adaptation

In a relatively short time, apps have become highly popular as a platform for children’s fiction. The majority of media attention to these apps has focused on their technical features. There has been less focus on their aesthetic aspects, such as how interactive elements, visual-verbal arrangements and narration are interrelated. This article investigates how a reading of a «picturebook app» may differ from readings of the narratives found in printed books and movies. The discussion will be anchored in an analysis of the iPad app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. This app, which is an adaptation of an animated short film, relates the story of a book lover who becomes the proprietor of a magical library.

Stephanie Strickland's and Nick Montfort's See and Spar Between is in many respects a translational challenge that in some languages might seem an impossible task. Polish, our target language, imposes some serious constraints: one- syllable words become disyllabic or multisyllabic; kennings have different morphological, lexical and grammatical arrangement, and most of the generative rhetoric of the original (like anaphors) must take into consideration the grammatical gender of Polish words. As a result, the javascript code, instructions that accompany the javascript file, and arrays of words that this poetry generator draws from, need to be expanded and rewritten. Moreover, in several crucial points of this rule-driven work, natural language forces us to modify the code. In translating Sea and Spar Between, the process of negotiation between the source language and the target language involves more factors than in the case of traditional translation. Strickland and Montfort read Dickinson and Melville and parse their readings into a computer program (in itself a translation, or port, from Python to javascript) which combines them in almost countless ways. This collision of cultures, languages and tools becomes amplified if one wants to transpose it into a different language. This transposition involves the original authors of Sea and Spar Between, the four original translators of Dickinson and Melville into Polish, and us, turning into a multilayered translational challenge, something we propose to call a distributed translation. While testing the language and the potential of poetry translation in the digital age, the experiment – we hope – has produced some fascinating and thought-provoking poetry.

Andrew Klobucar argues that a new iPad app for The Waste Land demonstrates, despite the developer's intentions and Eliot's fears, that the symbolic form of the database is irrepressible. According to Klobucar, Eliot bemoans the cultural impact of new media and technological innovation, though his poem--particularly through Pound's editorial notes and Eliot's added annotations--employs the structure of a database. The app for The Waste Land attempts to mitigate this tension by promoting a single legitimate version of the poem, though the app's structure ultimately works against that model, as it frees readers from the imposed authority of singular narrative.