Great Adaptations

NY Times ^ | January 13, 2008 | SOPHIE GEE

[forkinsocket]

Mass-market adaptations make Great Books go bad. Or so conventional wisdom would have it. But every so often, plundering and pillaging a canonical text for the sake of entertainment gives it the kiss of life. Take “Beowulf” and “Paradise Lost.” The unpalatable truth is that both originals are now virtually unreadable. “Beowulf” is written in Old English, an inflected Germanic tongue that looks a lot less like our language than one would hope. As for Milton’s epic, it’s in “normal” English, but its blank verse is so densely learned, so syntactically complicated and philosophically obscure, that it’s almost never read outside college courses. Even Samuel Johnson, writing 100 years after Milton, said: “‘Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”

Now, modern popularizers have come to the rescue, with striking commercial success. Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary’s film version of “Beowulf” has taken in more than $180 million worldwide since its opening in November. “His Dark Materials,” Philip Pullman’s trilogy inspired by “Paradise Lost,” has sold 15 million copies worldwide, while the film version of the first volume, “The Golden Compass,” has earned more than $150 million.

But the “Beowulf” movie and Pullman’s novel (the film is a different story) have succeeded aesthetically as well — not by dumbing down the originals, but by picking up on their weirdest and hardest-to-parse particulars.

With “Beowulf,” the critics have talked mostly about the film’s video-game-like 3-D animation and mannered special effects, which recast the epic as a lavish, fast-paced fantasy. But it’s also successful in the way it rewrites the source material.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

“His Dark Materials,” Philip Pullman’s trilogy inspired by “Paradise Lost,”

Somewhat, but Pullman wanted to change the ending 180 degrees.