Random musings in this thread: Don’t want to dunk on Laal Singh Chaddha just based on a trailer, but it sparked a broader thought of how you can’t have a “Google translate” approach to art. Remakes are hard, because one has to answer the q - what is this work really *about*? /1
@teasri made a point in an exchange that Forrest Gump is “quintessentially American” and a metaphor for America itself and hence anyone remaking it hasn’t understood the movie. That makes sense to me /2
Q though is - in theory can there be a remake at the right level of abstraction- that is a movie that is quintessentially *Indian* through the narrative device of one man’s extraordinary life? I think it is possible, but literally everything would be different. /3
And if literally everything else is different, is it even a remake of the same movie anyway? In fact even the “narrative device of one man’s life” may not port well across cultural contexts. The individual as a metaphor for a nation/ civilisation *itself* may have deeper …./4
…resonance specifically for America and what it is as a nation. Brings me to a broader musing of syntactic and semantic approaches to language translation that I learnt of from the superb book “Le Ton beau de Marot” by Douglas Hofstadter /5
The book is about translating a minor poem by a French poet, Marot, into English, but what the book is *really* about is how the mind constructs meaning /6
A syntactic translation is basically a transpose operation - find the literal equivalent in language B from language A, adjust for grammar structure differences and presto - you have the result. A semantic translation OTOH is about translating *meaning* /7
That is hard enough to do with language. And with art - where we can debate so much about what it really means, and there are so many layers and metaphors - it is much harder. /8
An amusing example from my own teen years- a short story I read during by 12th in Andhra state board was translated from Hindi and had the phrase “there is something black in the pulse” 😂/9
A semantic translation may be something like “there is something fishy” conveys the instinctive feeling of something being off without being able to pinpoint it, and is a food based metaphor to boot /10
Artists have to be steeped in cultural context, as they stand on the shoulders of giants in invoking tropes, metaphors that conjure deep emotion with economy, by tapping into that reservoir of cultural memory /11 (end)
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