Adapting, Translating, and Reworking Gomorrah

This article seeks to find a balance between issues concerning adaptation and translation and issues of TV studies and film studies. Adapting a literary text for a movie or for a TV series within the same culture involves a plethora of interpretive, semiotic, and hermeneutic relationships. This case study of the Italian novel Gomorrah (2006) by Roberto Saviano considers diverse strategies of adaptation, illustrating the complex passage through different discourses, practices, and processes from Saviano’s novel to Matteo Garrone’s film (Gomorrah, 2008) and to the TV series (Gomorrah, 2014—on air). The analysis adopts a multidisciplinary methodology in order to draw attention to translational ‘continuities’ from one medium to another and to the differences and ‘discontinuities’ in transmedia reinterpretations of previous source materials.