Not every filmmaker is as communicative as James Gunn.
Following the release of your typical film, very few directors take up vigil on the web, combing through questions related to their release and answering them for curious fans. Yet this is exactly what Gunn has been up to over the last week, as a flood of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 related questions hit social media. He’s been particularly active on Twitter, where the celebrated director is taking the time to clue curious viewers into some of the background details sprinkled through Guardians Vol. 3.
He’s already let us down easy, following questions about seeing more of Rocket’s experimental friends, dug into some of the major canon changes he made for the film, and now Gunn is providing his fans — and at least a few of his haters — with a lesson in linguistics, following complaints about adaptations.
A few fans, in particular, really seem rankled by Gunn’s decision to alter some of the details contained within the original Marvel comics. They’ve been whinging, over on Twitter, for hours now, in the comment section of yet another question Gunn was willing to address. Twitter users @Logan78106803 and @Notgoingsane started the discussion with a question about Cosmo’s gender, before doubling down on their misunderstanding of the term “adaptation.”
See, in the original Marvel comics, Cosmo is a male dog. Gunn altered this canon marginally to make her female, in order to pay proper homage to Laika, a Russian dog who became one of the first animals to ever travel to space. She died, several hours into her groundbreaking voyage, and her sacrifice is at least partially honored through Gunn’s minor reworking of her comic book origins.
But that simple change was enough to infuriate our two naysayers, who promptly filled Gunn’s comment section with complaints about comic accuracy. Insisting that “it makes no sense” to change characters in any way, shape, or form. @Notgoingsane dug in their heels and refused to budge. Even after Gunn pointed out that they were perhaps in need of a dictionary, in order to understand just what the word “adaptation” truly means.
It’s always a multiverse thing. That’s what the MCU is – a different version of Earth 616. And, again, you should look up the meaning of “adapt.”
— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) May 14, 2023
Claiming to be a “comics purist” is all well and good, but — as Gunn pointed out — Cosmo’s gender-swap is one of the most minor alterations the director made to longstanding Guardians canon. He also changed the races of several characters — including longtime members like Drax and Mantis — but that wasn’t enough to deter our primary naysayer. He continued to double down on his misunderstanding of the word “adapt,” as he essentially advocated for 100 percent accurate comic retellings with absolutely no artistic wiggle room.
Gunn, who finally tired of the debate, simply advised his detractor to research the meaning of the word “adapt” before arguing any further. This could have prevented the entire dispute, had @Notgoingsane pivoted over to Merriam Webster, which clearly outlines that an adaptation is a “composition rewritten into a new form.” See that “rewritten” in there? It indicates that, in most adaptations, things are going to look a touch different from the original.
After all, isn’t that the real point of an adaptation? We already have the original — if you want to enjoy that, you’ve got access. But an adaptation takes that original and reworks it into something new. It maintains plenty of elements from the original, but it genuinely wouldn’t be an adaptation if it was a precise replica.
None of this is likely to convince @Notgoingsane any time soon, of course, but Gunn’s not shying away from the debate. He’d just like it if his fans came to the discussion armed with the knowledge of what specific words mean.
About the author
Nahila Bonfiglio
Nahila carefully obsesses over all things geekdom and gaming, bringing her embarrassingly expansive expertise to the team at We Got This Covered. She is a Staff Writer and occasional Editor with a focus on comics, video games, and most importantly 'Lord of the Rings,' putting her Bachelors from the University of Texas at Austin to good use. Her work has been featured alongside the greats at NPR, the Daily Dot, and Nautilus Magazine.
For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today?
Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known.
Jacke talks to Alison Strayer, translator of several books by French author Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. Plus he talks to author and Chekhov expert Bob Blaisdell about his choice for the last book he will ever read.
Annie Ernaux has written some twenty works of fiction and memoir, including Getting Lost and The Years. She is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. Alison Strayer is a Canadian writer and translator. She won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Pix du live de Montreal, the Prix littéraire France-Québec, and the Man Booker International Prize. Bob Blaisdell, author of Chekhov Becomes Chekhov, is Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Kingsborough College and the author of Creating Anna Karenina.
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I grew up multilingual and learned in earliest childhood to switch effortlessly between languages. Even today, I find myself going back and forth, sometimes even in the same entence-say. You’ll notice that I did it just en-thay. Because I am aware of how frustrating it is when people drop foreign-language expressions into their speech and expect the listener to understand, I will translate: entence-say, in English, is the singular noun “sentence,” and en-thay is the temporal adverb “then.”
