Near the beginning of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) we learn that the brother-in-law of Isabel Archer is at a loss to understand her. She is, he observes, “written in a foreign tongue; I can't make her out.” Ludlow goes on to confess, “Well, I don't like originals; I like translations.” The inability of others to take Isabel on her own terms and the need for a familiar context in which she might be placed speak to James's interest in women, especially American women in a European culture where they are often as misunderstood as they might have been in America. But it also speaks to the subject of my essay: the translation of nineteenth-century American originals into the contemporary medium of film. Ludlow would no doubt prefer a two-hour film version of Isabel to the six hundred pages of often dense prose which James (1843–1916) devotes to her. But I also suspect that he might very well be bored if he were to sit through the 126 minutes of Jane Campion's film version of the novel. The point I am making is that the translation of a novel into a film is a much more complicated process than Ludlow might imagine. For my purposes, let me put it another way: translation is not in the service of an audience which cannot decipher an original, but rather, as Walter Benjamin asserts, “Translation marks their stage of a continued life … a transformation and a renewal of something living.”