Erotic Literature: Adaptation and Translation in Europe and Asia

Abstracts

Toni Bentley (Independent Writer): Risks and Revelations in Writing the Erotic

My paper will present what it is actually like for a woman to write, and publish a very graphic, yet also intellectual, very honest, very personal erotic memoir in the 21st -century. The book details the course of my erotic life in general, but focuses specifically on a life-defining, four-year affair of a deeply unconventional nature — and its inevitable demise. Written in the first person, the book does not conceal a woman obsessed — I counted the encounters and kept sexual mementos — and the risks inherent in revealing oneself not as a woman in control but one out of control.

I will discuss why I would do such a thing against considerable advisement, both personal and professional, and why I decided against using a pseudonym and instead put both my name and face on this work. I will outline the challenges and mysteries of the writing process — how to put the unputtable into language – as well as the enormous and interesting difficulties in having such a book published and what happens, in both the personal and public arenas, when boundaries, are not so much pushed but actually crossed. I will describe some of the varied and extreme reactions to this work in the different cultures in which it has since been published (18 countries), including the attacks by “feminists” post-publication due to the submissive nature of the act I celebrate — heterosexual sodomy (with a considerable nod to the Divine Marquis de Sade.)

This book has become a kind of erotic Rorschach test not only for individual readers — sexuality cuts so close to the bone — but for the sexual mores of the various other cultures where the book has been published – and I will outline the curious edits asked for various translations, including the British edition. I will also discuss the one-woman play, adapted directly from the book, that has been performed in Spanish, German and English and how the reaction to the play differed from that of the book, how changing the form and presentation of an erotic work, changes the reception of it. Finally, I will examine what these all varied reactions might tell us about sexuality, about female sexuality in particular in our “feminist” and “post-feminist” age, about the nature of taboo, and about human nature in the public sphere versus the private and why exposure of the hidden via the written word can be so powerful, so threatening, so liberating and so desired.

Julia Boog & Kathrin Emeis (Hamburg): “The Hot Tears of Eros”, Or the Impossibilty of (Scientific) Translation

Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo (George Bataille, Eroticism)

George Battaile’s philosophy of eroticism is always about the transgressive, the formless and the ecstatic. It is an interruption, that dissolves the rational world. Therefore, it is not easy to transfer it into the strict system of grammar and syntax, especially not into the rigid system of scientific language. Eroticism performs the function of dissolving boundaries: not only when it comes to books, art or films, but also when it comes to theorizing.

Postmodern intellectuals like Foucault or Barthes used this transgressive force of the erotic to ease the way of scholastic writing: Foucault’s critique of Sade and Bataille or Barthes’ Pleasure of the Text is already written in a more fragmental, essayistic way than the majority of academic texts. But it is only Bataille, who works at the interface of poetic – even surreal – and theoretical writing. To say the least, he works at the interface of writing and not-writing.

In his last work, The Tears of Eros, this connection becomes most evident in the form of his research: the volume features a lot of pictures and photographs from different cultures and centuries and, with its many hyphens and exclamation marks, comes across as ‘poorly’ written. This paper will follow Batailles’ (punctuation) marks and will question the possibilities of capturing the erotic in discursive language: How come the last work of this pivotal thinker on eroticism is a work about visual arts? What does it say about the nature of erotic? What about the conditions of scientific translation?

