Traduttore, traditore? La adaptación televisiva de “Las aventuras de Pepe Carvalho” (Adolfo Aristarain)

Adolfo Aristarain directed for TVE The adventures of Pepe Carvalho (1986). The miniseries enjoyed a moderate success with viewers, but neither the critics nor Manuel Vázquez Montalbán truly liked it. The writer detached himself from the TV adaptation and symbolically killed the director in his story Murder in Prado del Rey (1987). This article examines the work of the Argentine filmmaker, on the assumption that adaptations from literary to audiovisual language involve an intricate process of intersemiotic translation (Jakobson, 1959), which often requires major changes in the transposition of one medium to another.