The Director’s Story

It has to be stated that cases of faithful translations into film are rare. This is because a film based on a literary work is usually projected through the director’s creative thought process, and ends up being her interpretation of the work. This might result in a completely different work of art altogether. Moreover, the visual medium gives scope to the director’s imagination to conceptualize the words of the author in a different way. An example is David Lean’s film Doctor Zhivago based on Boris Pasternak’s novel of the same name. The film is a ‘faithful’ translation, but Lean has exploited the advantages of the visual medium to the maximum. The vast and desolate expanse of snow that forms the backdrop as Zhivago is led away from Lara, becomes an excellent symbol of his hopelessness and sorrow. Similarly, the haunting melody that accompanies the presence of Lara along with the images of spring and hope, convey the essence of that character very effectively. Lean has used the cinematic medium efficiently to express Pasternak’s linguistic images.

Similar is the case with Satyajit Ray’s cinematic representations of various Tagore stories. The most famous among them are Ghare Baire (Home and the World) and Charulata. Charulata is the cinematic adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s short story Nashtanirh (Broken Nest). It deals with the boredom and frustration of a young wife whose intellectual husband has no time for her. She is attracted to her husband’s young cousin and is caught up in a moral dilemma. Obviously this internal conflict is the hardest to portray through cinema. But Ray has captured the essence of the bored Charulata through the famous scene where she runs from one window of her palatial mansion to the other with her opera glasses. For this rich housewife, life is what happens on the street outside which she can observe only from the isolation of her position behind the window blind. Ray has given a visual interpretation to Tagore’s imagination here.

However, in both the cases given above, the film agrees with the text it has borrowed from, and therefore can be called a faithful translation. There are instances where the director can adapt a story from a culturally alien context and transform it completely so that it looks to be a new story altogether. Shakespeare has perhaps been the most interpreted author like this. One good example is Vishal Bharadwaj’s Omkara which was an interpretation of Othello. Othello the Moor became Omkara the gang leader in rural Uttar Pradesh and Iago became the malcontent ‘Langda’ Tyagi. The intricacies of political power games in the Indian context was so successfully incorporated into the basic storyline that the film became convincingly Indian. The only connection with Shakespeare was the essential story.