Jianqing Chen (UC Berkeley): Adapting Jin Ping Mei, Screening Sex

To the general Chinese people, Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅), or The Plum in the Golden Vase, is a book more heard of, rather than thoroughly read. While the books are hidden in the secret library only accessible to the Jin-ology (Jin Xue 金学) scholars, its notoriety in ravish sexual descriptions incites the curiosity of general people, rendering the film adaptations of Jin Ping Mei the ever-popular costume pornography in Hong Kong cinema. In fact, the pornographic films adapted from Jin Ping Mei kept remaking and pervaded Hong Kong cinema since the 1970s and still endure. This paper delves into the multiple pornographic adaptations and remakes of Jin Ping Mei ranging from Li Hang-Hsiang (李翰祥)’s fengyue (风月) films, e.g. Golden Lotus (1974), The Golden Lotus: Love and Desire (1991), to the third-tier films such as New Jin Ping Mei (Ming Tan, 1996), Jing Ping Mei /The Forbidden Legend: Sex Chopsticks (Man Kei Chin, 2008), New Jin Ping Mei 3D (Jing Wong, 2015). Different from Jin-ology scholars for the dismissal or destigmatization of Jin Ping Mei’s celebration of the pleasure of sex, I focus on the sex scenes within these film adaptations and the corresponding paragraphs of the erotic novel. I discuss how the textual description of sex acts, comprised of onomatopoeia, dirty talks, double entendre, vernacular gossips and scandals, are adapted to films and manifest in the sex scenes through body exhibition and performance, voyeurism, sexual vocalizations, and mis-en-sence. This paper then explores the different aesthetic devices in erotic novels and pornographic films and thus different sensory experiences. 

Juliette Feyel (Cambridge): From Literary Contact to Cinematic Intimacy: Patrice Chéreau Meets Hanif Kureishi

Patrice Chéreau's film Intimacy (2001) is an adaptation of various Hanif Kureishi's narratives, the novel Intimacy (1998) and his short story “Nightlight” from Love in A Blue Time (1997) amongst others. Jay, a recently divorced man in his forties, meets a mysterious woman every Wednesday with whom he shares nothing else than sex. Even if they pursue the same narrative goal, literature and cinema approach the same situation from radically different angles. The same plot is transferred from one medium to another and invites one to reflect on the solutions which were invented for the sake of a translation from one set of semiotic codes to another. We shall see that while literature's power of evocation is challenged by the representation of an empirical, corporeal reality, cinema needs to convey a psychological drama through the exposure and aesthetic construction of two bare bodies.

Johannes Frimmel (LMU Munich): Adaptation and Standardization: Some French Pornographic Texts in German Translation Around 1900

In the German Empire, for certain observers the book trade gave the impression to be inundated with erotic and pornographic literature. Besides expensive bibliophile editions of erotic classics, also a large number of dime novels, cheap pornographic books and nude photographs were circulating. They represented the dark side of the new business of mass entertainment, and authorities feared them to undermine the family order and consequently physical and military strength. Vienna, then, was not only the birthplace of psychoanalysis, but also an important marketplace for pornographic literature. So it might be no coincidence that a rare corpus of catalogues and German books from an international bookseller and publisher of pornography was preserved at the Austrian National Library where it has been dormant until now. A major part of that corpus are translations of French texts, as France and Belgium were leading export countries of pornographic books. In my paper, I want to analyze some of these adaptations and ask whether there can be found various textual strategies of sexual arousal in German or French context. However, these books and their circulation throughout Europe inform us also about the internationally operating porn industry at the beginning of the 20th century. So they rather demonstrate an already established international repertoire of sexual entertainment. This standardized concept of pornography could easily be adapted to other cultural contexts and aimed much more for the male middle class than for the demonized proletarian reader of “smut”.

Carina Ulrika Gröner (Universität St. Gallen): Seduced by preconditions- Eroticism of power, money and the uncommon in Goethe, Sacher- Masoch and E.L. James

“Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” This famous quotation, which is often wrongly attributed to Oscar Wilde, refers to the unspoken preconditions that underlie all social structures as well as the communication about them. But these preconditions are of course also important for artworks, erotic artworks in particular.

Therefore, what we consider to be erotic is closely connected with social preconditions, like power or money and the unlikelihood of their perfect occurrence. For Niklas Luhmann, the German social theorist, power, money and sex serve as emblematic communication media for the individual to find, express and communicate his or her position in society. So narratives of erotic situations do not only amuse us, they also teach us about the preconditions of social positioning and possible upward social mobility.

In Johann Wolfgang Goethe´s The sorrows of young Werther, love serves as a code for intimacy and the communication about it and this love code becomes a moral legitimisation for  erotic activity since then. Originated in the historical period where the love code is appearing, the novel also shows the limits of this code.

