Translationships 3: Pedro Almodóvar’s Translationship with Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine: The Translator as Director
by Magdalena Edwards
TRANSLATIONSHIPS is a column by Magdalena Edwards. Magdalena is a writer, actor, and translator born in Santiago, Chile, and based in Los Angeles, California. Magdalena translates from Spanish and Portuguese into English, including the work of Clarice Lispector, Márcia Tiburi, Silviano Santiago, Óscar Contardo, Nicanor Parra, and Raúl Zurita. She is currently translating Julio Cortázar’s Cartas de mamá for Sublunary Press. She is also working on a book-length project titled Translationships. More on Twitter @magda8lena & Instagram @msmagda8lena.
Almodóvar has Swinton accomplish a number of tasks before she speaks on the phone, and these actions contrast starkly with her stillness and her complete absorption in the conversation once it begins. One could say that Almodóvar does faithfully render the sequence of “poses” Cocteau designed for the actress of his play. Swinton’s hands may be free due to her AirPods and yet her body is entirely occupied by the phone call when she is speaking and listening to her lover.
I’ve thought a lot about the translator as a kind of actor who takes on the voice and body of the original text and reanimates it in the target language. Translation as an embodied practice. Others have written about translation as performance including Katrina Dodson, Sandra Berman, and Carole Maier. Recently, while watching Pedro Almodóvar’s short film The Human Voice (2020) and re-watching his earlier feature films Law of Desire (1987) and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and reading Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine (1930) alongside, I started thinking about the translator as a kind of director.[1]
In a recent interview, when asked when he started thinking about adapting Cocteau’s play, Almodóvar noted that the “Cocteau piece was always very present in [his] mind” such that it influenced his two feature films Law of Desire (where Carmen Maura’s character is asked by her director brother, played by Eusebio Poncela, to star in his staged version of Cocteau’s play) and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (which takes the basic plot points of Cocteau’s piece and runs with them, also starring Maura). Almodóvar additionally revealed that “in the last three years, [he] tried to make a closer adaptation of the play”[2]—this time in English and starring Tilda Swinton. More than thirty years after its sister films, The Human Voice opens with a note to the viewer: “Freely Based on Jean Cocteau’s Play.”
One thing that links all three of Almodóvar’s “freely based” versions or variations, and makes his translationship with Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine clear, is the repeated use of the telephone as the visual and material stand-in for the romantic other, the lover who is on the way out. In every case the telephone draws out the process of the lover’s departure; he is no longer there in body, but he continues to be present through his voice. The telephone is responsible in many ways for the melodrama because it keeps ringing. Cocteau’s unseen and unheard lover, who must be conjured by the actress on stage as she speaks and listens to him on the phone, is in the process of abandoning her. This is a very specific lover who is due to marry another woman the next day and who is also asking his soon-to-be ex to pack his things for him and leave his suitcase downstairs so he can fetch it when he’s ready without having to see her. The lover bent on rejecting his former beloved becomes various other versions of himself, now both seen and heard, in Almodóvar’s three films. Almodóvar is clearly saying there is no one way he can translate Cocteau and he would prefer to freely explore multiple options. This characteristic of the translator as director, as given to us by Almodóvar, is powerful and compelling: the starting premise that there is no singular correct translation, but that what matters more is the process of translation and the multiplicity of translation outcomes this process provides.