The earthy, untrammelled, and lyrical other language that I’m referring to was derived originally from Latin, hence its common name, Pig Latin. Among linguists, it’s known as Demotic Ay-speak, for the sake of precision, and to remove any allusion to pigs (which have nothing to do with the language). Other members of my linguistic community will tell you that I’m fiercely proud of my fluency and stand up for the language whenever it is misused. I even prefer to read novels in it, because it makes me feel at home. I first encountered the P.-L. version of olstoy-Tay’s “anna-Yay arenina-Kay” in the abridged translation done by Mrs. Erwin’s fifth graders. The principal translator, Billy Nolan, was a fully proficient speaker.
Recently, I returned to the novel, this time in its unabridged original form, translated by Evelyn Hummel, who apparently is an adult. Much of the childlike joy imparted to the text by Nolan and his fellow-translators has been lost, I’m sorry to report. Mr. Hummel begins the first chapter ponderously: “All-yay appy-hay amilies-fay are-yay alike-yay. . . .” Nolan, in contrast, had chosen to leave out that sentence entirely and substitute one about how his “ad-day” (“dad”) was an “ofessional-pray estler-wray” (“professional wrestler”). (Nolan’s father did, in fact, wrestle professionally, under the ring name The Genius.) When questioned about opening the novel in this way, Nolan fils said that he felt it was the duty of the translator to convey the spirit of the original rather than hide behind word-for-word literalness—and I would agree.
Strangely, I never heard my own parents speak the language, although I now think that they must have understood it. How I picked it up while being raised by two monolingual English speakers, I have no idea. My brother and sister and I spoke it freely among ourselves. If our parents somehow figured out what we were saying, we could switch to Op-Talk, Backward Talk (also known as Yoda Talk), Pirate-Speak, and so-called Repeating Talk. (Parents: “Cut that out.” Us: “Cut that out.”) I’m afraid that our polyglot skills confused and frustrated them terribly.
In my professional life, I became a writer, but I never forsook my childhood languages—although English, the tongue of the oppressor-parents, was to be avoided. I wrote my first memoir entirely in Pig Latin and never felt so free. When I completed a manuscript that I was happy with, I hired an expert to translate it into French, a language I do not speak. Wanting to publish the book in both the U.S. and the U.K., I then translated the French version into English on my own by simply guessing at the meanings. As well-informed readers will recall, the work that resulted went on to win many prizes. What interested me even more was the velocity and refraction achieved by looking at a text through these differing lenses.
As for Mr. Hummel, he compounded his offenses by writing a screenplay of the novel he translated. He should have stuck to English; the results were distressing. (Full disclosure: as a leading Pig Latin linguist and scholar, I was hired as the intimacy coach for “anna-Yay arenina-Kay” ’s love scenes.) Unfortunately, the film’s actors were not up to the challenges of Hummel’s script. To provide the correct lilt to this musical tongue, you must practice the crucial “ay” phoneme, so that you make your sentences sing. If you don’t master it, you’re at a disadvantage speaking dialogue in which literally every word ends with that sound.
My real fear, of course, is that one day Pig Latin will die out. I can’t imagine that this movie will make people more inclined to learn it. Recently, I saw a map that showed where the language is still spoken. In most of the world outside the U.S., it exists only in very tiny pockets, if at all. According to studies, the higher a person’s I.Q. , the less likely that the person will be familiar with Pig Latin—the exact opposite of what one would expect. In tsarist Russia, the business of the court was conducted entirely in French, and the upper classes communicated only in that language. I dream that one day the élites of both coasts in the U.S., and of all the major cities worldwide, will, in a similar way, develop a special language among themselves that only they are able to understand. Why not give Pig Latin a try? ♦
“I didn’t take any photographs. The sights were recorded only in my eyes. The sounds, smells and tactile sensations that a camera cannot capture in any case were impressed on my ears,
nose, face and hands. There was not yet a knife between me and the world, so at the time this
was enough.”
Greek Lessons, Han Kang’s 2011 Korean novel, recently translated into English by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, tells a story that challenges the normative role of language, exploring the possibilities of relationships forged by disparate experiences of loss and grief, plunging the reader into a liminal territory where language is not just cognitive but also sensory. Hauntingly akin to Martha Nussbaum’s framing of questions of ethics, kindness and inter-connectedness, Kang’s narrative centres on two seemingly nondescript people – an unnamed woman who has lost her ability to speak and is trying to reclaim speech by immersing herself in the unfamiliarity and rigours of Ancient Greek, and an unnamed man, her teacher, who is rapidly losing his sight owing to a degenerative genetic condition.