In Leopold von Sacher- Masoch´s short stories Katharina II about Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, power serves as a symbolically generalized communication medium in erotic situations. In the stories we sometimes find power as simple threats, which are then followed in order to avoid negative consequences. But more interestingly we often find power as the communication medium of politics, by using powerful women in military positions and with military costumes as actresses in erotic situations.

In E.L. James` Shades of Grey trilogy money and economic success work as symbolically generalized communication media and here the underlying motivations are most evident: Anastasia exchanges her innocence against social promotion, Christian gets an obedient sexual partner shaped after his wishes in exchange for his economic status. However, like in many cases of economic motivations in erotic situations, the communication thereabout is implicit. Instead the love code is used again as a moral legitimization.  

Jie Guo (University of South Carolina): Erotica in Erotica: Adaptation and Somatic Translation in Late Imperial Chinese Erotic Culture

This paper studies a convention commonly found in late imperial Chinese erotic literature: the lovemaking couple’s use of erotica as a tool of sexual arousal. Important Ming-Qing erotic novels such as Jin Ping Mei, Rou putuan, and Hailing yishi all feature detailed scenes in which characters read or view erotic works together and meticulously imitate the gestures and positions verbally or visually depicted in them. Such scenes of somatic translation—that is, the involved parties’ bodily “translation” of the lovemaking scenes featured in the erotica they read or view—are then often adapted into paintings, album prints, or book illustrations. The “erotica-in-erotica” convention has caught the attention of some scholars, for instance, Robert Hans van Gulik, James Cahill, Patrick Hanan, and Craig Clunas, but further research is needed. Indeed, a comparative examination of this convention in literature and art sheds light on several key aspects of Ming-Qing erotica. First, this convention points to the self-referentiality of late imperial Chinese erotica, which tend to draw on itself and has established a kind of self-enclosed, self-generating tradition. Second, located at the intersection between literature and picture, between verbal and visual, this convention offers a window into the intimate interrelationship between various forms, mediums, and genres of Ming-Qing erotica. Third, this convention provides explanation for another convention in late imperial erotic literature and art, i.e., voyeurism, which, functioning as a kind of “live” erotica, constitutes another important mechanism to generate pleasure for both voyeuristic characters and voyeuristic readers/viewers. 

Stephanie Heimgartner (Ruhr University Bochum): Let’s Talk About Sex: How to Find a Language for What You Cannot Speak of Descriptions of sexuality in Nicholson Baker and A. L. Kennedy and the translations of their work

Pornography seems to be more of a riddle to literary scholars and critics than to the wider public: Can erotic literature, apart from its more obvious advantages, be of aesthetic worth?

The paper discusses the strategies of two narrative texts, A.L. Kennedy’s Original Bliss (1997) and Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes (2011), to answer this question. Both texts are in a way experimental: Original Bliss recounts an impossible love story; House of Holes fights style conventions for pornographic literature and opposes the canon while at the same time integrating it. Both develop a language that, using different means, mirrors on itself. And both have been widely translated. Here, translations into German are used to show how the diverse subtexts and metapoetical strategies transfer.

The scope of erotic scenes in A. L. Kennedy’s work seems to be to illustrate the characters’ urge to develop a working form of communication, be it verbal or corporeal, and therefore adresses one of the central topics of modern literature. Kennedy operates with a rhetoric of fragment to show her characters’ existential fragility and their awkwardness in their contacts with other human beings. In German, the fragmentary impression cannot always be mirrored, if only for the reason that German is less advanced on the way to an analytical language and therefore has longer words and sentences. Also, the choice of semantically less equivocal vocabulary is sometimes a necessity for the translator – this can endanger the sexual subtext that Kennedy creates.

In Nicholson Baker’s books, language is not viewed as a vital means of communication, but as creative matter. He hyperbolizes and ironizes the narration of the sexual encounter by introducing phantastic elements. Words and how you put them together are the real matters of arousal; not that someone has sex, but what are the means of its presentation becomes important. The text is thus promoted as a playground, the mediality of which remains overly present. This seems to offer less problems for a translation, but is received very differently by the English- and German-speaking literary critique.