Translating myself #11: A translation tangent
“It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?”
Voltaire
Hello.
Welcome back to “Translating myself”, my time-limited newsletter series about translation. Today we start week 2 of 4.
Friday’s newletter was longer than usual. To paraphrase Blaise Pascal (or was it Thoreau?), I would have written a shorter newsletter if I had only had more time. Today’s will be shorter.
I recently went to the cinema. It was my family’s first foray into film on the big-screen for (at least) a year a half. The movie we chose for our triumphant return to the cinema was “In The Heights”. (You can see the film trailer here.)
Directed by Jon M. Chu (who made “Crazy Rich Asians”), it is an adaptation of the award-winning musical written by Lin Manuel Miranda (based, in turn, on a book by Quiara Alegría Hudes, who co-wrote the film’s screenplay.)
“In The Heights” tells the story of a group of Latino immigrants living in the New York neighbourhood of Washington Heights, pursuing their dreams as they struggle with the effects of gentrification. It is bursting with colour and emotion. It is packed with astonishing choreographies and wickedly clever lyrics. It was a blast of pure joy, and the best possible choice for our first film outing in a long, long time.
What does this have to do with translation, I hear you ask?
Plenty. Please bear with me…
At its heart “In the Heights” is about displacement and uprootedness, which – as I argued in an earlier newletter – are closely connected to the act of translation (or, at least, the drive to translate). More broadly, however, the film sparked thoughts on translation between genres.
Lin Manuel Miranda has been a family favourite since “Hamilton”, his hip-hop musical about one of the United States’ controversial founding fathers, first rapped and riffed its way into our home. Miranda got the idea for his block-buster musical while on holiday in Mexico, as he read Ron Chernow’s acclaimed biography of Alexander Hamilton, the United States’ first post-independece Treasury Secretary.
I have briefly touched on ways in which writing history can be understood as a form of translation – information from past times gathered and reshaped for readers in another era. Chernow, then, can rightly be considered as the most authoritative translator of Hamilton’s life onto the written page.
To Miranda, Hamilton’s story is about immigration, about seeking a sense of purpose, about the compromises of power and the pitfalls of pride. Alexander Hamilton may have lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but to Miranda the resonances were deeply modern.
He took it upon himself not only to translate (in other words, adapt) the Chernow biography onto the stage, but to tell the story through hip-hop. The result is a triumph of storytelling anchored in scholarship and song.
Miranda wrote “In the Heights” long before “Hamilton”. As with “Hamilton”, he based the play on a book, and undertook the arduous task of setting an existing story to music. Years later, and certainly buoyed by Hamilton’s extraordinary success, the show has been adapted for film – the latest phase in a process of translation from life to page, from page to stage, and from stage to screen.
It would be absurd to expect a work like “Hamilton” to stick slavishly to the details of the life of the combative founding father – Miranda has confessed to the need for compression, or elision, in the interest of telling the story. But surely it is the tension between fidelity to the original (whether it is the actual life, ot the biography) and modern audiences’ expectations that makes the play so riveting.
In a similar way, the adaptation of “In the Heights” to the big screen succeeds because the writers and the director understand what is unique about the language of film.
I have approached questions of translation at a slight tangent today. Tomorrow I will turn my attention back to translation issues emerging from my work with Dulce Maria Cardoso’s novels.
In the meantime, please share your own examples of ways in which we translate one form of expression (photography, music…?) into another. More importantly, perhaps, please feel free to share an example of something that has given you joy over the past few days.