The Rose's Petal and the Celluloid Frame

Literature and Visual Art (LM) — Università di Bologna

Introduction

In 1983, Umberto Eco, the Italian semiotician-turned-novelist, published a curious essay on adaptation: "Eco on Eco: Translating The Name of the Rose." In it, he argued that "to translate means to understand the internal system of a certain language, the structure of a text given in that language, and to construct a double of a textual system which, under a certain description, can be considered as equivalent to the source system." Three years later, Jean-Jacques Annaud would put this theory to the test in the ultimate act of semiotic translation—adapting Eco's own debut novel into a visual medium.

To assess what is "lost" and what is "gained" in this translation, we must first understand what Eco's novel was attempting to accomplish on a structural level. The Name of the Rose is not merely a medieval mystery; it is a text about texts, a labyrinth about labyrinths, what Eco himself would call an "open work"—a term he coined in 1962 to describe artworks that invite multiple interpretations while maintaining internal coherence.

The Architecture of Adaptation

Cinema's Semiotic Challenge

Cinema, as Eco understood it, operates through what he called "iconic signs"—signs that bear a relationship of resemblance to their referents. A film cannot show an abstract concept directly; it must embody it in concrete visual form. This presents an immediate challenge when adapting a novel whose central subject is the nature of signs themselves.

The novel's famous conclusion—"stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus" (the rose of old remains only in its name; we possess only naked names)—is an assertion about semiotics itself. Annaud's film cannot make this statement directly; it must instead create a visual equivalent that allows viewers to arrive at similar conclusions through different means.

The Role of Visual Hierarchy

Annaud's key insight was to translate Eco's textual labyrinth into an architectural one. The abbey's physical structure becomes a visual manifestation of the novel's epistemological themes. The camera's movement through dark corridors, its emphasis on enclosed spaces and limited perspectives, creates what might be called a "visual epistemology"—the viewer experiences the limitations of knowledge through the limitations of sight.

This translation is not without losses. Eco's novel is filled with extended passages of medieval theological debate, elaborate discussions of nominalism versus realism, and intricate parodies of scholastic reasoning. These cannot be directly visualised without becoming static and theatrical. Annaud's solution was to compress these debates into brief exchanges while expanding the visual and atmospheric elements that the novel only sketches.

Gains and Losses in Translation

What Is Lost

The most significant loss is what we might call "intertextual density." Eco's novel is a palimpsest, layered with quotations, allusions, and deliberate anachronisms. The narrator Adso repeatedly quotes texts that would not exist for centuries; characters speak in elaborate parodies of medieval Latin prose. This textual playfulness—what Eco called "semiosic chains"—cannot survive the translation to film, where dialogue must be spoken and understood in real time.

Also lost is the novel's fundamental unreliability. Adso is writing as an old man, reconstructing memories that may themselves be reconstructions. The novel constantly reminds us that we are reading a text about reading texts. Film's inherent present-tense quality—what André Bazin called its "ontological realism"—makes this kind of temporal layering extremely difficult to achieve.

What Is Gained

However, the film gains something that the novel can only gesture toward: the immediate, visceral experience of the medieval world. Eco's descriptions of the abbey, however detailed, remain abstractions on the page. Annaud's camera gives us mud, cold, firelight flickering on stone faces. The film achieves what Eco called "hypotyposis"—the rhetorical technique of making something so vivid that the reader seems to see it—through literal vision.

The casting of Sean Connery as William of Baskerville also introduces an element absent from the novel: star presence. Connery's performance creates a character who exists not just as a collection of signs but as a physical being with weight, warmth, and charisma. This is neither better nor worse than Eco's William—it is simply different, operating in a different semiotic register.

The Labyrinth as Visual Metaphor

Architecture of Knowledge

The library, in both novel and film, is the central symbol—a labyrinth whose structure mirrors the nature of knowledge itself. In Eco's novel, we learn its layout gradually through William's deductions, piecing together a mental map from textual clues. The process of reading becomes itself a navigation of the labyrinth.

In Annaud's film, we see the labyrinth directly. This might seem to diminish its mystery, but the cinematography ensures that our vision is always partial, our orientation always uncertain. The camera becomes Theseus without a thread, and we share its confusion. This is a different kind of mystery—not intellectual but phenomenological.

The Question of Closure

Eco's novel ends ambiguously, with Adso's meditation on names and the impossibility of final meanings. The film, constrained by narrative conventions, must provide something more conclusive. Annaud's solution—the burning library, the physical destruction of knowledge—translates the novel's philosophical ambiguity into visual catastrophe. Whether this is a gain or a loss depends on one's interpretive priorities.

Toward a Theory of Adaptive Translation

Eco's Own Framework

In "Experiences in Translation" (2001), Eco would later elaborate a theory of translation that applies directly to this case. He distinguished between what he called "saying almost the same thing" and "saying exactly the same thing"—the former being the goal of good translation, the latter being impossible. A successful adaptation, by this measure, is one that finds equivalents rather than exact correspondences.

By this standard, Annaud's The Name of the Rose is a successful translation. It does not reproduce the novel's textual effects; it finds visual equivalents that operate according to cinema's own semiotic logic. The viewer who has not read the novel encounters a complete and coherent work; the viewer who has read it recognises the translation as valid, even where it departs from the source.

The Model Reader and the Model Viewer

Eco's concept of the "model reader"—the ideal recipient implied by a text's structure—finds its parallel in what we might call the "model viewer" of a film. Eco's novel constructs a reader who enjoys puzzles, who catches allusions, who takes pleasure in the play of signs. Annaud's film constructs a viewer who responds to atmosphere, who follows visual rhythms, who experiences knowledge as perception.

These are not the same reader and viewer, but they are compatible. The translation works because it respects the competences of its new audience while remaining faithful to the spirit—if not the letter—of its source.

Works Cited

• Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
• Eco, Umberto. "Eco on Eco: Translating The Name of the Rose." Journal of Italian Translation 1, no. 1 (1983): 15–26.
• Eco, Umberto. Experiences in Translation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
• Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
• Annaud, Jean-Jacques, dir. The Name of the Rose. 20th Century Fox, 1986.