Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of various approaches to adaptation, identifies categories of adaptations, and compares the unique aesthetic systems of theatre and film, which impose their own rules on transposing the adapted text to stage and screen. Theoretical approaches are discussed in the context of theatre and film adaptations, predominantly from the region of ex-Yugoslavia.
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Notes
- 1.
“The original play, placed in the South London classroom in the early 1980s, is transported to Sarajevo around 2007. The original cast of six high-school boys is transformed into seven characters—three girls and four boys. The free adaptation, while keeping the original spirit and main themes, is grounded in the new European reality at the beginning of the 21st century” (Class Enemy n.d.).
- 2.
“Unlike Williams’s original play, Pašović’s version features both male and female characters—anything else, he says, would be unrealistic under modern conditions. He used some young ex-offenders as advisers on the production and he involved a pair of young hip-hop artists from a small town in Bosnia, who had been beaten up by a bunch of officially-sanctioned thugs after singing songs criticising the mayor on a local radio station. ‘I was outraged by that story,’ says Pašović. ‘So I called them up and invited them to come to Sarajevo to be part of this project. To beat up young people because of their songs—I felt that was not permissible, even in Bosnia in the 21st century’” (Brave Art 2008).
- 3.
Pašović has produced a Hamlet that is relevant for the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. According to Pašović, the production offers “an exceptional freshness and up-to-datedness, and at the same time [is] very theatrical in its oriental colors, lights, sounds and dynamics. Yet, it is the world filled with mysticism and danger. The story and the names are not changed, save the titles (sultan) and Turkey instead of Denmark and cultural references. Hamlet is universal, and could have happened at the Danish, Elizabethan, Ottoman or any other royal courts. We share the same problems and dilemmas” (Hamlet n.d. EastWest Center Sarajevo).
- 4.
Wayang Wayang Kulit is an Indonesian traditional art form of shadow puppetry.
- 5.
“However, I find it more useful to think of adaptation as a synonym of appropriation because it is too problematic to draw the line between a ‘faithful adaptation’ and an ‘unfaithful appropriation’ (faithful or unfaithful to what, anyway?)” (In Laera 2014d, p. 5).
- 6.
The Noh theatre practitioner Udaka Michishige sees “‘adaptation’ as ‘remodelling’ [kaizou], a term which describes the development and polishing of one’s technique over the years” (in Laera, ed. 2014, p. 82).
- 7.
Hutcheon, Linda proposes that the term “adapted text,” “the purely descriptive term” be used instead of the competing terms “source” and “original” (Hutcheon with O’Flynn 2013, p. 12).
- 8.
Laera warns that “domestication and actualization can easily become entangled in conservative discourses, reinforcing dominant views and the status quo” (2014d, p. 8).
- 9.
The cited sections and the title are translated by Garić-Komnenić, also later in the text.
- 10.
“Wagner (1975: 222–226) has suggested three categories of adaptations: ‘transposition’, in which the literary text is transferred as accurately as possible to film (Branagh’s Hamlet, 1996, for instance); ‘commentary’, in which the original is altered (as in Joffe’s Scarlet Letter, 1995), and ‘analogy’, in which the original text is used as a point of departure (as in Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, 1995)” (in Cartmell 1999a, p. 24).
- 11.
In Levinger and Goy’s translation, of the toponym “Hoćin,” the spelling is Chocim. In sources, the spelling of the town in today’s Ukraine is Khotyn and Hotin. I will use the novel’s spelling Chocim.
- 12.
Critics point out a discrepancy in Selimović’s time frame. The more accurate time of the novel’s story is the 1800s battles at “Hoćin” between the Ottoman and Russian Empires (my translation) (Hodel 2011, p. 144).
- 13.
The word connotes the following meanings: “the public, masses, ‘street,’ powerful individuals in Balkan countries and their doings behind the curtain” (my trans.) Hrvatska Enciklopedija. https://www.enciklopedija.hr/natuknica.aspx?ID=13188
- 14.
Cartmell refers to some productions of Jane Austen’s works.
- 15.
Levinger collaborated on the translation of The Fortress with her husband, Edward Dennis Goy, who is a Slavist associated with Cambridge University. She published her memoir Out of the Siege of Sarajevo: Memoirs of a Former Yugoslav in 2022. Pen and Sword. UK.
