he acknowledged in that very letter, consisted particularly in the fact that he wanted Martha to use this specially produced paper to write to him. But then is it not also particularly romantic, especially bearing in mind the fact that at the time Freud's research was still in its birthpangs, and he was yet unable to sustain his family life? What comes across as despotism at first glance, at second looks more like a complete devotion - something that we may have lost these days.

His love for Martha was instant. I have recently read a short autobiographical essay by Thomas Mann, in which he tells, in very similar to Freud's terms, about his meeting, falling in love and marrying his wife, with whom he was to live for a very long time. The long period of solitary life, Mann says, didn't let him learn to hide his feelings. Freud states precisely the same in one of the letters, and all the letters breathe with the hitherto unused language of love, affection and friendship.

The latter - friendship - is important to underline, for, as Freud correctly points out in his letter from Vienna on September 25th, 1882, those in love must be ready to share with one another their concerns, heartaches, they must be mutually trustful, mutually reliable, and to realise that to live together is no pleasant thing, but an everyday labour.

Martha Bernays was receiving letters from her beloved from all over Europe: in the volume there are letters not only from Germany and Austria (1882-1884), but the Alps (1885) and France (1885-86). As such, the letters are an indispensable resource for researchers, even - unexpectedly - for those interested in Parisian fin-de-siecle, particularly, theatre. Several times Freud narrates, in a very comic way, of his sufferings for the sake of culture in the hot and stuffy atmosphere of a Parisian theatre. However, his troubles somehow turn out to be well worth themselves, for on one occasion he happened to see Sarah Bernhardt in Fedora (Theodora) by Victorien Sardou (a letter from Paris per November 8th, 1885).

The love for Martha virtually gave Freud a focus - not that he didn't know what to do with his life, but the necessity to make his work and research successful in order to be able to marry the girl he loved and to ensure her love for him changed him altogether. This is noticeable in the change of the tone of the letters: in 1882, when Freud is 26, he is insecure yet determined, he is laying the foundations for his happy marriage by writing long letters in which he professes his love and teaches his future wife how to love him. However, his spirits are not yet soaring. It should be correct to say that they never quite get to soar, for even by 1886, the year of marriage, Freud is still not sure of many things. But the influence of Martha is clear in that, while he is not sure of the income, he is sure of his love, or better, he is sure that his love is requited. Several times between 1882 and 1884 Freud noted that knowing Martha had made him determined and taught to respect himself. If in 1882 or 1884 he could occasionally reproach his bride for not writing regularly or in much detail, by 1886 he had to apologise himself for not being able to compose lengthy letters. Moreover, as time went on, the young scientist began to dream, as the letter per 20th of June, 1885, plainly manifests:

Princess, my little Princess,

Oh, how wonderful it will be! I am coming with money and staying a long time and bringing something beautiful for you and then go on to Paris and become a great scholar and then come back to Vienna with a huge, enormous halo, and then we will soon get married, and I will cure all the incurable nervous cases and through you I shall be healthy and I will go on kissing you till you are strong and gay and happy - and "if they haven't died, they are still alive today".

Last but not least, the letters contain meditations on life, art, philosophy, as well as Freud's reflections on himself. At no point does he seem to be totally aware of himself - of his talents, abilities, the traits of character. It is quite possible, however, that this lack of awareness, and hence the lack of self-security, the compensation for which he found in his love for Martha, was precisely the driving force behind his research.

More on Freud-Bernays relationship:

Young Dr Freud - Family: Wife

Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna

The image is courtesy of Sigmund Freud Museum.

The problems of adaptations - 1

I am currently giving much thought to the importance of screen adaptations. I have to think simultaneously of the stage adaptations, too, because very often we are speaking about one and same text to be adapted to either stage or screen. The reason why I am so preoccupied with the screen adaptations is because I feel that particularly Russian cinema of today suffers immensely from the lack thereof. At the same time, world's cinema is probably just as deprived by the lack of attempts to put to screen the narratives that exist out there.

To think about it, somehow it seems much easier to create a YouPorn channel, or to make a soft- or hardcore porn film, or to blend a pornographic content with some metaphysical or political discourse, or to simply create a laughable or crude flick, rather than to actually put to screen the narrative of de Sade as it is. This is not to defy or to forget Pasolini's Salo (which draws on 120 Days of Sodom), but de Sade had been writing on the wane of the Age of the Enlightenment, and he was drawing on the hyperboles of Rabelais and contemporary ideas of theatre. The scholars who pointed out to de Sade's striking theatricality are correct in that they first find the place for de Sade in his own time, instead of dragging him all the way into the 20th c., and openly link Sadism and Faschism.

