John Huston's intersemiotic translation of "The Dead": between sign and symbol

When directing the film version of James Joyce’s “The Dead” in 1987, John Huston faced the challenge of reproducing on the screen Joyce’s atmosphere of claustrophobia and spiritual barrenness. In this essay, Huston’s movie is analyzed as an instance of C. S. Peirce's theory of intersemiotic translation, an act which he defined as the process of reproducing “a sign into another system of signs”. After an introductory analysis of the use of symbols in “The Dead”, my essay focuses on Huston’s filmic adaptation of Joyce’s symbolism. To this end, I argue that Joyce's text is staged through the use of “fading lights”, dark and oppressive colours, props, music and specific choices regarding photography and framing. The aim of this contrastive analysis is to ascertain whether and to which extent Huston managed to reproduce the symbolic meanings embedded in Joyce’s short story, despite slight changes due to his resorting to a different semiotic system.