Transposition and Transadaptation at a Glance

 

What does life look like when ordinary folks write about ordinary folks? And when they all come from different countries that nonetheless share common underlying conditions?

The theory of transadaptation (and more formal transposition) is illustrated by these stories published serially each week at perypatetik and collected in anthologies at the end of each year.

The basic idea of transposition is that form remains largely constant while content shifts. The genre was invented by our editors Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey as an alternative to both translation (retention of original form and content) and adaptation (change in form, retention of content of original). It can be expanded from literature to life by analogy. For example, the form of “travel” is a fundamental concept that describes movement from one place to another. What is used (the content) has shifted from horse and buggy in the 19th century to car today. Evening entertainment (form) has evolved from knitting, playing the piano and reading to watching movies on television (content).

Transadaptation works with a looser understanding of form than its literary predecessor transposition. In transadaptation, both form and content may change. Content is always contemporary in a given culture for transadaptation. For example, the plot of a story in Columbia or Uruguay will bear no direct correlation to a plot in Ukraine, Russia or Mongolia. In terms of shifts in content, transadaptation is nearly identical to transposition. It differs by allowing form to vary within a certain range that nonetheless facilitates comparability. In the perypatetik project, this range-constrained formal variation is generally established by a period, concept, category or the like. For example, after establishing a general framework with In the Middle – Prelude to a Contemporary Transadaptation (2020), we began by transadapting the period of “childhood” across cultures in Conceived – Childhood Transadapted (2021). That meant, each contributing author wrote a story with at least one child-aged character. This was followed by stories with characters not yet fully mature adults in Evanescent – Young Adulthood Transadapted (2022). With mostly the same authors (and thus countries), the next collection centered on the form of “adulthood” with all its different content-manifestations in various countries: Material Dissent – Adulthood Transadapted (2023). To lay the groundwork for the transition from “period” to “concept” transadaptation, we arranged for a sweeping volume in Of Flowing Vicissitudes – Life Transadapted (2024).

The transadaptation of concepts draws on the framework conditions of global peripatetic modernity that we documented in the 2017-2019 online series at http://www.perypatetik.net and http://www.perypatetik.org. In 2017, the theme was uncertainty, with 52 authors from over 40 countries contributing short essays for weekly publication. In 2018, the theme was instability; and in 2019, it was polarization and extremes. In volume 6, Meaning? – Uncertainty, Instability and Extremes Transadapted (2025), we started collecting stories (rather than essays) that transadapt the themes of uncertainty, instability and extremes.

Transadaptation (via any medium) should reveal to us that solutions to current problems can be found by applying past and present mindsets analogously.

Most of the stories in these collections are about weathering external hardship and thriving personally on occasion. Fiction tells us: this is exactly the model that has proven to be viable for centuries. Both diachronically and synchronically, things do not repeat; they rhyme or are transposed or transadapted. These stories demonstrate in particular the synchronic transadaptation of romantics and the potential of their values and norms to counterbalance the deleterious effects of our daily environment.

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Collections of transadaptations: Volumes 1 to … of transadaptations

Theory of transposition and collection of transpositions: From Wahnsinnig to the Looney Bin

Theory of transposing culture: Peripatetic Alterity (chapter 10)

See “publications” here at perypatetik (menu item) for papers on this transposition and transadaptation.