- 16.
“In German-speaking countries the term was introduced by Hans Thies Lehmann in 1999, who also named Tomaz Pandur as one of its representatives” (Šorli 2009).
- 17.
Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian’s review of the film: “Because [No Man’s Land] is set entirely within the trench and the surrounding terrain, it looks almost like a stage play, with Tanovic writing in a kind of postmodern Shavian idiom, denouncing the fact that so much diplomatic and military firepower is being deployed to so little effect” (In Bradshaw 2002).
- 18.
My translation.
- 19.
Bonitzer reflects that this radical space-off is created by “the duplication of the field from one shot to the next, the strange process which confirms a space in the juxtaposition of its fragments.” Pascal Bonitzer (trans.) Off-screen Space. Cahier du cinema. (December 1971–January–February 1972), 296.
- 20.
A comprehensive analysis of such devices would require an entire section to properly address the topic. This “blank” might be filled by future research.
- 21.
My translation of the quoted sections and later in the text.
- 22.
Derviš i smrt/Death and the Dervish (1971) Dramaturg B. Mihajlović–Mihiz. Director Branko Pleša. Atelje 212 Belgrade.
- 23.
Like his brother, Meša was a partisan: he joined the resistance in the early days of WWII.
- 24.
My translation of the quoted sections and further in the text.
- 25.
The following novellas have the space-time continuum: Exile, Excitement, Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone, The Wild Horses, Life Is a Dream, A Foreign Land Is a Place of Sorrow, The School of Dolphins, How Are You?, Should the Old Mandarin Die?, Death, The Old Dog, The Companion, Conversation with a Friend, The Morning of Victory. The other novellas, The Sweet-Scented Amoeba, The Miracle, Memories of the Beginning, On the Edge of Time, and The Pale Woman belong to another fictive level and are not in time-space continuum with the other novellas.
- 26.
E. Souriau considers that drama reflects the totality: “Scenic microcosms is able to represent the entire theatrical macrocosms.” Souriau defines it as “point stellairment central.” The central knot of such organisation of theatrical universum is the interpersonal tension. It is regarded as “la condition fondamentale du théâtre.” All antagonistic and condensing cosmic forces are concentrated around dramatic characters in the narrow scenic microcosms. The dramatic status of the literary text emerges from that very focalisation that displays the universal forces in the scenic microcosms (In Souriau 1950, p. 24) (my translation).
- 27.
A public announcer of important messages. Since Selimović uses various words of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian origin that create a specific stylistic effect, they are kept in their original form.
- 28.
Souriau singled out six basic functions in drama. One figure might perform more than one function as well as one function could be performed by more than one figure (Souriau 1950, pp. 86–112).
- 29.
Siegfried Kracauer agrees with this view only to a point. In the context of Souriau’s view—“[t]he camera cannot achieve complete identification with a screen character in the fashion of the novel. All it can do is to suggest intermittently what he sees and how he feels about it”—Kracauer argues that “Souriau underestimates the potentialities of film” (In Kracauer 1960, p. 236).
- 30.
“IMPERSONAL NARRATIVE discourse … both creates and constructs the fictional world while at the same time referring to it as if it had an autonomous existence, as if it pre-existed the illocutionary act. By contrast, PERSONAL NARRATION—for example, the narration of a character-narrator—does not create a fictional world, but simply reports on it, in the manner of a witness or participant …” (In Stam et al. 1992, p. 119).
- 31.
McFarlane points out that “cinema may be more agile and flexible in changing the physical point of view from which an event or object is seen, [but] it is much less amenable to the presentation of a consistent psychological viewpoint derived from one character” (In McFarlane 1996, p. 16).
- 32.
My translation from Sofija Novković and Olga Stojanović’s transl. from the German to Serbo-Croatian (in Hodel 2011).
- 33.
Sections of the novel have been used in adaptations, but the entire novel, on account of its lack of a central character, poses a fundamental difficulty for adaptation.
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Garić-Komnenić, S. (2024). Adaptation and the Adapted Text. In: Bosnian Literary Adaptations on Stage and Screen. Adaptation in Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47134-6_2
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