Read the following excerpts from Salman Rushdie’s “A Fine Pickle” (The Guardian, 28

February 2009

The question raised by the adaptive excesses of Adaptation is the question at the heart of the
entire subject of adaptation – that is to say, the question of essence. “Poetry is what gets lost in
translation,” said Robert Frost, but Joseph Brodsky retorted: “Poetry is what is gained in
translation,” and the battle-lines could not be more clearly drawn. My own view has always been
that whether we are talking about a poem moving across a language border to become another
poem in another tongue, a book crossing the frontier between the world of print and celluloid, or
human beings migrating from one world to another, both Frost and Brodsky are right. Something
is always lost in translation; and yet something can also be gained. I am defining adaptation very
broadly, to include translation, migration and metamorphosis, all the means by which one thing
becomes another. In my novel Midnight’s Children the narrator Saleem discusses the making of
pickles as this sort of adaptive process: “I reconcile myself,” he says, “to the inevitable
distortions of the pickling process. To pickle is to give immortality, after all: fish, vegetables,
fruit hang embalmed in spice-and-vinegar; a certain alteration, a slight intensification of taste, is
a small matter, surely? The art is to change the flavour in degree, but not in kind; and above all
(in my thirty jars and a jar) to give it shape and form – that is to say, meaning.”

The question of essences remains at the heart of the adaptive act: how to make a second version
of a first thing, of a book or film or poem or vegetable, or of yourself, that is successfully its
own, new thing and yet carries with it the essence, the spirit, the soul of the first thing, the thing
that you yourself, or your book or poem or film or your pre-pickle mango or lime, originally
were.

Is it impossible? Is the intangible in our arts and our natures, the space between our words, the
things seen in between the things shown, inevitably discarded in the remaking process, and if so
can it be filled up with other spaces, other visions, that satisfy or even enrich us enough so that
we do not mind the loss? To look at adaptation in this broad-spectrum way, to take it beyond the
realm of art into the rest of life, is to see that all the meanings of the word deal with the question
of what is essential – in a work adapted to another form, in an individual adapting to a new
home, in a society adapting to a new age. What do you preserve? What do you jettison? What is
changeable, and where must you draw the line? The questions are always the same, and the way
we answer them determines the quality of the adaptation, of the book, the poem, or of our own
lives. […]

Everyone accepts that stories and films are different things, and that the source material must be
modified, even radically modified, to be effective in the new medium. The only interesting
questions are “how?” and “how much?” However, when the original is virtually discarded, it’s
difficult to know if the result can be called an adaptation at all. […]
What is essential? It's one of the great questions of life, and, as I've suggested, it's a question that
crops up in other adaptations than artistic ones. The text is human society and the human self, in
isolation or in groups, the essence to be preserved is a human essence, and the result is the
pluralist, hybridized, mixed-up world in which we all now live. Adaptation as metaphor, to
paraphrase Susan Sontag, adaptation as carrying across, which is the literal meaning of the word
"metaphor", from the Greek, and of the related word "translation", another form of carrying
across, this time derived from Latin.

What are the things we think of as essential in our lives? The answers could be: our children, a
daily walk in the park, a good stiff drink, the reading of books, a job, a vacation, a baseball team,
a cigarette, or love. And yet life has a way of making us rethink. Our children move away from
home, we move away from our favourite park, the doctor forbids us to drink or smoke, we lose
our eyesight, we get fired, there's no time or money to take a vacation, our baseball team sucks,
our heart is broken. At such times our picture of the world hangs crookedly on the wall. Then, if
we can manage it, we adapt. And what this shows us is that essence is something deeper than any
of that, it's the thing that gets us through. […]

As individuals, as communities, as nations, we are the constant adapters of ourselves, and must
constantly ask ourselves the question wherein does our richness lie: what are the things we
cannot ever give up unless we wish to cease to be ourselves?

We can learn this much from the poets who translate the poetry of others, from the screenwriters
and film-makers who turn words on the page into images on a screen, from all those who carry
across one thing into another state: an adaptation works best when it is a genuine transaction
between the old and the new, carried out by persons who understand and care for both, who can
help the thing adapted to leap the gulf and shine again in a different light. In other words, the
process of social, cultural and individual adaptation, just like artistic adaptation, needs to be free,
not rigid, if it is to succeed. Those who cling too fiercely to the old text, the thing to be adapted,
the old ways, the past, are doomed to produce something that does not work, an unhappiness, an
alienation, a quarrel, a failure, a loss.

Using as a starting Rushdie’s observations as a writer engaged in the process of adaptation,

try to formulate you own response to these questions:

1. How do we define such terms as “essence” and “spirit”?

2. Does the “essence/spirit” of a text necessarily constitute the same thing to all
readers/viewers? Why?Why not?

3. Should an adapter aim to create a “second version” of the text being adapted? Why?Why
not?

4. What other words are used by Rushdie to describe adaptation? Consider each of these
words: do they have positive or negative connotations?
5. What other words could we substitute for the term adaptation? Draw up a list of
alternative words. Do they have positive or negative connotations?