“Found in Translation” (Part 2)

There is a fascinating opinion piece in this Sunday’s NY Times from novelist Michael Cunningham, author of “The Hours” and a new book “By Nightfall.” Cunningham’s article is so thought-provoking that I decided to break it up into five parts so we could discuss it this week. Here is part two [bold emphasis added]:

Although the words “Call me Ishmael” have force and confidence, force and confidence alone aren’t enough. “Idiot, read this” has force and confidence too, but is less likely to produce the desired effect. What else do Melville’s words possess that “Idiot, read this” lack?

They have music. Here’s where the job of translation gets more difficult. Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear. Ideally, a sentence read aloud, in a foreign language, should still sound like something, even if the listener has no idea what it is he or she is being told.

Let’s try to forget that the words “Call me Ishmael” mean anything, and think about how they sound.

Listen to the vowel sounds: ah, ee, soft i, aa. Four of them, each different, and each a soft, soothing note. Listen too to the way the line is bracketed by consonants. We open with the hard c, hit the l at the end of “call,” and then, in a lovely act of symmetry, hit the l at the end of “Ishmael.” “Call me Arthur” or “Call me Bob” are adequate but not, for musical reasons, as satisfying.

Most readers, of course, wouldn’t be able to tell you that they respond to those three words because they are soothing and symmetrical, but most readers register the fact unconsciously. You could probably say that meaning is the force we employ, and music is the seduction. It is the translator’s job to reproduce the force as well as the music.

I like to think I put a considerable amount of thought into my choice of words when writing a script. Those of you who have followed this blog for any length of time probably remember posts, such as here and here, where I suggest that we do better to think of scene description as poetry, not prose — word choice as imagematic writing. But Cunningham’s parsing of the first three words of “Moby Dick,” down to their musical essence, is a whole other level of consciousness about word usage.

And so this question occurred to me: Is this depth of thinking about each word choice solely in the province of novelists and poets? Or to put it another way, do screenwriters and TV writers not have to go to such depth when writing a script? With TV, given the extreme time crunch series writers have, I’d think not with the possible exception of a pilot script where you do want the pages to ‘sing’ to convince a network to give a green-light and attract talent.

But what about screenplays? How much thought should screenwriters put into word choices? How much thought do you put into it? I expect that most of us pay more attention to dialogue because we’re hearing the voice of each character articulate what they say. But what about scene description? Should we look for its ‘music’?

I’m asking this as a serious question because it veers into an area I know screenwriters have to consider and that is narrative voice: the matching of a writing style with the story’s genre (i.e., scene description in a comedy should be funny, scene description in a thriller should be thrilling, etc).

What are your thoughts?

Tomorrow: Part 3 of Cunningham’s opinion piece about writing.

For the NY Times review of Cunningham’s newest book “By Nightfall,” go here.

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