Sidestepping the ableist trap of a narrative applauding the overcoming of challenges posed by one or the other disability, the book turns into a study of alienation from the world, sometimes from the self, and the ways in which language, once freed from the rigidity of epistemic structures, can become a way of healing, and reconstructing the self. Like its protagonist who took no photographs, in complete contravention of this social milieu’s obsession with capturing and chronicling, the reader is nudged into setting aside conventional expectations and experiencing the text almost sensorially.
Readers familiar with Kang’s Booker-winning The Vegetarian (2016), will see shades of its heroine, Yeong-hye, in the unnamed woman of Greek Lessons. Yeong-hye’s husband described her as “completely unremarkable in every way”. She is plain and passive and easy to invisibilise. The woman studying Ancient Greek is similarly “neither young nor particularly beautiful.” She does not like taking up space and even before she loses speech, she is the quietest voice in the room, not allowing her voice to travel far, not allowing it to “disseminate her self”, fearful that she would lose herself if she used up too many words.
The loss of language
Language seems to have always been of particular importance to her. At age four, she had taught herself the Korean alphabet. At school, she would spend all her time reading. After college, she worked in publishing, and subsequently, as a lecturer of literature. She was a published poet, a columnist, and the founding member of a cultural magazine. Six months before the loss of speech, she lost her mother to a prolonged illness and soon after, lost custody of her son to her ex-husband. Her psychiatrist attributes her inability to speak to these two obviously traumatic events, but she is convinced that “it isn’t as simple as that”, that no single, specific experience led to her loss of language.
The silence she finds herself living had consumed her for the first time when she was 16. It was broken when, in the middle of a French lesson, a word leapt at her, forcibly dragging her back into spoken language. It is to prevent this loss of agency again that she decides to study Ancient Greek, to make its alien syntax, its phonemes, its play, bring her back to orality, but of her own volition this time. She experiences the loss of speech as a loss of words, fragmenting her reality: “The words evade her grasp. Words that have lost lips, words that have lost tongue and tooth-root, words that have lost throat and breath remain out of reach. Like unbodied apparitions, their forms elude touch.” Language for the woman is no longer only what is spoken or written, but a living, sensate and tactile thing, that changes how she occupies the world.
Kang’s overarching concern, in all four English translations of her novels published so far, seems to be with human fragility. Greek Lessons, with all its attention to language and meaning and the gaps that exist between the two, deftly negotiates grief and trauma, memory and recognition, love and loss. Her protagonists have suffered not just debilitating disabilities, but also deeply traumatic losses. The woman is caught in a dreadful, generational cycle of anxiety. She recalls having been told about her mother’s fears during her pregnancy and her having come close to not being born at all, generating within her a permanent anxiety about existing in a world that was unreceptive and often hostile to her. Her loss of words creates further ruptures in her already tenuous relationship with her child, breaking communication down, making impossible for him to read/translate her wordless love.
The immigrant’s inexorable push
The Greek teacher too, has lost love, has experienced the loss of home and alienation from all that was familiar, and is in the process of grieving the loss of his sight, potentially meaning the loss of all intellectual enquiry and delight that has been the driving force of his life. At the age of 15, he was made to leave South Korea for Germany, in the manner of many Korean and other East Asian families fleeing conflict and uncertainty in pursuit of a “better” life. Kang brings unstinting honesty to her exposition of the diasporic experience when she writes about the man’s mother’s refusal to politely smile at strangers in Germany: “I am done with smiling. I won’t do it anymore. Let me live as I want. I would rather not smile, at least not in my own home. But don’t mistake that for anger – I may not smile, but that doesn’t mean I’m angry.” Her discomfort is both cultural and visceral. It also clearly indicates the immigrant’s inexorable push and pull between fitting in and owning their truth.
Greek Lessons is by no stretch of the imagination an “easy” book, despite the slimness of its form. In keeping with the context of the Ancient Greek lessons the protagonists are brought together by, involving texts that would often delineate both philosophical and literary discussions of human problems, the book conflates the search for truth with the affective pleasure of literature, to become something of a treatise on the abrasive nature of trauma and the possibility of redemption in kindness and love.
