Literary style in the novel and on the screen: The intersemiotic translation of Far from the Madding Crowd

Abstract

Since Roman Jakobson’s classification of intersemiotic translation as a sub-category of translation, the term has paved the way for many studies on the close relationship between literature and cinema. Among different semiotic systems, the adaptation of literary works to the cinema occupies a central position in intersemiotic translation. In this respect, the present study approaches Far from the Madding Crowd directed by Thomas Vinterberg in 2015 as an intersemiotic translation of Thomas Hardy’s novel under the same title. It aims to evaluate how Hardy’s two major stylistic markers in the novel, i.e. sentence structure and imagery, are brought to the film by Vinterberg. To this end, the notions of transfer and intersemiotic transposition were used to identify related stylistic components in the novel and to compare them with their visual representations in the film. Thus, Vinterberg’s specific choices in reflecting Hardy’s literary style were analyzed. The findings of the present study suggest that Vinterberg paid attention to Hardy’s literary style and attempted to transfer it to the film to a large extent, as he reflected the writer’s sentence structure and imagery through various visual and auditory tools. However, it can be also observed that possibly due to the limited duration of the film, Vinterberg sometimes had to avoid transferring Hardy’s elaborate narration in some scenes.