TRANSPOSITIONS

1. Please transpose a classic work of literature into the here and now. Write a brief synopsis of your temporal transposition.

JOAN SCHENKAR: The expatriate Nora Flood, always a socially conscious woman, cannot return to her country house in the Hudson Valley after the recent election—even to seek out her faithless, fascinating lover, Robin Vote, gone to New York with the rich widow Jenny Petherbridge. Nora remains in Paris on the rue St. Romain, weeping for Robin and for her country—and writing checks (in euros) to charitable organizations de-funded by the Bush People.

Robin Vote—politics means nothing to her, le droit de brûler sa vie is all—randomly roams the American countryside until her feral instincts sense the violation-to-be of her rights as a lesbian, a smoker, an alcoholic, and a woman. She catches the first economy flight back to Paris—and to Nora’s waiting arms.

Robin’s husband, the faux-Baron Volkbein, and her ill little boy find comfort in the devaluation of the dollar. The baron takes the boy to New York, where Volkbein’s half-Jewish, half-invented noble ancestry recommend him to moneyed circles and he does very well with his quiet antiques business. The boy’s illness is diagnosed as environmental and he is overwhelmed with attention and interesting drugs.

Dr. Matthew O’Connor, still propping up the zinc at the Café de la Marie in the Place St. Sulpice in Paris, profits immensely from the influx of Americans fleeing Bush Country. The immigrants, clustering protectively together in shabby/chic hotels on the rue Jacob and the rue du Seine, all head straight for the café, where they buy Dr. O’Connor duck à l’orange after duck à l’orange. Dr. O’Connor continues to dazzle with his magniloquent soliloquies.

(Nightwood, transposed to the climate and temper of this American winter of 2004–5, has a happy ending, and is utterly ruined as a work of art.)

ROBERT KELLY:

THE TEMPEST

A man wakes up drenched and confused on the shore of an island: The sea is at his elbow, making noise, and out a few hundred yards among some rocks, a broken yacht is foundering. Quick winds and mackerel sky. Sore, he limps inland in search of whatever comes to mind, finds a cinderblock building with a gasoline-fired generator roaring away inside it, a dirt path up a hill under arches of aspen trees, grass at the top. He meets some drunken fishermen, then a degenerate island lout who sasses him but doesn’t strike.

And in the shade of a clam shack closed for the season, a young girl who talks to him and seems to feel some whim to help him dry and warm himself. She leads him farther up the hill to her house where her young husband is playing computer games. He looks up, smiles, looks back. The girl and the castaway talk at the kitchen table. He is shivering, so she covers him like a piece of furniture with a heavy old blanket. He is interested by the feeling of his clothes lingering damp and chill under the blanket. Is she warming him or keeping him cold? What do blankets do? What are things? The husband, a game ended, looks up and says, Who are you? but loses interest before the cold castaway can think of something to say. I know who you are, the girl says. You are someone very wise, the winds and waves listened to you once. And now you are old. She pauses to let her comment wash away. Then: Will you read the cards for me? Inside him some big answer is getting ready, but not to her question. He is catching his breath. He is coming home.

E. SHASKAN BUMAS: (Summary: Since the fall of Troy VI, Criseyde, now 2,900+ years old, has read Homer, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Mostly Chaucer and a little theory.)

Criseyde by the Riverside: In my dreams sometimes, I hear Trojan, though I can’t make out the words. / Speak up, / I shout, though I don’t even know how to say that, and I wake myself.

If I can remember my language, maybe I’ll remember my story, which only makes sense in that language in which nothing was absurd except the accusation of falseness. In Trojan, words were so beautiful that truth—any representation—was superflux. Sentences would swim among forty-two shades of subjunctive; verbs could begin in the past tense and end in the future, so just to speak properly was to prophesize; a simple / Good morning, / lasting three to five minutes, lightly alliterating, repeating tonal patterns, was more reassuring than an embrace, would actually help to turn a rotten morning good; and a / How you doing? / would bring a girl halfway up Mount Olympus.

Some Trojan survived: The multiple meanings of a word would split off into different directions. We didn’t have one word for / time / . We used  / river /  or / dragon / . To the west of the Bosporus, time was a river, and to the east, the river was a dragon. In Trojan, time was also a dragon with a bovine digestive system. It would charcoal-broil you with breath of fire, chew you up, vomit you out, and burn you again, before swallowing you once and for all.

I’ve forgotten how to die in Trojan. / Death / was a word chock-full of guttural consonants, sharp accents, and a final hiccough that would wind you. Maybe the word itself was a preview of death. But what do I know about my life and death, except that everything I say is false? Or so say the men in my life with words I never agreed to. Come back to me, little story. Come home, my darling tragedy.

RACHEL WETZSTEON:

A NEW LOOK AT ALEXANDER POPE’S 'THE RAPE OF THE LOCK'

You like it? Gentle mirror, flatter me
With falsehood and forced cheer, but can’t you see
A most atrocious crime has been committed
And Justice looks down with her pale brow knitted?
I entered with the boldest of intents,
Full of wild schemes and brave experiments,
For you know me—I love a little change,
I revel in the special and the strange,
But never dreamed I’d exit the salon
With all my happiness and hair quite gone.
I filled Ray’s hands with clippings I had brought,
Clear pictures of the kind of thing I sought:
Winona, I insisted, not Sinead.
I feel like Kojak; I wish I was dead.
Tell you what happened? Sorry, I’m aghast;
I’m breathless; it all took place so damn fast:
Ray bibbed me, hissed “You’ll love it,” and was off,
Stopping my mouth each time I tried to cough
A word of protest; then—punch line; don’t stir—
Like that intense, high-minded traveler
Realizing he’s already crossed an Alp,
I looked into the glass and saw my scalp.
The tears, the screams, the pleas; it was too awful;
Such sheer perversity cannot be lawful—
Satanic Ray declaring “You’re so fetching”

While all his minions in the back were retching.
Where have you gone, my late, my golden friends
With all your splendid highlights and split ends?
Why have you hailed, my fair, my trusted Ray,
Such horrors down upon me? You will pay.
(I’ll do such things to make you squirm and fret,
Although I don’t know what they are just yet.)
Now I shall bolt my door and be unwell
And learn the hard way how the monkish dwell,
Or else pack up my cares in Samsonite
And wander quickly off into the night.
No, no, despite this day of dreadful strife
A tiny voice is saying, Get a life.
The world is over; hairdressers are rats,
But I’ll be practical, I’ll shop for hats.
I’ll roam the stores of Bleecker Street selecting
The broadest-brimmed disguises, and inspecting
The lovely girl with the amazing tresses
Who lets the wind’s soft, amorous caresses
Billow her wanton ringlets into space—
Unless they billow back and veil her face.
Unless her long locks, doing what they’re bidden
By her own demons, keep the skyline hidden.
Unless—ah me, my thoughts run in a maze;
It’s really been the headiest of days—
Her precious curls are snakes in seraph’s clothing,
Gossamer foes who tease her into loathing
The joys and fears of looking at the city;
Unless she’s blind as fate, however pretty.
Saint Joan and Saint Belinda, give me strength;
The Anistons and Paltrows flaunt their length
On giant billboards, and the susurrous
Young Britneys pertly warble, Be like us.
I called their sweet luxuriance my own;
I met my tonsured double with a groan;
But while contentment and clear minds were dozing,
Something was quietly metamorphosing:
Although my new look makes me want to weep, it
Does wonders for my sight. I think I’ll keep it.

GREGORY MCNAMEE: The year is 2028. Twenty-five years after the fall of Baghdad, thirty veterans of the Iraq War—which has still not ended—gather in a bus station in Canterbury, North Dakota. From there they will embark on a long ride to Fort Worth, Texas, where they intend to visit the recently opened 120-story monument to George W. Bush, honoring the beloved president-for-life of the Republican States of America: “A tower built of felony / and dollars from an Enron spree,” as one of the malcontents among them says.

From their experiences in battle, some of the pilgrims have become sensitive to injustice and will take the opportunity of that visit to question the God of Battle, celestial and terrestrial. Others, happy with things just as they are, want only to honor the relics of fallen crusaders. Whatever their motives for calling on Bushland, most will visit the nearby VA hospital in the hope of determining the origins of their strange discomforts, coughs, and rashes.

