Is Film Adaptation Also a Translation? With Reference to Two Screen Versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Abstract

This article examines film adaptation of a literary work, which is regarded as an “intersemiotic translation” (R. O. Jakobson’s term). Research in the field of film adaptations has experienced a real boom abroad for at least the last two decades. In recent years, one can notice an increase in interest in this topic in Russia as well. This is evidenced by even a cursory acquaintance with newly written articles, monographs, and dissertations, whose authors approach the problem of film adaptation from the standpoint of a wide range of research fields: film studies, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, etc. At the same time, the question of whether an adaptation of a literary text can be regarded as a translation is still debatable. Employing this point of view, this article proposes to consider two adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet: by T. Richardson (1969) and by F. Zeffirelli (1990), where the directors abandoned the traditional interpretation of the play in the theatre and the cinema but did not choose to transfer the action to a different epoch. A comparative analysis of the performance of Hamlet’s monologue as a key moment of the protagonist’s internal conflict demonstrates that even though both directors keep the text of the monologue unchanged, its interpretation undergoes serious transformations. Due to its multimodality and in addition to the word, cinematography uses sound and visual images. These extra artistic means which cinematography has at its disposal offer a recoding of meanings akin to transcoding a text by means of another language, characteristic of translation in its classical sense.