Another example is, obviously, Hamlet. A classical role, a secret dream or ambition of many film professionals. Olivier's adaptation is Shakespearean, so much so that certain frames remind you of the Renaissance and Baroque paintings. Kozintsev's film departs from the Renaissance times and at times can even remind the viewer of Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Zeffirelli's adaptation is an interesting go at understanding Shakespeare that has taken the director well beyond Shakespeare's times, very close to Freud, but potentially not too far from the truth. The inversion of the well-known text and the re-positioning of Hamlet's soliloquy is a great achievement, in that we are invited to access Hamlet's situation on a different dramatic level. Usually, Hamlet's soliloquy is followed by his dialogue with Ophelia in which he orders her to become a nun. We are left not with Hamlet, but with Ophelia who is trying to cope with the evident state of mental break of her beloved. In Zeffirelli's film the dialogue with Ophelia precedes the soliloquy, so when Hamlet gets to his "to be or not to be", it is indeed the question, for at that point he is finally left totally alone.

However, all mentioned adaptations more or less faithfully follow Shakespearean notes: they are set in either medieval or quasi-medieval (~Renaissance) times. The adaptation by Kenneth Branagh is different in that it uses the full 1623 text, but brings it to life in the middle of the 19th c. Branagh chose the time for its state of political turmoil, sex and post-Napoleonic glamour. The problem, however, is that in 1848 The Communist Manifesto was published, not to mention many Revolutions that preceded and followed its publication. The political climate was far too different from the one in which Shakespeare conceived of his play. And the beginnings of psychiatry leave one suspecting that Claudius could easily send his nephew to the asylum, without hiring two guys to spy on Hamlet. This could indeed be a great and masterful adaptation, if it adapted the text to the time. Instead, we have something of a family theatre that went too far - pretty much like the feast in Luis Bunuel's Exterminating Angel.

Why, then, is it difficult to make a screen adaptation? I deliberately took two different examples, one of a narrative, another of a play, to underline the difficulty of adapting a text to the screen. Many more examples can be cited, particularly, The Death in Venice, as it was written by Thomas Mann and subsequently adapted by Luchino Visconti. Umberto Eco has a good sub-chapter on it in Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. It is interesting in itself that Eco chose a line from Hamlet to illustrate the problem: there is, of course, a big difference between a mouse and a rat, but exactly what did Hamlet mean, and thus how to translate it into a foreign language?

We may think this has no relation to cinema - that is, if we forget that a film is in itself a translation of a written text into the language of cinema. And here we have many more problems emerging that concern the crew and cast as the mediators between the source text and the target text. The 2006 premiere of the long-abandoned Quiet Flows the Don on the Russian TV comes to mind. Much of the criticism was based on the fact that the "foreigners" dared have a go at playing Russian characters. Strangely enough, a careful reader of Sholokhov's novel will recall that the Cossacks positioned themselves vis-a-vis even Russians. If the "spirit" of the Cossacks, as it is evoked in the novel, should be followed, then the only true adaptation can be produced by the Cossack community. However, it has not yet been produced, whereas the problems and questions that Sholokhov raised and discussed have not lost their vitality more than 80 years later, whereby it is perfectly possible for the "foreigners" to relate to these problems and, therefore, have a go at playing out the source text to their, foreigners', target audience.

This is all the better subject to think about as a Hollywood version of Master and Margarita is in the making. The fame of this novel is such that it is virtually unadaptable and that it sends a curse on its makers. Given the number of diabolic characters in the novel, both in proper and figurative sense of the word, this should not come as a suprise. What will be a surprise is, of course, how Hollywood treats Bulgakov's Soviet Moscow, especially given the changes in Moscow's political climate and in political relations between America and Russia in the recent years. The question is, perhaps: is there a possibility that this interpretation will be more political than any that previously existed? Shall it draw any parallels between Stalin's Moscow and Putin's Moscow?

What interests me, however, is the script. One of the problems of adapting Bulgakov's novel is that there are, in fact, two novels in one. Of course, Bad Education by Pedro Almodovar comes to mind, where the real-time events intertwine with memory flashbacks and a film directed after the script of a long-dead character. From this point of view, there should be no problem adapting the biblical and Moscow chapters in Master and Margarita. But then precisely how, and to what extent, should they be adapted? Even the 6-hours long adaptation of Quiet Flows the Don by Sergei Gerasimov naturally has a plenty of cuts from the original text which comprises 4 volumes. My view has long been that, in order to successfully adapt this novel to screen (or even to stage), it is important to study Bulgakov's own adaptations of his texts to stage. 

To be continued...