In that end is our beginning. The long bus trip forms the stage on which our pilgrims will tell their tales: A perfect West Pointer, a lusty multiple divorcé from nearby Bath, a gold-chain-clad dermatologist, a bouffanted televangelist, an adventurous chef, an infantry corporal on permanent reserve duty, and a policeman at home in the darkest cells of Abu Ghraib, among many others, all pitch in to keep their comrades entertained and edified and sometimes mystified as they motor from one Cracker Barrel to the next down the endless highways of America.

MARNIE MUELLER: My offering is the leave section of All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque.

As Paul Baumer’s bus nears Reading, he looks across the outlying cornfields he thought he’d never see again to the crows dipping down to pluck up the last kernels from the stubble and rising, black against the low, gray sky. His mom meets him at the bus terminal. She hugs him but looks distracted, patting him nervously on the chest. “They say it’s more awful than FOX News is telling,” she says. He reassures her that he’s okay, that it’s not as bad as she thinks. When he gets home, his sister says to him, “She’s been in bed for months. They say she has the cancer.” The possibility of his mother’s death brings unfamiliar tears to his eyes, hitting him harder than the headless bodies, the detached rigor mortis arms and legs, screaming children, rivers of fucking blood he has witnessed in the past year, or even the deaths of his closest buddies, including Kemmerich, his high school friend, whose mother he must visit later in the day. He spends a few hours at home, but he can’t stand his father’s ignorant questioning about the war. Paul thinks, The jerk don’t understand that I can’t talk about those things. When his father gets fed up with the one-word answers, pops a beer without offering one to Paul, and then turns up the volume on the TV, Paul gets out of there and goes down to Boomers for a draft or two to fortify himself for what he must do. He’s drinking his second down, enjoying the Jets game, when his old shop teacher hoists himself onto the next stool. “How’s it going, soldier? We’re fucking proud of you, you know?” He shakes Paul’s hand, saying, “You keep givin’ them what they deserve. You’re winnin’ this one for all of us.” Paul mumbles something about “It may not be that easy.” But the shop teacher doesn’t want to hear it. “Sure, the little battles may not go so good, but in the end, we’re going to beat the fuckers, big time, ’cause of boys like you. We got Saddam, right?” Three beers in him, Paul goes to Kemmerich’s house. Kemmerich’s mom sobs and screams at him, “How come you’re living and my baby’s dead?” After she calms down, he lies to her, saying that Kemmerich died from one bullet through the heart, that her son didn’t suffer one bit, saying that his face was calm. She doubts him, but he swears it on her bible thinking, What’s the fucking big deal? Just one more dead soldier outta thousands. “May I never come back,” he says to her, “if he wasn’t killed instantly.”

MO WILLEMS:

MACHIAVELLI ON THE TELLY

THE SCENE: A television studio appointed to resemble an upscale living room. A chipper BLONDE chats amicably with THE MAC (Niccolo Machiavelli).

BLONDE: Tired of not controlling your destiny? Or the destiny of your downtrodden subjects? Well, get ready to change your life with The Mac’s new “Live Like a Prince” system! I’m here with the developer of the system, an honest-to-goodness Renaissance man, Nicky Mac!

MAC: Great to be here, Blonde. Y’know I started this system for Larry Medici, who by the way, is MAGNIFICENT. And I said to him, I said, “Larry. You’re a Prince. But ya gotta find a way to hold it all together. I mean the barbarians are at the gate and they ain’t sellin’ Girl Scout cookies, if ya know what I’m sayin’!”

BLONDE: And what I love about “Live Like a Prince” is that you’ve got it all in one simple system!

MAC: That’s right, Blonde. The Kinds Of Principalities And The Means By Which They Are Acquired; How To Avoid Contempt And Hatred; Concerning The Influence Of Fortune In Human Affairs, And The Manner In Which It Is To Be Resisted; even Concerning Those Who Become Princes By Evil Means! It’s all there!

BLONDE: I love it when you say even if there’s no “I” in “TEAM,” there is one in “CORRUPTION.”

MAC: That’s what I mean about TAKING IT TO THE MAC! (Both the BLONDE and THE MAC share a loud, disconcerting laugh.)

BLONDE: (suddenly serious) We’ll be back with more exciting things that THE MAC can do for you after this message from your local PBS affiliate . . .

STEPHEN KUUSISTO: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (retrofitted for the winter of 2005, post-election in the United States)

In the updated version of Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of racism and economic hostility, 49 per cent of the voting public now lives underneath the subway system of New York City. These millions live in tiny, separate rooms, stringing together individualized garlands of stolen light bulbs. Outside, and far above, the country is presided over by a “born again,” hostile, and unsuccessful businessman from Texas who believes that when the electricity flickers, something occult must be taking place.

In this postmodern, post-industrial, post–information age version of the book, the ending can be rewritten by every single one of its estranged sub rosa readers. Here is my version:

The White House is enveloped by an enormous cloud of methane. The Army is called out (like in those ’50s sci-fi flicks) but the troops can’t penetrate the fog. You can imagine the dialogue for yourselves. When the cloud lifts after three days, the Presidential mansion is empty. The New York Times calls the event “the crapture.” Conspiracy theories; finger pointing; odd disappearance of Charlton Heston. Feel free (and desperate) to write your own conclusion.

ROBERT GLÜCK: H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine transposed into the world of my office, 2004

In this country, a beautiful race of humans writes the topic sentences in a green paradise, and a stunted race trapped below the ground writes the exposition and occasionally eats one of the topic-sentence humans.

ALICE MATTISON:

PARADISE LEASED

Larry Satan, a New Hampshire real-estate developer, has been caught masterminding a scheme to turn over the White Mountain National Forest to lumbering interests and has been exiled to North Conway, where he spends his time at boring factory outlets. He conceives a plan to add to his holdings by persuading Adam Schwartz and Eve O’Connell—crunchy granola types living in the mountains—to sign over their land to him for several thousand years. Sin and Death, Republican legislators, raise a lot of questions but then agree he can do it. Raphael Angelo, an environmentalist, visits Adam and Eve and talks to them at length about the wisdom of deeding their land to an environmental organization so it will be wild in perpetuity, also warning them about Larry Satan’s scheme. But when Larry Satan appears to Eve dressed as a snake while she prunes shrubbery in her garden, he persuades her that her life is unnecessarily limited and gets her signature on a contract to lease her property to him. When Adam finds out, he is distressed, but signs as well. Adam and Eve are driven from their land, and bravely look forward to finding something almost as good in Vermont.

DAVID VIGODA:

THE CALLING

Imagine you grew up in a gated community outside a large city, wanting for nothing. After an elite college, you entered your father’s prominent law firm or your uncle’s prestigious investment bank, where everything came easily because you were being groomed for the top.
One night, while walking off an alcoholic daze near your downtown club, you notice a policeman troubling a half-crazed drunk or homeless man. You approach as he strikes with his stick, perhaps two, even three times. The man cries out in pain and bewilderment; you ask what’s going on. With grunts and a vague gesture, the policeman tells you to move on; you ask again.

He backs off only a little when he sees your dinner jacket and white tie, perhaps also noticing the studied abandon of your expertly coiffed hair or the unmistakable inflection of your voice. He is cowed but surly. “Do we have a problem?” he asks.

“Not if you tell me that man deserves to be beaten.” You are staring, obliging him to stare back. You have no thoughts, but something else wells up, something mysterious that you do not recognize. It expresses itself as rage. You grapple with the officer, his gun goes off and he falls, blood gushing. You now realize you are dreaming. You have never seen so much blood, a red pool just grows around the man’s middle; it’s fascinating, as dreams often are. He twitches violently then is still.

Looking around, you realize you are alone, perhaps in the entire city. Even the beaten man is gone and you wonder whether he was really there. The night is vast and you stand above a bloody corpse, bloody. Of course this is a dream. That would explain the complete silence. (The Book of Exodus, Chapter Two)

THOMAS GLYNN: As George W. Bush woke one morning after a night of peaceful and untroubled dreams, he found he had been transformed into a gigantic rat. He was hot and unusually sweaty and his huge body made a large cavity in the bed. He was covered in brown hair, matted and smelly where he had been lying on it. Tiny pale-colored insects wriggled in his fur. What has happened to me? he thought.

