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Title |
Urban as Filter: The Translatability of the fiction "The Two Painters" and Its Taiwanese and Korean Film Adaptations |
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Author |
Ho, Chia-Ying |
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PhD Candidate, Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, National Chengchi University |
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Abstract |
Taiwanese author Huang Chun-ming's 1971 fiction "The Two Painters" was subsequently adapted into the Korean film Chil-su and Man-su (Park Kwang-su, 1988) and the Taiwanese film The Two Painters (Yu Kan-ping, 1990) in the late 1980s. As a special case of literary adaptation as above, the "media difference" and "spatiotemporal difference" among the fiction and two adapted films are worthy to be discussed. This paper takes "urban" as a latent theme of the original fiction and its film adaptations, and serves as a filter of translation for analyzing the implications of translatability across the three works. The discussion begins by problematizing literary adaptation through the concept of "translatability." By referencing works of Walter Benjamin and Naoki Sakai, who reconceptualize "translation" beyond its traditional scope, then this paper seeks to re-clarify the adaptive relationship between fictions and films. Subsequently, by analyzing the fiction "The Two Painters" as base, this paper conducts a comparative discussion of the Taiwanese and Korean film adaptations. It focuses on the narrative and representation in the three works, specifically examining the "rooftop scenes" in city and the "characterization" of the painters. These analyses reflect the issues of urbanization, labor problems, and ethnic identity to interpret the seemingly disparate yet shared essence and continuity among the original fiction and its daptations. In doing so, this paper rediscovers the classic and contemporary significance of the fiction. |