Kang frees the sensory from intellectual underpinnings (and pretensions) to point towards a language that does not stultify with rules, but instead, celebrates flaws and departures from the ordinary. The concluding pages of the book are a testimony to the same. The story is told in the alternating perspectives of the man and the woman, often dipping into memories, in one particularly brilliant passage, becoming a dialogue between the spoken and the unspoken memories of its two protagonists. It shifts between the past and the present, sometimes turning inscrutable, but the slippages only privilege the transcendence of ideas and the deconstruction of the hierarchy between the intellectual and the sensorial. To borrow from Martha Nussbaum, “to try to grasp love intellectually is a way of not suffering, not loving- a practical rival, a stratagem of flight.” Han Kang, with her incredible gift, makes the reader sit with silence, and far more crucially, normalises perceived abnormalities, refusing to take flight from suffering.
Greek Lessons, Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House.
SAO PAULO, May 12 ― “Pele,” arguably the best footballer in history, is now also an adjective.
On Wednesday, the word “pele” was added to the more than 167,000 words in the Michaelis Portuguese dictionary printed in Brazil.
For the world's 265 million-odd Portuguese speakers, “pele” can now be used to denote something or someone extraordinary ― the sense in which it is already employed informally in Brazil.
“The expression already used to refer to someone who is the best at what they do has been eternalized on the pages of the dictionary!” the Pele Foundation said on Instagram.
Under the new entry, the word is defined as “exceptional, incomparable, unique” ― qualities associated with “The King” of football who died in December at the age of 82.
The online version of the Michaelis also provides useful examples: “He is the pele of basketball... She is the pele of Brazilian drama.”
For now, the word has been included only in the Michaelis online version, though it will be added to printed dictionaries in future.
It is the result of a campaign by the Pele Foundation, the sports channel SporTV and the Sao Paulo football club Santos where Pele played for much of his career.
Pele scored a world record 1,281 goals during his more than two decades playing with Santos (1956-74), the Brazilian national team, and the New York Cosmos (1975-77). ― AFP
Though Mirza Ghalib wrote a large number of poems in Persian, it is a pity that those works have been overshadowed by his Urdu writings. Most of his works available in English translation are also from Urdu works. In fact, Maaz Bin Bilal’s Temple Lamp is the first complete English translation of Ghalib’s famous ‘masnavi’ Chirag-e-Dair, a long poem written on Banaras during Ghalib’s stay in the city in 1826. The English translation of this work is timely as, in an era of religious divisionism, it reveals how a city usually considered holy by the Hindus could be a romantic and spiritual home for a Muslim poet, who once wrote to his friend Munshi Hargopal Tufta, “I consider all humanity to be my family; every man, be he a Muslim or a Hindu or a Christian, is my brother.”
Chirag-e-Dair was written by Ghalib in Banaras when he stopped there en route to Kolkata for submitting a petition to the British Governor General to remove difficulties in obtaining his pension in full. Before reaching Benaras, Ghalib spent a few days in Allahabad, a place he did not like at all. In a famous letter to Nawab Muhammad Ali Khan, Ghalib expressed his dislike for the city: “What a ridiculous place is Ilahabad! May God get rid of it; for it has no healing for the sick, nor anything of note for the gentleman…” Banaras, after this experience, seemed heavenly to him. Immediately upon reaching, Ghalib’s health significantly improved. To the same Nawab he wrote about enjoying a city that had “excessively heart-warming qualities.”
Chirag-e-Dair should be read as an appreciation of Banaras, a holy Hindu city, by one of 19th century India’s finest poets. The poem, divided into several sections, appreciates the natural and spiritual beauty of the city along with that of its people. Maaz Bin Bilal rightly argues that “Banaras, poetically, proves to be his romantic and spiritual home. In verse 25, Ghalib prays to God to keep the city protected from evil eyes: “May God keep Banaras/from the evil eye,/it is heavenly bliss,/paradise established.” In verse 47 he writes: “The (supreme) place of worship for/the conch-blowers,/surely, (Banaras) is the Kaaba/of Hindustan” – an indication that, to Ghalib, spirituality transcended institutional religion.
The structure of a ‘masnavi’ also helps Ghalib capture his spiritual sojourn into a holy city (not confined to a particular religion by barbed wire) poignantly. A ‘masnavi’ is a long narrative poem divided into ‘betis’ (couplets that make complete sense in themselves), composed of two equal lines known as ‘misra.’ There is internal rhyme in a ‘misra’ as well. Ghalib references Hindu rituals to describe the serene beauty of Banaras, subverting the so-called religion-specificity of language. In verse 42, he writes: “Autumn, when it shakes its wings/in pride,/becomes on (Kashi’s) forehead/a proud sandalwood mark.”