Pieces of last night’s meal were lodged in his teeth. Alongside him was a large gray snake, which caused him such a fright that he bit hard into it, then squealed loudly as he realized it was his own tail, half as long as he was. But he gave it little thought as he rolled out of bed, hitting the floor with a bump. He wanted to open a window to escape the heat in the room, but standing on his rear legs, he found that his belly did not allow him to get close enough to push the window open. Mr. Bush was a commercial traveler of sorts, though he had considerably more resources at his disposal. He tried to open the window again, when he heard commotion outside his door.

“George, George, is that you? Are you okay?” He tried to answer but his voice came out funny, too high pitched. Americans would never stand for that. The door rattled and shook. “George, please open the door!” Suddenly it burst open and there was Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney. “Oh shit!” said Condoleezza, who dropped her Invade Iran briefing papers all over the bedroom floor. She turned to Dick, right behind her, who said firmly, “No problem at all. From now on I’ll do all the press conferences.”

ARTHUR SAINER:

THE TRIAL

Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph Kerry because one fine day the Ashcroft aides woke him up and questioned him, smiling slightly, about why he imagined he could possibly run for President. They cautioned him as he put on his trousers that he was under arrest, that it was illegal even to mention this arrest to anyone, particularly his spouse, and that, by the way, the Constitution had been suspended, and this suspension was also top secret; only the White House and a handful of Ashcroft antiterrorists knew of this. A lawyer? Sorry, counsel and habeas corpus had been done away with. You’re sleepy? You’ll have plenty of time to rest in Guantánamo. Oh, and you’ll be given a number, so start memorizing it. Now don’t make a fuss, your case is not terribly important, except to you.

HARRIET ZINNES

METAMORPHOSIS: HAMLET

He is alone.
He is not alone.
He is wandering.
Hamnet. Hamlet.
Let him be
in history
in time
out of time
To be
but likely
not to be
in history
in and out of time
“To be or not to be.”

CHARLES A. WACHTEL:

THE METAMORPHOSIS

On the eve of the inauguration that will mark the commencement of the second term of a reelected president, more than half the citizens of the country over which he will continue to preside have a dream, and in it, the reelected president undergoes a sudden transformation greater than a business traveler waking to find he has become a beetle, more profound than the blind seer, Tiresias, reaching down to discover his old man’s body is now an old woman’s body, too.

In the dream, the reelected president, tired from work, switches off the lamp on his desk and, after rising slowly to his feet, finds himself looking through a field of pure darkness at a mysteriously luminescent stone wall. It’s as if behind the hard mortar and dense stone is a source of light so powerful that a small portion of its radiance penetrates from the other side; it’s as if he is watching the glow through a glass of brandy.

His displacement realizes itself in a shock of fear—the body he has found himself inside of, so unlike his own, has been feeling it for days—and the great pain of an inflammatory rash in his groin, caused by the continual wearing of multilayered clothing in extreme heat. He takes his right hand from the trigger guard of the weapon he has been tightly holding since he arrived, moments ago, raises it to his face and, like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream finding the leathery snout of a donkey with his trembling fingers, discovers night-vision goggles and, above, a helmet. He flips the goggles up in time to see a dotted line of tracer fire coming from somewhere behind him, arching through the blackness above as the machine-gun rounds they’re interspersed with chisel a line across the top of the wall he is facing.

A knuckle conks the back of his helmet twice, and the voice of a man he didn’t know was behind him says, quickly, “And now folks, a word from the sky.”

The body he has found himself in, which has been here a long time, drops to the ground. By the time his face has buried itself in the dust and bits of broken pavement, he knows where he is. What surprises the reelected president is not how the blast tries to pull his insides out through his ears, but how the earth dropped and slammed back up against his torso before he’d even heard it.

He will lie there for hours; he will lie there until a single voice, a man’s voice he cannot help but regard as beautiful, calls the sun back into the sky.

He, unlike so many, would survive this war, and will next find himself in the dimmed fluorescent light of a closed department store, running a vacuum cleaner across a carpeted floor, watching Otis, his supervisor, who gets two dollars more an hour than he does, walk toward him. Survival has required that, over time, the reelected president lose bits and pieces of the awareness of who he actually is, and his recognition of self has, by this point in the dream, been almost entirely replaced by a familiar sadness, a sense that the exertion of gravity has grown stronger in its relation to his own life’s energy and slowed each of his movements down. The waves of recurring images barely reach him now. He still does not turn his head when called by the name over the breast pocket of his coveralls, but the mixture of fear and sadness has become familiar.

Otis, now standing beside him, places the tips of his thumb and forefinger together and twists his hand to say, “Turn off the machine.” In the silence that follows, Otis tells him that he’s here to say good bye. “I grew up in this town, but now I’m leaving. Everyone knows me. Everyone has always known how I live my life, and you know what?” he asks the reelected president, “Most people couldn’t care less. But since the state voted in their same-sex marriage ban, things have been changing. Not so you’d notice, at first. Not one thing—a lot of things.

“First the mechanic, a guy I’ve known since high school and who I’ve gone to since I was old enough to drive, decides he can’t inspect my car anymore. Then there’s a word scraped into the door of my locker at the Y. Then a friend comes home to find every goddamned window of his house broken . . . on both floors!” He becomes quiet for a second, then says, “And a lot more than that. All together enough things to add up to a reason for not giving this state another dime of my goddamned taxes.

“It’s like I’ve left already,” he says, then starts to say something more, but stops. Tears are forming in his eyes. He reaches out and shakes the reelected president’s hand. “The only life I have ever known,” he says, “and I feel like I’ve left it already.”

But then, unexpectedly, his face brightens. “Oh, there’s one bit of good news. The only good news in all of it. I told the folks in the office that you were by far the most qualified to replace me, and guess what?”

The reelected president knows he doesn’t actually have to answer, so he doesn’t speak, but as it dawns on him that two bucks more an hour will mean another eighty bucks a week, he cannot prevent a smile from stretching across his face as he nods in anticipation of what Otis will say next.

JOHN REED: What a transparent way of pandering to the backlist, and an atavistic cultural climate.

LENORA CHAMPAGNE: My 1996 play with music, My Nebraska, borrows characters and incidents from Willa Cather’s My Antonia, but time-travels, juxtaposing scenes from the days of settling the plains to the current-day dispossession of family farms by corporate giants. The play spans roughly one hundred years and conveys the sense of loss experienced by Jim Burden, who grows from a boy to a man of forty-five during that time, suggesting that Midwestern Americans’ identity is somehow frozen somewhere around the 1950s—a suggestion that feels unfortunately too true at the current moment.

RICHARD KOSTELANETZ: I wrote the following skilly-minimal fiction out of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich:

MILESTONES IN LIFE

0 birth
1 teeth
2 walk
3 talk
4 read
5 school
6 toys
7 television
8 games
9 swimming
10 hobbies
11 books
12 baseball
13 football
14 friends
15 girls
16 smoking
17 sex
18 college
19 fraternizing
20 copulation
21 study
22 commencement
23 military
24 marriage
25 job
26 daughter
27 promotion
28 son
29 responsibility
30 exhaustion
31 new job
32 failure
33 unemployment
34 divorce
35 indolence
36 loneliness
37 remarriage
38 extravagance
39 indebtedness
40 raise
41 daughter
42 perseverance
43 executive director
44 speculations
45 new house
46 cadillac
47 son
48 country cottage
49 over-extensions
50 collapse
51 separation
52 psychoanalysis
53 reconciliation
54 grandchild
55 prosperity
56 drinking
57 exercise
58 remarriage
59 new house
60 another child
61 re-education
62 another job
63 reassessments
64 babysitting
65 speculations
66 resignation
67 infidelity
68 class reunion
69 depression
70 twins
71 renovations
72 greater responsibilities
73 vice-presidency
74 financial success
75 reassignment
76 divorce
77 corporate takeover
78 great-grandchild
79 surgery
80 rehabilitation
81 retirement
82 directorships
83 domestic pleasures
84 new teeth
85 cataracts
86 security
87 indolence
88 blindness
89 death

SERGE SCHMEMANN: After “The Grand Inquisitor,” The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1879 (with a nod to Constance Garnett’s translation)

THE GRAND SHERIFF"

"My action takes place in the twenty-first century, and at that time, as you probably learned at school, it was customary for heavenly powers to come down to earth,” John explained.

