Multilingual Encounters in the Contact Zone. The Transnational Film Adaptations of Tabucchi’s Dama de Porto Pim and Nocturne indien

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article focuses on international, multilingual film adaptations of Antonio Tabucchi’s writing. It uses two case studies, Toni Salgot’s 2001 Spanish-language Dama de Porto Pim and Alain Corneau’s 1989 French-language Nocturne indien, to suggest that the film adaptations significantly emphasise issues of multilingualism and transnational encounter. It focuses on the way in which the adaptations focus on struggles between European cultural and linguistic identities, played out in non-European spaces, with the power struggles of wartime Europe of particular importance. The article proposes a modified version of Louise Pratt’s ‘contact zone’ as a means of thinking through these encounters, in which struggles between competing European linguistic, historical, and cultural identities are played out in non-European spaces, against a backdrop of imperial ‘remnants’. The article draws on Gérard Genette’s concept of ‘hypertextuality’ as a way of highlighting the multilevelled process of rewriting that characterises film adaptation, especially adaptations of translated texts.