“My Brilliant Friend” was a book before it became a TV series.

 

You’re supposed to read the book before you watch the film (or the series) but I didn’t like the book  or thought I didn’t like the book and so I thought I wouldn’t watch the series.      I might have long ago called “My Brilliant Friend” a chick flick series and made excuses not to watch the film the same way I made excuses about not reading the book but I’m a reformed man and just a little bit smarter now.

In any case,  my wife had me watching the seasons one and two of the series with her. The reason I succumbed so easily was because when the pandemic hit I took the opportunity to  work on learning the Italian language. I’ve been watching lots of Italian movies — subtitled.

The “My Brilliant Friend” series is in Italian, with heavy use of Neapolitan dialect.  So the fact that these languages of Italy can be so dissimilar, and have such different expressions and meanings, is fascinating.

I absorbed a little Sicilian from my mother and grandparents who were born there.  My father came from a small town about seventy miles from Naples so I picked up a little of that dialect from him.  If my language acquisition proceeds at a snail’s pace, at least I got some validation from the series to sooth my insecurities about speaking in a bastard tongue.  I’m not sure whose tongue is really the bastard tongue but I digress. . .

So the  topic of this discussion is book v. film.  And I already said that my first encounter with the book was a fail.  I might have been smarter and looked into it more because only recently did I find out “My Brilliant Friend” was first written in Italian. This is pretty basic, I know, but did I ever say I was a genius?   

 One reason I rejected the first opportunity to read the book was because I was hearing about it everywhere  — on all the talk shows, the internet, and everywhere blah-blah-blah was being touted.   This kind of 4-walled publicity approach often indicates   the publisher is making a huge and expensive effort to create a blockbuster on somebody’s behalf while dozens of better books are unfunded, unsupported, and unnoticed.  I’m not saying that’s the case with “My Brilliant Friend.”  I don’t know yet.  I’ve only read ten pages of it so far in this second-life attempt.

   Yes, I’ve learned a few things since then.   As I look back I’m not even sure I didn’t like the book. I see now that maybe what I didn’t like was the translation.  I see now that the novel, because of its parochial nature, would be terrifically hard to translate into English.  Some of the things people say and do in Naples and Sicily cannot be understood anyplace but in those two regions.

  I have only recently understood what a difficult thing translation is, especially in a long novel which makes fundamental use of localisms and idioms.   A translation of a novel will always be quite a different book even while keeping  to the basic plot points.  The phenomenon is blatantly clear in translations of poetry, particularly where rhyme and metaphor are extant. 

What language transference cannot do with a novel such as "My Brilliant Friend"  is duplicate the actual feeling and meaning of words to   persons  not involved in the particular culture.  This unfortunate and difficult aspect of translation is experienced most  egregiously by those who watch ‘foreign’ films with sub-titles.  Just as there’s no direct translation of our Americanisms, there are no direct translation paths for many of the Italianisms in Elena Ferrante’s book. 

So this comparison of book to film  is of small importance to most people but that’s what I’ll try to do as I read Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend.”