“So He comes down to this hot southern town where on the day before almost a hundred Arabs had been strung by the Grand Sheriff in the presence of the whole population.

"He comes softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, everyone recognizes Him. Children throw flowers before Him, sing hosanna. At that moment the Grand Sheriff himself passes by. He stops and watches, then orders the deputies to take Him. The crowd instantly bows down to the earth, like one man, before the big Sheriff. The guards lead their prisoner to the station. The air is fragrant with magnolia.

"In the darkness the iron door of the cell is suddenly opened and the Grand Sheriff strides in. He goes up slowly and starts talking: ‘Is it Thou?’ but receiving no answer, he adds at once, ‘Don’t answer. There’s nothing You can say, anyway, that You didn’t say in the Scriptures. Why are You back, anyway? Tomorrow I’ll hang You, and the folks who kissed Your feet today will cheer. You know that, don’t You? Didn’t You used to say, ‘I will make you free’? Well, You’ve seen these ‘free’ men. We’ve paid dearly for it. For twenty centuries we had to wrestle with Your freedom, but now it’s ended, and I intend to keep it that way. Hey, You were warned. But You didn’t listen! Did You forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?”

ROSANNE WASSERMAN: I used Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s oh-so-classic forty-four Sonnets from the Portuguese as launch pads for an updated sonnet series. I preserved the rhyme but jettisoned her meter for a shorter, though still rhythmic line. Here are a couple of the results. 

22.

If we could move into a perfect space
a dance floor lit by phosphorus
leaving the world well lost for us
would it be enough to see your face
beside me in that timeless place?
Ignoring the news and its bitter chorus
letting ambitions and books ignore us
getting to know you by smell and taste
would we make some difference
beyond ourselves? loving with all our might
so strong that even day could sense
the shape of Eros before his flight
from knowing, how bodies are innocence:
the sexual sweet dark night.

23.

I live how you taught me to live
thirty years ago, bum that I was,
AWOL from office jobs just because
the sun wasn’t shining. I didn’t give
a hoot, but you showed me a positive
model to do as true love does.
Disguised as a worker now I buzz
though lilac, anemone, clover: viv-
id fields of work in worlds considered
real, where we pull from air
our children, books, and houses littered
with bagel crumbs, pennies, and graying hair.
Heavy with miracles, unembittered,
I shoulder my magic share.

VINCENT KATZ: Aristophanes’ The Clouds transposed (with politicians taking the place of philosophers)

A fifty-year-old man is in bed. He is tossing and turning, can’t sleep because he’s worried about the debts he’s piled up at the race track. If only his good for nothing son would help him, but he’s only a playboy—fast cars, fast girls, fast food. Suddenly, he’s got it! He’ll send his son to Sokrates’ Famous School for Politicians. He remembers the ad: “We’ll teach you to make the weaker argument seem stronger, to win any debate, how to mince words, convince with style not substance. Ten easy lessons, reasonable rates.” He convinces his reluctant son to sign up. The son becomes shrewdly argumentative, forcefully combative. He convinces his father to move out of the house and live in the garage, while the son plans his political career. A chorus made up of Lady Representatives sings to the young man. Like sirens, they seduce him with the lure of unlimited access to pleasure and power. Things are going well for the takeover, his first election is only days away. The father suddenly flies into a rage and goes to attack the school and its famous teacher, to tear it down if possible. On his way there, he has a revelation . . .

JOHN CHIOLES:

OEDIPA

You could tell the old woman had never been a mother. That day, as the sixteen-year-old Oedipa sees her old aunt rising from the gorge-side of the island, a horror-struck sorceress, there is something at once beautiful and grotesque about her, young and old. Her body is a map; she is the mascot of this place, Mystic islet on the Atlantic lapping side of Rhode Island.
The craggy old woman delivers her premonition about Oedipa’s mother having given birth in secret. She’s suddenly oracular, some said she had a bit of the local rut-gut to drink, while on work detail at the end of the ravine; for Oedipa’s mother was in those days an inmate at the Free Prison, a minimum security jail, tucked away at the other side of the gulf. After the horror she vanished to the far side of the islet.

So Otis came and won old Camerons world & he was the city himself, the city of her who ate children up alive. It is sometimes referred to as Commara. So they are all sons and daughters of Cameron; but he starts with the words little ones, seafaring speech; the sons and daughters of Cameron, all children and afflicted, diseased and suffering the tortures of time-warp, seared by the fires of the plague.

Otis of the mountain what all men call the great. It is an epithet; it really means his mind was good enough to solve the great riddle that no one had managed& and sphinx, who had to have eight virgins and young men each year to eat up in her cave& sphinx made this demand of the city until such a time when someone came along to solve the riddle; at such time it would be defeated and no longer be given the little ones. Of course Otis did it, therefore, Otis the great, an epithet.

Some say Oedipa was raped by the brutish, handsome Otis, as her mother had been before her. If so, the old woman would appear again and tear him apart limb from limb and hang the pieces to dry high up on the proud elm tree. That, she would.

JAMES MORROW: When I first heard that Mel Gibson would be renovating H. G. Wells’s sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds for contemporary movie audiences, I was admittedly skeptical. Was it conceivable that Gibson could follow up The Passion of the Christ with an equally nuanced masterpiece? I am delighted to report that Invasion of the Bubbeh Snatchers is an absolute triumph, beginning with its central conceit of a Satan-spawned race of Martian atheists who sally forth from their home world to spread epistemological havoc throughout the galaxy. While the scenes of these extraterrestrial secularists burning parochial school children alive are a bit hard to take, we should not allow such moments to prevent our savoring the glorious pluralism that characterizes the roster of victims: Catholics, evangelicals, fundamentalists, right-wing Baptists, and, of course, the Jewish grandmothers to whom the title alludes. (Let us have no more talk of Gibson’s alleged anti-Semitism.) But the director’s real coup de grâce occurs in the final 15 minutes. You will recall that Wells’s novel ends with the imperialistic Martians succumbing to common atmospheric microbes. Gibson’s variation on this resolution, already so renowned I can discuss it with impunity, proves utterly riveting. I shall not soon forget the look on the alien commander’s face when he realizes that, despite his race’s familiarity with the events of September 11, 2001, he failed to reckon on the most invisible, intangible, and yet invincible fact of life on planet Earth. Once the American heroes unleash their faith-based defenses, the zeitgeist vapors pouring from every altar and chalice in the republic, events come to a rapid conclusion, with the benighted invaders suffocating in the very suburban streets they’d hoped to incinerate. If the year 2005 brings a more satisfying cinematic climax, I’ll have to see it to believe it.

TRANSPOSITIONS

2. What is your favorite movie adaptation of a work of literature? Why? If you want, briefly consider the generic imperatives of each medium and the meaning of such terms as "faithful translation" and "true to the original."

JONATHAN FRANZEN: There are plenty of bad movies from bad books and bad movies from good books and good movies from bad books. But really good movies from really good books? My list, which is almost vanishingly short, is topped by Paul Mazursky's Enemies: A Love Story and John Huston's Wise Blood. You can tell in each case that the director deeply got the novel, and that’s all any writer can ask for. The rest is mostly luck.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG: A lot of terrific movies are adapted from books, but the books aren’t necessarily "literature,” e.g., the Philip K. Dick novels from which Blade Runner and Total Recall were quarried. Or Gone with the Wind. Or Dr. Strangelove, from Peter George’s non-funny Red Alert. Bad movies from great books are also legion—David Copperfield, Moby Dick, The Bible. Two cases that spring to mind of very good books being made into very good pictures are The Wizard of Oz and I, Claudius—though the latter, admittedly, was a BBC television series, not a theatrical movie. Maybe very, very high-end hackwork suits the movies better than outright literary greatness.