Maintaining the rhyme scheme of one language in another is a difficult task and Bilal has not been able to retain the internal rhyme of the ‘beti‘ in Temple Lamp. Had it been done, the poem could have been more musical. Bilal, however, should be thanked for choosing this particular work for translating in to English. It broadens Ghalib’s oeuvre to the English readers and is also more autobiographical and descriptive than his Urdu ghazals. Bilal rightly argues that Ghalib’s “penchant for physical beauty, his ability to perceive and represent pleasure and joy, and his zest for life,” contests “descriptions of Ghalib as primarily a poet of grief.”
Ghalib wrote Chirag-e-Dair in his youth. There is no reason, however, to think that Ghalib’s love for Banaras withered with time. An old Ghalib wrote to his friend Miyan Dad Khan Sayyah, “Banaras is beyond words. Such cities are seldom created. I happened to be there at the height of my youth. If I were young now, I would go and live there and not return.” In fact, contemporary India should read Temple Lamp to remind itself of a religious and literary past that thrived, despite differences, on mutual respect.
(Angshuman Kar is a poet and professor, Department of English and Culture Studies, University of Burdwan)
These are the first lot of more than 50 Tibetan manuscripts on Buddhism, brought back to India by Rahul Sakrityayan from Tibet, being translated in Hindi by Sarnath-based Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies
The much-awaited Hindi translations of the centuries-old Tibetan manuscripts on Buddism and Buddhist philosophy, which were brought back to India from Tibet by noted author Rahul Sakrityayan, are awaiting the message from the Bihar chief minister as a preface for publication.
Bihar Research Society officials displaying Tibetan manuscripts collection to Bihar CM Nitish Kumar (HT Photo/Sourced)
As part of its efforts to make the core principles and philosophy of Buddhism easily understandable for the people, the Bihar government had in 2019 tied up with the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies (CIHTS), Sarnath, to translate more than 50 Tibetan manuscripts in Hindi.
Accordingly, it had allocated a budget of ₹1.94 crore for the publication of the Hindi translation of the manuscripts. The first instalment of ₹15.50 lakh has been given to the institute.
A senior official of the CIHTS said that five books, which have been translated, are awaiting the introductory messages of Bihar CM Nitish Kumar for printing.
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“Our vice-chancellor (Prof. Geshe Ngawang Samten) has sent letters to the chief minister twice in the last one year and met him in person in April this year at Rajgir for the message and the 2nd instalment of the fund, ₹25 lakh. However, both are still awaited,” said the official, adding that the institute had proposed releasing five books on the auspicious Buddha Purnima (May 5).
The books ready for publication include ‘Karm Vibhang Sutra’, ‘Pragyaparmitahridaya Sutra’, a collection of books written by Acharya Deepankar Shrigyan, ‘Madhyamkalangkar Karika Bhashya Evam Teeka’, and a collection of other rare manuscripts.
“These are Tibetan translations of original manuscripts written in Sanskrit on palm leaves about Buddhism and its philosophy that were in possession of old Nalanda and Vikramshila universities. These manuscripts were taken to Tibet during the 7th-11th centuries for translation and propagation of Buddhism. These manuscripts were translated in the Tibetan language under the guidance of scholars on handmade papers and in natural ink,” said a researcher.
The institute had earlier planned to get the five translated versions of the manuscripts by Dalai Lama during his visit to Bodh Gaya between December 28 and 31 in 2022.
However, the programme had to be deferred for want of the CM’s message and the 2nd instalment of the agreed amount, said a CIHTS official, quoting a letter to Kumar by the vice-chancellor on December 15, 2022.
Director general of Bihar Museum Anjani Kumar Singh, who also is an advisor to the Bihar CM, said that he would inquire into the delay from the department of art and culture, which had signed the MoU with the CIHTS.
The manuscripts in Tibetan languages were handed over to the CIHTS from the Bihar research society, which is part of the Patna Museum and is under the administrative control of the directorate of Museums, Bihar.
Secretary, art and culture department, Bandana Preyashi, could not be reached for her comments on the issue despite repeated attempts.
S Siddharth, principal secretary to CM Kumar, said that once they get the message from the chief minister, it will be delivered to the CIHTS on a priority basis.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Subhash Pathak
Subhash Pathak is special correspondent of Hindustan Times with over 15 years of experience in journalism, covering issues related to governance, legislature, police, Maoism, urban and road infrastructure of Bihar and Jharkhand.