Cocteau’s original play features a 1930s candlestick telephone, as seen in photos of his leading actress Berthe Bovy,[3] and there is no particular description of it in his text other than the following in the “Preface”: “one act, one room, one character, love, and that banal accessory of modern plays, the telephone.” Almodóvar, on the other hand, translates the phone in multiple ways in each of his 1980s films, including: the passionate red, cool white, and envy-green rotary phones color-coding the love triangle between Miguel Molina, Eusebio Poncela, and Antonio Banderas in Law of Desire, and Carmen Maura’s fury-red push-button phone that she throws through her apartment window and then recuperates, her giant rectangular grey and white answering machine (which later in the film gets thrown off the balcony and breaks upon impact below), and the cool blue telephone in the telephone booth on the sidewalk right beneath her apartment in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
In The Human Voice, Almodóvar gives Tilda Swinton’s character an iPhone with AirPods, decidedly cooler (colder) in look and feel, totally twenty-first century. Almodóvar’s move from rotary phone to smart phone means, on the most basic level, that Swinton has her hands free while she is speaking on the phone, whereas the various characters in Almodóvar’s prior films and the woman in Cocteau’s original do not. Cocteau provides instructions, a kind of telephonic choreography, in his accompanying notes on how to stage the play. He provides a list of what he calls “poses”: “From this moment [of answering the phone] she will speak standing, seated, her back to the audience, facing forward, in profile, on her knees behind the back of the armchair, her head cut off, leaning […] Each pose must be used for a phase of the monologue-dialogue.”
Almodóvar has Swinton accomplish a number of tasks before she speaks on the phone, and these actions contrast starkly with her stillness and her complete absorption in the conversation once it begins. One could say that Almodóvar does faithfully render the sequence of “poses” Cocteau designed for the actress of his play. Swinton’s hands may be free due to her AirPods and yet her body is entirely occupied by the phone call when she is speaking and listening to her lover. While Almodóvar says he “wanted to make [The Human Voice] something more contemporary” than Cocteau’s play “because it’s impossible for women right now to identify with the idea of a submissive woman, someone submissive to her partner,”[4] nonetheless Swinton’s character describes herself to her lover as “submissive” and is held captive by their conversation over the telephone, which she does not even have to hold in order to use. Almodóvar says it “was a moral necessity for me to give [Swinton] a way out” as compared to the “closed cycle” or loop of Cocteau’s play, a strategy he explores with his earlier characters in Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.[5]
The actress in the original staging of La Voix Humaine must hold the phone’s handset, speak into the mouthpiece, and listen through the receiver. And then there is the phone’s cord, which Cocteau includes in his choreography: “[she] will survey the room, dragging the phone cord.” There is a photo of Berthe Bovy, the actress who originated the role with Cocteau, with the phone receiver against her ear and her head thrown back dramatically and with the following caption: “abandoned young woman trying to regain her lost lover; strangles herself with the telephone cord.” The photo does not show the cord around her neck, though the cord is visible and somewhat tangled. In the final section of the play, there is the following stage direction for the actress to wrap the cord around her neck: “(Elle enroule le fil autour de son cou.)” And she tells her lover, in one of her final attempts to get him to change his mind and not abandon her: “Tu te souviens d’Yvonne qui se demandait comment la voix peut passer à travers les tortillons du fil. J’ai le fil autour de mon cou. J’ai ta voix autour de mon cou.” [“You remember Yvonne wondering how the voice can get through the twists of the cord. I have the cord around my neck. I have your voice around my neck.”] This is a section of Cocteau’s play, among others, that Almodóvar does not use.
Here is another section that Almodóvar doesn’t use, adapted from the original French text by Daniel Raggett who directed The Human Voice in London at the Gate Theatre in 2018:[6]
The actress should speak the following bit in quotation marks in the foreign language she knows the best.
“You know, your sister’s papers, well, I burnt them all in the oven. I thought about opening them first to take out the drawing you told me about but since you told me to burn everything, I burnt everything
Oh! good
good
yes”[7]
It would have been wonderful, I think, to have had Swinton do her version, as directed by Almodóvar, of this moment where the actress attempts to inflict injury on her soon-to-be-ex-lover with hurtful information and does so in a different language. The possibility of multilingualism emerges here — and the reality that sometimes one needs a different language to say certain things.