BROOKS HANSEN: Lolita, the first one—the Kubrick (1962). I like it because there are so many respects in which it grossly distorts all the basic features of Nabokov’s book. (Nabokov, it should be noted, is credited with having written the screenplay, but don’t be fooled: His overlong script was largely trashed by Kubrick.) The structure of the story, the age of the girl, and Peter Sellers’s scene-stealing presence throughout are but a few examples of the nearly unforgivable and wanton abuse of what was in the original, and one can certainly understand the author’s apparent dismay at the result.

And yet and yet and yet, somehow the movie does manage to capture the spirit of Nabokov’s prose—credit to Kubrick, of course, but also and more principally to James Mason, whose performance as Humbert Humbert succeeds miraculously in doing what the book did, too, which is to make me laugh out loud at a situation and a character that I should otherwise have found revolting (and, having disarmed me with humor, is able then to touch me fairly deeply).

By contrast, the 1997 Adrian Lyne version was actually quite faithful to the book, at least in all the superficial ways. It tracks the plot scene for scene, and sweats like hell to make me see the girl through Humbert’s eyes (here played as Victim by a sweaty, twitchy Jeremy Irons). And yet by straining so hard to honor all the ostensible elements and perceived “intent” of the original, the Lyne version comes off as dull and tendentious, occasionally pornographic, not sexy, and most crippling of all, absent all the belly laughs which are the essence, the genius, and the real scandal of Nabokov’s creation.

SCOTT HIGHTOWER: Visconti’s Gattopardo and Death in Venice, Fellini’s Satyricon, Martin Ritt’s Hud, Michael Curtiz’s The Egyptian, and several embodiments of Chekhov’s Three Sisters all come to mind. But my all-time favorite movie adaptation of a work of literature is hands down Pasolini’s 1970 reworking of Euripides’ Medea.

Medea (played by Maria Callas) breaks with the pagan culture of the landlocked vineyards of her ancestors and runs off to her destiny with a modern explorer/rascal, a suspicious stranger in a philosopher/king-led city-state. Pasolini uses Turkish topography and then rocks east and west. He stirs in primeval notions of holiness, sacrifice, romantic love, an epithalamium, a chorus, the dull primal howl of Nepalese horns. Medea’s ultimate demand for reciprocity leaves her not just as a tragic figure of filicide in the modern sense but also as a classical heroic figure that makes it through riddles and ambivalences to a state of formal self-possession. In a literary sense, she transcends her status and takes on heroic proportions.

MINDY ALOFF: La Belle et la Bête (Jeanne Marie-LePrince de Beaumont, 1756 [trans. into English 1757]; Jean Cocteau, 1946): Madam LePrince de Beaumont, an author of seventy books, is now remembered only for this one. Although the motifs of her story probably originated in the remote past and can be found in folktales around the world, her fine literary rendering—intended as a kind of moral education for young ladies—was based on a 1740 story collection by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbet, Dame de Villeneuve. The subjects of Beauty and the Beast are obsession, curiosity, and renunciation, dramatized in an erotic context.

Jean Cocteau, a man of the theater and himself an experienced scenarist for the ballet, consulted with peerless ballet designer Christian Bérard to turn the story into a parable of reality’s need for the imagination, which, in this brilliant black-and-white movie, becomes a tribute to both balletic ceremony and silent film. In Cocteau’s kingdom for the Beast (played with hoarse agony and smoking claws by Jean Marais), objects are alive, and the space created by Henri Alékan’s camera is deep, dark, and visceral. The lovers pass through it in slow motion, as if underwater, to the richly textured and frequently choral score of Georges Auric. It is a tragic world in which the characters renounce their pride—“I am the monster,” proclaims the Beauty of Josette Day—and find themselves in a comedy. The joy, however, is only terrestrial for a moment. This is France in 1946. Lying in one another’s arms, Beauty and her Beast float into the sky like smoke.

JEANNE MARIE BEAUMONT: One of my favorite adaptations is the 1995 film of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, directed by Roger Michell. It neither sentimentalizes the past nor compromises Austen’s austere but amused views of the social fabric. Of the many adaptations of Austen novels I’ve seen, this one most successfully sidesteps a Laura Ashley over-prettiness by creating a sense of nineteenth-century true grit. The coats look worn and soiled at the edges, the interior lighting is accurately dim, and complexions do not appear smoothed or glossed with twentieth-century cosmetics. The acting, particularly by the complicated Amanda Root in the role of Anne, is nearly faultless. Root communicates a bruised soul yet loyal friend; a passion roils deep in her eyes, but her rather plain surface is all calm duty and quiet resourcefulness. She’s the type of woman most around her take for granted but Austen never did. The supporting cast hits all the right gossipy, frivolous, conflicted, and baffled notes. The set scenes, where the characters are gathered in claustrophobic rooms and much transpires in the slightest nods and looks, are perfectly choreographed to communicate the tension of almost unbearably suspended outcomes that keeps one flying through an Austen novel. There’s nothing flashy here, no glamour. Yet the heat underneath, which manages by the end to melt just a bit of the formal surface, leaves me feeling warm and enlightened. Because that stimulation of feeling and thought seems true to the pleasures of reading Austen, this film “keeps faith” with its source material in a most basic and satisfying way.

MARTHA SOUTHGATE: This will sound funny but my favorite book into movie is Kramer vs. Kramer. I think this actually has to do with the imperatives of each medium. Books that are clear, not deeply textured, and more plot driven than not often make superior movies because the actors and screenwriter can bring the nuance that is lacking on the page to the film, whereas the interior life of a great novel can never be captured the same way on film. Kramer vs. Kramer is in no way a great novel but it made a solid, extremely moving mainstream film because of the extraordinary performances of Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, and young and now forgotten Justin Henry.

BENJAMIN BARBER: Like a typical cantankerous writer, let me quarrel with rather than answer the question about my “favorite movie from a work of literature.” I tend to think that film and literature are two radically disparate media, and that for the most part, the great movies come either from lesser literature (Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Rear Window, The Bridge on the River Kwai, the Rawlings series) where “epic” cinematography heightens literary reality and substitutes spectacle for imagination, or from original screenplays (Going My Way, The Apartment, Chinatown, most of the films of Ingmar Bergman) where the script is subordinate to or arises directly out of the director’s vision. A few cases, such as All Quiet on the Western Front and The English Patient, involve a sensitive transfer of literary sensibility to film, and the English have specialized in turning significant period literature (Thackeray, the Brontës, et al.) into moving movie melodrama. But for the most part, great films and great literature are and ought to be regarded as alternative forms of art that get in one another’s way when one tries to marry them. The Accidental Tourist and Catch-22 were both badly mauled on the way to turning them into less than compelling films. The most successful transfers from literature probably do the novel even more serious harm on the way to effective filmmaking. After all, who can be satisfied with a director’s vision—however brilliant—once an author has evoked the reader’s own imagination? Showing us the “picture show” version of a story we have fully conjured in our own heads must disappoint. The autonomy of film should probably be the first principle of the filmmaker, especially when she starts with somebody else’s literary work. In short, PEN’s query is misconceived: No comparisons, please!

JOHN S. MAJOR: My favorite film adaptation of a literary work is Throne of Blood (1957), Akira Kurosawa’s version of Macbeth. Never have the weird sisters been so spooky or Lady Macbeth so coldly malevolent; never has Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane with such spine-chilling menace. The scene that everyone remembers, of course, is the film’s ending, with Toshiro Mifune’s Macbeth riddled with arrows, looking like a puzzled, defiant porcupine.

Kurosawa’s genius here was in recognizing not only how well the action scenes of Macbeth would work within the conventions of the popular “historical epic” genre of Japanese film but also how perfectly the moral dilemmas of the play mesh with the real historical circumstances of Japan’s sixteenth-century Warring States Era. At a time when samurai and daimyo struggled constantly with issues of loyalty and treachery, Macbeth and his court would have fit right in. At the same time, Kurosawa was right, I think, to make Throne of Blood as a free adaptation of Macbeth rather than as a simple transcription of the play into Japanese. He thus gave himself the artistic freedom to use the conventions of Japanese “historical epic” film with new depth and psychological insight.

