Der hermeneutische Akt des Übersetzens. Schleiermacher und die Literaturverfilmung

Abstract

Friedrich Schleiermacher’s notion of translation can be applied productively to the dialogical relationship of literature and film. Whilst a literary translator translates the original text into the target language, thus stepping back behind the original, this process is entirely different in the case of literary adaptation. Here it is the director who takes the author’s place, ostensibly causing the original text to disappear. Furthermore, the translation of a literary text into the language of cinema is an interpretative engagement with, and an attempt to better understand, the original work. In contrast with translation in a stricter sense, which has by its nature a duty to uphold and to faithfully reproduce the original text, it is striking that the cinematic adaption cannot help but ‘outdo’ the original text, thus proclaiming its own ability to say ‘more’, or rather to put things in different terms to the original. At the same time, however, the adaption also tends to offer its own interpretations. This essay considers the extent to which Schleiermacher’s concept of translation can be applied as a critical category to the analysis of literary adaptations. Using Luchino Visconti’s film Morte a Venezia (1971) as a salient example, it will examine not only the congeniality of the adaption of Thomas Mann’s story Tod in Venedig (1912) but also consider whether it would be more apt to speak of a distortion or, in the words of Umberto Eco, a “transmigration of the theme”.