It interests me profoundly that the version of Cocteau that Almodóvar has made that is closest to the original text is also his first English-language production. The prior and freer versions are in Spanish and Cocteau’s text was written in French. Almodóvar says he wrote The Human Voice “in Spanish and had [it] translated” into English.[8] The triangulation of languages at hand is fascinating: Almodóvar wrote a script in Spanish freely based on a play written in French and then had the script translated from Spanish into English so he could film in English for the first time. Almodóvar says of working in English: “When I was rehearsing with [Swinton], I was frightened about the language. My English, as you see, is not that good. But with Tilda, it was different. She says that we understood each other, and that was real, because both of us talk the language of cinema. In that language, we understood each other perfectly well.”[9] Given the importance of the sound, music, and rhythm of the dialogues in all of his films, this is a testament to his synergy with Swinton and their shared language of cinema, movement, and emotion. It is also a testament to whoever translated his script from Spanish into English. I wish we knew who that was.
It has also been said that The Human Voice is part of Almodóvar’s preparation for “getting the filmmaker used to the challenges of shooting in another language” since he will be “filming an adaptation of Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women.”[10] In fact, Berlin’s book is one of the items on Swinton’s character’s coffee table in The Human Voice. One of the tasks Swinton completes in the first section of the film, before her phone call, is organizing the items on her coffee table, rearranging them, and this includes Berlin’s book. Of Berlin and her stories, Almodóvar says: “They’re so funny. They’re so dark. The brutality of herself and her writing, it makes the stories so vibrant.”[11] LitHub’s Johnny Diamond confessed his nervousness regarding a cinematic rendition of Berlin in Almodóvar’s hands: “I’m very skeptical of his ability to work with Berlin’s brokendown American dirtbag ballads.”[12] I’m eager to see what he does, especially since Berlin wrote about and lived in Mexico and Chile. And maybe he will find himself doing with Berlin what he has done with Cocteau, working on multiple versions over multiple years. And who will Almodóvar cast? There is so much to look forward to as Almodóvar explores a new translationship for the big screen.
[1] “‘The Human Voice’ Review: Almodóvar Meets Cocteau Meets Swinton” by Glenn Kenny (New York Times)
[2] “Almodóvar on The Human Voice, a Film Inspired by ‘Desperation'” by Rachel Handler (Vulture)
[3] Berthe Bovy dans La Voix Humaine de Jean Cocteau, 1930 (Germaine Krull) and The Actress Berthe Bovy in the play La Voix Humaine by Jean Cocteau
[4] “Almodóvar on The Human Voice, a Film Inspired by ‘Desperation'” by Rachel Handler (Vulture)
[5] “Almodóvar on The Human Voice, a Film Inspired by ‘Desperation'” by Rachel Handler (Vulture)
[6] The Human Voice: Rehearsal Photos (Gate Theatre)
[7] Jean Cocteau, The Human Voice (Bloomsbury, 2018)
[8] “Pedro Almodóvar Reveals Post-Oscar Plans for New Short Film Starring Tilda Swinton—Exclusive” by Erik Kohn (IndieWire)
[9] “Almodóvar on The Human Voice, a Film Inspired by ‘Desperation'” by Rachel Handler (Vulture)
[10] “Pedro Almodóvar Reveals Post-Oscar Plans for New Short Film Starring Tilda Swinton—Exclusive” by Erik Kohn (IndieWire)
[11] “Almodóvar on The Human Voice, a Film Inspired by ‘Desperation'” by Rachel Handler (Vulture)
[12] “Pedro Almodóvar is adapting Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women and I am nervous” by Jonny Diamond (LitHub)
Magdalena Edwards writes the Translationships column for Hopscotch. Her translations include the work of Noemi Jaffe, Clarice Lispector, Silviano Santiago, Márcia Tiburi, Óscar Contardo, Nicanor Parra, and Raúl Zurita. She is currently translating Julio Cortázar’s Cartas de mamá for Sublunary Press. Find her on Twitter @magda8lena & Instagram @msmagda8lena.
Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, June 1, 2021
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