Kurosawa returned to Shakespeare with Ran (1985), his dazzling take on King Lear—one of the most visually stunning films ever made. Yet, in the end I prefer Throne of Blood, perhaps because in that film Kurosawa’s notorious perfectionism, married to a tight budget and minimalist sets, resulted in a work that remains close to its roots in the stage.

TONY HISS: All-time favorite: the 1951 British version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (in England its original title was Scrooge). In effect, the no-words-wasted screenplay is by Dickens himself, with most of the dialogue taken directly from his 1843 novella, and even the voiceover narration borrows heavily from Dickens’s best descriptive passages. This movie is an unqualified triumph. Alastair Sim reaches deep into his own uncertainties to capture the essence of Ebenezer Scrooge, and to show us his two transformations: the young man’s descent into bitterness followed by the older man’s remorse and reclamation of his humanity. Sim indelibly defines the sneering voice, the shrinking posture, the searing pain, and the liberated humor in Scrooge. The superb supporting cast includes Patrick Macnee as the young Jacob Marley.

All-time runner-up: The Heiress, adapted in 1949, via a Broadway play, from another novella, Henry James’s Washington Square (maybe novellas make better screen treatments than novels). The movie title is in some ways an improvement, because the story is about what Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland, who won an Oscar) inherits from her stubborn father (Ralph Richardson) and her hard-hearted suitor (Montgomery Clift). Riveting acting by all three, and a heartbreaking, Oscar-winning score by Aaron Copland. This movie has only a single grim transformation, and it’s completely believable when young, sweet, innocent Catherine becomes the kind of person who can say (in the movie’s most famous lines), “I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters.”

ROBERT DEMARIA: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Burgess once told me how bitter he was about selling off the film rights to A Clockwork Orange for almost nothing at a time when he needed the money. Later the rights were re-sold for much more and Stanley Kubrick made the film, which was a big success. Burgess did not approve of the film version, and yet it captured the kind of future that he intended. He felt that the treatment was exploitative, and that the central incident of the attack on the writer and his wife was not serious or sympathetic enough. The attack was actually based on a true incident involving Burgess and his wife. In spite of all these disputes, there emerges an excellent film that lingers permanently in the viewer’s mind. I have been told that when the film rights are sold, the writer should take his money to the bank and get out of the way because a new work of art is being created.

ELLEN POSNER: Goodbye, Columbus, the 1969 film based upon one of Philip Roth’s early short stories, is my favorite translation of literature into film—never supplanted. Because the film is based upon a short story rather than a novel, the film/literature chronology problem is mitigated. And because the language in the film is taken right from the page, the emotional states of the highly verbal narrator are (while not “seen”), to a large extent, revealed. It is a film that does not elicit mourning for the short story. And it is a wonderful story from that early brilliant collection.

FRAN MANUSHKIN: Guys and Dolls, because Marlon Brando was such a great Sky Masterson, and the first movie star I fell in love with. I have been faithful to him ever since and have adapted my memories of the original book by Damon Runyan to match my memories of Marlon.

HARRY SMITH: I can think of no great novel or play that became an equally great movie, but good novels have been made into great movies. My favorite example is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, an engaging but stylistically ordinary novel that benefited from the screenwriting of Horton Foote, a skillful playwright. The synthesis of talent in the film with superior acting and directing is a work surpassing the individual abilities of either the novelist or playwright.

Other examples of good books/great movies: B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Van Tilburg Clark’s The Oxbow Incident.

CONSTANTINE CONTOGENIS: Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight is my favorite translation of Shakespeare’s Falstaff plays (Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor)—and of any work of literature—into film. Welles shows that the use of the phrases “faithful translation” and “true to the original” mistake the nature of artistic translation, whether from language to language or artistic medium to artistic medium.

The process of artistic translation does call for loyalty, but loyalty is deserved by works of both art and media, in this case English Renaissance drama and twentieth-century American film. An artistic translation cannot transfer to itself the artistic effects of the original. It must solve creative difficulties in its own medium that are analogous to those solved by the original.
The two loyalties will likely conflict. But if the filmmaker/translator is permitted some moral ambiguity, a hierarchy of loyalties toward each side can be ascertained. Betraying (being disloyal toward) a lesser value of drama, or of a particular play, can betray (reveal) a loyalty to a more fundamental value of drama, or of a particular play. And so with film values.

Example: Truthfulness to the plays would have required—apart from the entirety of the plays—relevant details of political maneuvering at the expense of additional Falstaff scenes. But faithfulness to the capacities of film would have called for close-ups of Falstaff at the expense of additional political background. Welles chose more up-close Falstaff. His disloyalty toward a fuller political reality is more than counterbalanced by his loyalty in the Henry IV plays to personal meanings of political power and the overwhelmingly individual reality of Falstaff.

MARK ALAN STAMATY: My favorite movie adaptation of a work of literature is the movie Adaptation because the original premise is so preposterous and the resulting script and movie are so brilliantly conceived and brought to life. I love the way screenwriter Charlie Kaufman works intuitively and tirelessly to come up with a fresh and original approach and result. And I think he is very successful in this effort, even in the ending, which some people think doesn’t work. I think it works wonderfully. I particularly like the way he makes the imagined real, makes written words instantly real, and plays with the question of what is reality.

PRISCILLA COGAN: It would have to be The English Patient. The novel by Michael Ondaatje was full of extraordinary images and language but poorly plotted. The movie translated that poetry into a visual feast of images and produced a story with a more compressed and coherent narrative. It added to the novel, rather than detracted from it, while understanding the difference between the printed word and the visual image.

ROBERT LIMA: The reader of a novel projects images of characters and settings onto a mental screen. In point of fact, the reader becomes a co-creator with the author. This is a highly personal involvement of an individual reader with the written work.

A film adaptation from a novel is always the interpretation by another’s imagination or by a collaborative group. Although no film adaptation of a novel can fully capture the individual reader’s images of characters and settings, I find the experience of seeing an adaptation from novel to film to be valuable as it presents another point of view that can be compared to my own.

A favorite translation to film is Ernest Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea. I liked Spencer Tracy’s performance and the moving portrayal of the quest for the marlin. Yet, I found it difficult to accept Tracy as a Cuban fisherman and the nondescript setting as Cuban waters. He was not the Santiago I had imagined. Nonetheless, I put these quibbles aside and learned to love the film version of a favorite work of fiction.

I could make similar assessments of other Hemingway works adapted to film: The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, A Farewell to Arms. I liked the film adaptations but they cannot replace the personal “film” of the prose fiction that I projected in my mind’s screen.

C. W. SMITH: I’ve always admired Harold Pinter’s adaptation of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The mock-Victorian novel utilizes an author-narrator who intrudes (as in the Victorian tradition) but his intrusions frequently mention twentieth-century events, situations, or alterations in the novel’s Victorian settings. And the narrative “novelist” tinkers with endings to the story on the fly, offering, as the story runs its course, alternatives to how the story of Charles and Sarah might conclude—Charles might marry his fiancée Tina; he might never find her; he might find her and win her, or find her and be rejected. Pinter chose to frame the film as a play-within-a-play, with the two principal “actors,” Mike and Anna (Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep) playing Charles and Sarah. During the filming of FLT, Mike and Anna, both married, have an affair in the contemporary English setting while they play out the story of Charles and Sarah in the Victorian setting. The film brings Charles and Sarah together at the conclusion of the Victorian setting but ends the affair (unhappily for Mike) in the contemporary setting. Pinter’s nesting the stories faithfully utilizes Fowles’s alternate endings while posing the novel’s underlying questions about the relationship between art and life; it also handily dramatizes the authorial narrator’s allusions to a contemporary world by setting the frame story in modern England. While “Mike” and “Anna” are characters entirely invented for the film, their story nonetheless embodies the narrator’s metafictional spirit in a way that is cinematically satisfying and yet faithful to the original.

SUSAN THAMES: The film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion was a wonderful contrast to the usual adaptation fare, maybe because the production/direction team of Ivory-Merchant didn’t get their hands on it. So we got the kind of visual verisimilitude that brings a period to life—in this case, cramped rooms, soiled hems of women’s gowns, and characters portrayed by actors of less-than-centerfold appeal. The physiology of the film also echoed the rigorous social constraints to which the characters were subject.

