The Paradox of Bazinian Adaptation: Translation and Fidelity in Saramago’s The Double and Villeneuve’s Enemy

Discussing Enemy (2013), his adaptation of Portuguese novelist José Saramago’s The Double (2002), French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve remarks: ‘the best way to respect an author is to be very honest about the way you adapted [their work] and to totally destroy the original and make it your own’. Villeneuve’s recreative (translational) use of ‘respect’ reverberates intertextually with André Bazin’s description of respect-based fidelity. For Bazin, utterly faithful yet completely original adaptations could be achieved through ‘a ceaselessly creative respect’ in which faithfulness and unfaithfulness paradoxically converge in translational acts of recreation. I term this paradoxical doubling the paradox of adaptation in Bazin. In part 1 of this article, I explore how Bazin illustrates that paradox in his essays about adaptation with examples of translation, and particularly with examples of Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe (an emblem of intertextual rewriting in French literature). Bazin’s references to translation provide an aperture into a wider understanding of adaptation’s intertextual and heteroglossic nature. Bazinian adaptations are faithful reconstructions and unfaithful transformations. As I discus in part 2 of this essay, Villeneuve capitalizes on this paradox in his recreative translation of The Double. The film reflects and ‘destroys’ (as Villeneuve would say) Saramago’s novel in order to recreate it. Through its re-theorization of Bazin’s fidelity as a translational prism of recreation, this essay contributes to the ‘resurgence of (pro)fidelity criticism’ (Hermansson) as well as to ongoing calls (Krebs, Venuti) for greater attention to the hermeneutic synergy between translation and adaptation studies.