What Destroyed the Stories are Always the Images

The exchanges of opinions of two great minds from the previous Relativity of Literature columns, translated…

What destroyed the stories are always the images, but, if you want to reach everybody, helping all out, you can’t do without the images.  The problem lies in how everything that gets turned into actions on screen gets involved by businesses, for the sake of selling out, the producers MUST degrade the quality of materials to public liking, let alone, changing the original storylines, and even, the titles are reworked, to fit the public tastes too.

On this long weekend, I’d stayed at home, and watched my old films, the newly filmed, “Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy”, written by John le Carré, was the BEST of its kind.  The casts contained some big names, the director was amazing.  Based off of those of us who are already, fans of the novel, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” IS the best name for the film, it would naturally attract endless number of fans of the book to watch, but, the director, le Carré didn’t think so, and so, they’d changed the translated title for Taiwan to “The Spy Movement”, and in Hong Kong, it became known as “The Intrigue of Network of Spies”, and yet, it’d still not sold out at the box office, and, in China, they’d kept the original name for the book, and, I have NO clue how the movie had sold there.

But, this trend didn’t just start today, back in the 1960s, Lolita by Nabokov, got translated to names totally UNRELATED to the original title in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but, on the issue of level, it may be, a bit better, compared to “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”, but the literariness, the artistry, had seemed, to have gotten lost somewhat, and the films all became sexual.  In 1997, the film was redone, it didn’t get aired here, in Taiwan, but, in Hong Kong, it’d still kept its original translated title, and in China too, and for that, I give them, thumbs up!

Jien Mao: Did “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” air in China?  I have No recollection.  But, even IF it did get aired, this movie would be hard, for the mass public to get.  I’m somewhat familiar with Le Carré’s works, but, it took me, a very long time, to finally get the relationship between the characters.  Of course, on the subject of titles, it still was, a HELL of a lot better than “The Spy Movements” that’s for sure.  But, there is an issue with the sales of the movie, I’m sure, that they did some statistical researches, before they decided to change the translated titles, to attract the original fans of the books, I suppose, this, would be an accumulation of the movie industries’ original sins and originalities, I suppose.  I personally, do not feel at all, that aversive toward these sort of adjustments.  For the sake, of attracting more audience, into this world of spies, using this sort of cheesy titles, would be the way to do it, I think.

Actually, there are, a TON of great Hollywood movies in old Shanghai, like the older films of Gone with the Wind, Ms. Lonely Hearts, Random Harvest, Waterloo Bridge, you can deduct the English titles from the Chinese translated titles.  But, the problem is in not getting the meanings of the titles lost in the translations.  We’re not just, translating the words, but also, the meanings of the film’s title to a different culture.

But, with the pull and tuck between English and Chinese getting greater, for instance we’d often refer to some foreign situation using the context of Chinese events, in other words, hell would happen, if we try, to translate the works of the Empress Dowager Cixi.

Fu: it seemed, we’d opened up, a CAN of WORM on debating about the right methods of translating.  Let’s call it quits this time, and continue again at another time, shall we?

And so, you CAN see, how sometimes, the translations of one thing can be totally UNRELATED, and OUT of context, to what the original writers mean, right?  Which is why, we must be careful, in translating works of one language to another, because things ARE bound, to get lost, and, if we’re not careful, then, we may have, RUINED the original ideals of the original artist, writer, poet, or whatever.