WARREN ADLER: Hollywood has bought or optioned ten of my twenty-seven novels. Three have been adapted to film: The War of the Roses, Random Hearts, and The Sunset Gang, which became a trilogy on the PBS network. The War of the Roses and The Sunset Gang were faithful adaptations. The War of the Roses became a worldwide phenomenon and, of course, gave a great boost to my career. Random Hearts was a mess and I felt compelled to vent my dissatisfaction in a piece for The New York Times. As a novelist dealing with Hollywood, take the money, but always expect the worst. Film and television production is an argument-, ego-, and finance-driven operation that can offend the delicate sensibilities of novelists used to being masters of their own destiny. Aside from the financial benefits, which can be considerable, an adaptation can only help a novelist if the film or television production retains the original title, is cast by major stars and is a hit with legs, meaning its afterlife is considerable through worldwide media. It is pure blind luck. My experience has been that Hollywood screenwriters and producers are intimidated by novelists who they refer to as “real writers.” I have heard that some novelists have had wonderful experiences dealing with these people but I haven’t met any. Hemingway was right when he said go the Nevada border, throw your book over the border fence and spend the money they throw back. By the way, they are immune to insult, and continue to purchase my material.

BARBARA ADAMS: The Sweet Hereafter, the 1991 novel by Russell Banks, was translated into a film version in 1997 by Atom Egoyan. I saw the film before I read the book, the reverse of my usual practice, simply because I didn’t know Banks’s work at the time. The film moved me so deeply, its characters so wounded and human in their flawed nature, that I decided to use it—along with the novel which I read immediately—in my course on the contemporary American novel at Pace University.

When I discovered that Banks had not included Browning’s famous poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” in his novel, I was stunned: It had been integral to the movie, I thought, so well suited to the loss of many children because of selfish parents.

At a writers’ conference at Skidmore some years later, Russell Banks and two other novelists discussed the film versions of their books. All of them had opted out of writing the screenplay, or having any say in the process of transformation into a film. I asked Banks what he thought of Egoyan’s inclusion of the Pied Piper poem, narrated by Nicole, the only survivor of the school-bus accident but paralyzed for life and a victim of incest. Banks thought it worked well—it had never occurred to him at all. He trusted Egoyan, he added, who had his own vision of the novel. Each of us has our own vision of a book, as does each director. Egoyan melds his vision so well, it seems true to the original while enhancing it.

DAPHNE ABEEL: I guess my favorite adaptation of a novel for film is Gone with the Wind. I know that is terribly corny, but it is just such a wonderful movie, and in many ways, it sticks pretty closely to the book. Gone with the Wind offers so much to enjoy, history, a great romantic story, a beautiful but selfish heroine, a handsome, tough-minded hero. Great secondary characters, even the sets. I just think David O. Selznick did a great job, and it’s a movie I could see almost once a year. I think I have actually seen it about five times.

MITALI PERKINS: Call me a curmudgeon but I don’t like movie adaptations. When journeying to a place, I lose three of my senses. I can’t smell or taste or touch the way my imagination enables me to when I’m reading. Scenes communicating nuances of character are cut lest what delights the reader becomes excruciating for the viewer. And finally, movies don’t give the reader or the plot freedom to slow down.

Case in point: the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Reading the book, I finger the thick, green vines in Fangorn Forest, smell the evil reek in the valley of Mordor, and taste the hearty flavor of simmering mushrooms—thanks to the dialectic between Tolkien’s words and my imagination.
One of my favorite scenes is when Aragorn’s self-denial extinguishes the simmering bitterness between Legolas and Gimli. This pivotal, revelatory interaction between three major characters doesn’t appear in the movie. There’s simply no room for it.

As reader, I journey with Frodo and Sam through arduous, frightening passages, knowing that we will rest in places like Tom Bombadil’s candle-lit dining hall. We will feast, bathe, sleep, and steel ourselves for the next episode of fear or battle. In the movie, I’m rushed with the characters from one adrenaline-inducing scene to the next. No time for reflection or recovery in a screen hero’s journey.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the dimming of lights, the big music, the rustle of popcorn—these cues herald the relaxing experience of expert entertainers drawing me into their stories. I even enjoy watching movies based on books. Just don’t commandeer a book and claim you’ve squeezed it into the tight space of a film. Movie adaptations should come with a warning: “The story could not be been edited to fit your movie screen.”

NORMAN MACAFEE: I am sending a poem, “The Greatest Movie Ever Made,” about Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew from 1964. It ties with Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (the last sentence of this poem is taken from the Welles, as homage), though Sergei Bondarchuck’s War and Peace and Visconti’s The Leopard are up there.

THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE

Stuck in Roman traffic
for the funeral of Pope John
at a moment when the whole world
was in his hands
Pier Paolo Pasolini thought to do
"Christ plus 2,000 years of mythologizing,"
The Gospel According to Matthew,
which means from Bach to Missa Luba,
Eisenstein's Nevsky soldiers in the same
shot as Piero della Francesca's pharisees.
Finally a genius
is telling the story of Jesus
a poet
a "never orthodox Marxist"
a homosexual.

There are moments when you simply must accept
the author's decency, the dignity of his subjects:
cutting away as Mary great with child
maneuvers herself
onto the donkey...
it is a miracle, cutting--
Does she simply appear on the donkey in a puff?
the camera cuts away to two
boys looking intently, sadly,
two objects of desire,
belief and doubt,
everything being montage,
as Eisenstein said.

Jesus is before us in the form
of a Spanish economics student,
surrounded by a Jewish fishmonger
from the Roman slums as Peter,
Pier Paolo's mother as the old Mary,
poets and writers and professors
and semiologists and whores
and communists and boys from the slums
and old women who believe.
Who is my mother, who are my brethren?

Sartre knew when he saw.
Sartre had written a play,
his first, in a German POW camp
about the birth of Jesus
and seeing The Gospel
22 years later
embraced the Italian
as his brother
retrieving Jesus
for the Marxists.

PPP lived in a miraculous era
before AIDS,
before the VCR,
age still of movie house communion,
time of the major deaths,
Pope John, JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King,
Robert Kennedy so like Pasolini in so many ways--
Bobby went into filthy hovels
and embraced sickly babies--
then
Pound, Allende, Neruda
then Pasolini,
the saviors of our century
then Sartre and Beauvoir,
seeking salvation for the century, the millennium.
Pasolini made the film of the millennium,
The Gospel According to Matthew.

Sartre and Beauvoir agree to see him after the Paris premiere.
He is very late to the cafe. But they are there.
S: “How could you think we wouldn’t wait for you?”
In those days, not so far
from ours, they had all the time.

ROBERTA ALLEN: The Lover is my favorite movie adaptation. It created a “world” that may not have been, strictly speaking, the one Marguerite Duras intended—the screen version seemed too colorful, “too Hollywood” for that—but it captured the tension and eroticism between the two lovers in their closed worlds. The understated and moving performance of Tony Leung Kar-Fai, in particular, who played the Chinese lover, seemed “close” to the character in the book and stands out in my memory.

THOMAS C. LEWIS: I think the title “Metamorphoses” is too grand for the topic.

JAYNE LYN STAHL: Anna Karenina with Greta Garbo, as Anna, and Fredric March, as Vronsky, is my favorite adaptation of a novel. While I know that there may be better adaptations of a work of literature, for me, great art changes our lives, transforms us, and Anna Karenina changed mine.

At twenty, I went to see Anna Karenina with my professor and class at the local movie theater. This was my first encounter with passion, and a parallel universe in which desire must coexist with decorum. So it was that one of my all-time favorite novels sparked, in me, metamorphosis from a schoolgirl into a fully developed woman.

Anna’s passion was my passion and, like Anna, I could no more imagine living a life seduced by custom, and narcotized by routine. Watching Anna and Vronsky together, arousal started to gnaw at me. Anna’s hunger became my hunger, her betrayal my betrayal, as it was not so much lust, or infidelity, but daring to escape the ordinary that sparked her silent impulses, and urgings. Like Anna, I, too, wanted to give myself up to my yearnings. But, in Anna’s day, for a woman to want was unseemly. Has anything changed really? The scarlet letter may have faded, but the cloth is in tact. Had Princess Diana survived that car wreck, would she have remained royalty, or is it that, only through death, could she be transformed from a fallen princess into a sacred icon. Isn’t the fall what must, of necessity, come to those women who dare to want; how can their demand to live life on own their terms result in anything other than death.

