Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

by Salman Rushdie

We can learn this much from the poets who translate the poetry of others, from the screenwriters and filmmakers 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. But those who do not know who they are are doomed too: individuals who sacrifice themselves for the sake of pleasing others; comedians who stop telling jokes because they find themselves in a humorless world; serious people who start trying to tell jokes because they fear being thought humorless; people in a new situation, a new relationship, a new country, who act against their natures because they think that’s the way to make things easy for themselves. Whole societies can lose their way through a process of bad adaptation. Striving to save themselves, they can oppress others. Hoping to defend themselves, they can damage the very liberties they believed to be under ...