ترجمة المُتخيَّل الشمي لرواية "العطر" لباتريك زوسكيند: من الخطاب الروائي إلى الوسيطين السينمائي والتلفزيوني

Abstract

This paper departs from a nuanced problematic concerning the interplay between literary discourse and audiovisual arts, seeking to trace the aesthetic threads that govern the transition from the authority of the written word to the language of the image. To interrogate this problematic in depth, we have selected Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985) as our primary corpus. The choice of this particular text is not arbitrary; it is dictated by the text's inherently challenging nature, as it constructs its fictional worlds through the sense of smell as a narrative focal point — making it, on the surface, resistant to visual embodiment.

Within this framework, the study traces the mechanisms of aesthetic transformation to which this work has been subjected across two distinct adaptations: Tom Tykwer's cinematic film (2006) and the German television series (2018). Rather than merely cataloguing the differences between word and image, we probe the manner in which the olfactory worlds have been reshaped, the characters reconstructed, and the novelistic space re-engineered within a medium that relies fundamentally on sight and sound while being inherently devoid of smell.

The central aim of this inquiry is to demonstrate that the process of adaptation is not a mechanical transposition of the source text, but rather an interpretive practice that generates its own distinct visual aesthetics. The visual medium, in this context, does not diminish the semantic horizons opened by the novel — it actively re-produces meaning and participates in their expansion.