So there I sat at the movies, on a cold day in Buffalo, watching Anna Karenina, wondering—is this what affirmation must cost me, is this the lesson that desire, for women, comes with a stiff price tag. What was poor Anna’s crime? That she abandoned her role of mother and housewife, or that she found, in Vronsky, the reflection of her own ubiquitous sexuality?

Indeed, the film version of Anna Karenina succeeds better in being faithful to the novel than Anna succeeds in her fidelity to Karenin but, in both cases, this is fidelity without passion. Still, this remains one of the few films in which a person’s inner life is palpable, and in which transfer from page to screen is powerful enough to suggest transformation in the audience.

PETER H. TEN HOOPEN: To me, the best adaptation of a novel, or at least the most memorable, is Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, directed by John Huston, after a screenplay by the author himself, starring Stacy Keach, the young Jeff Bridges and Susan Tyrrell. The movie is every bit as stark as Gardner’s novel and gives a heart-rending depiction of both a young boxer’s struggle to make it in the ring, and a declining boxer’s struggle to come back. Its main attraction to me is that there is no attempt to romanticize what is the bleak existence of men who see their best chances for advancement in fighting others for monetary gain, such as it is. What moves me most, perhaps, is its appeal to compassion, which not just survives the transfer from paper to celluloid, but seems the stronger for it.

ELIZABETH SPENCER: Dickens’s Great Expectations, though filmed so long ago (1946), lingers in vivid memory as the best by far of film adaptations. Dickens novels turn so naturally into movies one would think he had the visual medium in mind. No, he had it in his head. Magwitch’s pursuit of Pip in the cemetery; Miss Havisham decked in bridal gown for the marriage which never occurred; a grown-up Pip, dressed up as gentry, sporting out with walking cane, sure his money came from gentry. English actors know how to deliver these roles. The writing had already given them their appearance, their precise flavor and depth. Director David Lean ran with the current that was already speeding before him on the page. With actors like John Mills, Martita Hunt, Jean Simmons and the rest, how could he go wrong? And for one of the few times, a great book became an equally great movie.

SUZANNE JILL LEVINE: When I think of successful cinematic “translations” of novels I think of the late 1972 BBC serial productions of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl or Tolstoy’s War and Peace—which reproduce effectively for the spectator the reader’s experience of traveling thoughtfully through these novels, the former with its intricate interior meanderings and the latter with its larger than life canvas of drama, romance, and historical events. The recent commercially released Golden Bowl—even with such finely nuanced actors as Nick Nolte, Uma Thurman, and Jeremy Northam—does not match that TV series’ excellent “fidelity” to James’s brilliantly woven psychological oscillations and gradual revelations. One other partial success story is the mid career Ken Russell’s vivid interpretation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1969) but still it was too overstated, which is often the problem with film adaptations. I could go on infinitely about the honest attempts by filmmakers with the novels of E. M. Forster (David Lean’s 1984 Passage to India, Merchant-Ivory’s 1987 Maurice and 1992 Howards End); indeed the short novel would appear to have a better chance than its ambitiously long relatives, as in the case of Henry James The Bostonians (1984) also by the Merchant-Ivory duo. Maybe novels which aren’t classics—of which we already have clear indelible ideal images that can never be matched translate better?

I would like to briefly dissert on an adaptation which is not my favorite (maybe Alastair Sim’s neurotic 1951 portrayal of Scrooge, i.e. Dickens’s Christmas Carol—written by Noel Langley, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst—is my favorite because I watched it one hundred times as a kid; but then again I watched Gone with the Wind a hundred times, too) but which I’ve thought a lot about: Hector Babenco’s film version of Argentine Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1984) for which William Hurt won an Oscar playing the very unlikely character of a frivolous homosexual in a prison cell with a Marxist revolutionary.

When I first saw this film I was horrified: How could William Hurt, this tall blond athletic American, play the role of a slight Latin gay man (for me the principal character Molina was an avatar of the Manuel Puig I knew): Molina, charming, light, ironic becomes a heavy-handed somber caricature in the hands of Hurt. How could the novel’s density—in which the narration of six movies occurs—possibly be faithfully rendered by this movie which inserts only one of the cited movie texts? The answer is: Fidelity is impossible, at least in the literal terms we might conceive it. This film, like a translation, stands beside the novel like a comment, an interpretation emphasizing some of its elements—its political and didactic message, its universal humanity—and inevitably compromising some of its formal inventions and—the hardest thing of all—tone.

For Puig, the cinema was a synthetic genre like dreams; the novel an analytical vehicle, like psychoanalysis. I think there is a certain fundamental truth in his view of these generic incompatibilities.

BONA FLECCHIA: Manji is the 1964 film version of the homonymous novel by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki written in 1930 while revising the final version of his masterpiece Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters). The two novels were to cross their paths once again when, after having worked as an assistant director to the great Kon Ichikawa on the set of the flowed adaptation of Sasameyuki, (flowed because of a tragic decision on the part of the director to change the function of one of the main characters to deal with a textual ambiguity and, therefore, betraying the very nature of Tanizaki’s style as a writer) the young director Yasuzo Masumura was to brilliantly bring to the screen the wonderfully tactile, complex and sensual world created by Tanizaki in Manji.

The intimate nature of the book is mirrored spectacularly in the cinematography that, to keep the characters close to us and to each other, restrains the beautiful compositions always strictly within medium and close-ups; and reflecting the longing and desires of the protagonists through a luscious and sensual use of color. What makes this film version of Manji remarkable is the ability of the director to transpose rather than interpret what is masterfully laid out on the page by the great Tanizaki.

I don’t believe literature, film, or any other form of expression can be subject to any particular set of imperatives. When a system is created to deal with a particular art form the art form itself decays into mediocrity. The restrains imposed by studios on directors and screenwriters, the ability of producers to substantially modify contents or the choices of many editors within the publishing world are crippling originality in favor of a marketable product.
A literary text is a complex piece of work which holds within itself a series of conventions (grammatical, structural, anthropological, social, and historical just to mention a few). One of these, at least, will necessarily be betrayed during the translation process. The term “faithful translation” is therefore a paradox. “True to the original” is what a translator would wish to be, while Joyce rightfully reproaches “traduttore traditore” (traitor translator). However, my favorite term for appropriating and intimately manipulating somebody’s work would be “version”; as this kind of work is the original vision of an individual conveyed through somebody else’s eyes.

DRAKE STUTESMAN: This is a difficult question. Adaptation suggests a good relationship between the original literature and film that interprets it but this relationship often fails. The original may be great and the film may be great but they rarely reflect each other’s purpose.

The Swimmer strikes this balance. By not mimicking the story’s emphasis and yet staying close to its narrative, the film mirrors what the story tries to do. Frank and Eleanor Perry’s 1968 film was made from John Cheever’s 1964 short story of the same name about an affluent man, in Westchester County, who decides to “swim home” through his neighbors’ pools. As he walks across their properties in his swimsuit, he’s greeted with less and less affection and then with contempt. His strong body tires. All that happens baffles him and it becomes apparent, to us, that he is “swimming” through his life’s delusions. This is made obvious when, finally, cold and crippled, he arrives at his house only to find it long deserted.

This surrealism could be expositional but both writing and movie avoid it—the story through allegory, such as seasonal changes, and the film by omitting allegory, because what deepens the reader’s attention would distract the viewer’s. The movie, like the story, unfolds, without explanation, as if the Swimmer is normal. But the film expands the story’s sketchy conversations and takes reactions as metaphors so that Cheever’s “seasonal” changes appear in the Swimmer’s denial and in the slow freezing of his once impressive charm.

Both film and story end in the same way and, in each, the effect is powerful—though you’ve been led to expect it, the Swimmer’s self-deception is crushingly piteous, something that Cheever achieved by making the story fantastic and ending on a factual sentence—“saw that the place was empty”—and which the film achieved by making the story realistic and ending on a nightmarish last scene.