Eating Shakespeare

Cultural Anthropophagy as Global Methodology

Anne Sophie Refskou, Marcel Alvaro de Amorim, Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350197671
• eBook ISBN: 9781350035713
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Théâtre shakespearien

Eating Shakespeare provides a constructive critical analysis of the issue of Shakespeare and globalization and revisits understandings of interculturalism, otherness, hybridity and cultural (in)authenticity. Featuring scholarly essays as well as interviews and conversation pieces with creatives – including Geraldo Carneiro, Fernando Yamamoto, Diana Henderson, Mark Thornton Burnett, Samir Bhamra, Tajpal Rathore, Samran Rathore and Paul Heritage – it offers a timely and fruitful discourse between global Shakespearean theory and practice. The volume uniquely establishes and implements a conceptual model inspired by non-European thought, thereby confronting a central concern in the field of Global Shakespeare: the issue of Europe operating as a geographical and cultural 'centre' that still dominates the study of Shakespearean translations and adaptations from a 'periphery' of world-wide localities. With its origins in 20th-century Brazilian modernism, the concept of 'Cultural Anthropophagy' is advanced by the authors as an original methodology within the field currently understood as 'Global Shakespeare'. Through a broad range of examples drawn from theatre, film and education, and from both within Brazil and beyond, the volume offers illuminating perspectives on what Global Shakespeare may mean today.

PART ONE

Dialogue I: Shakespeare and Cultural Anthropophagy in practice

1

We are all cannibals: reflections on translating Shakespeare

Geraldo Carneiro and Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho

The Brazilian poet Geraldo Carneiro talks about his translations and adaptations of Shakespeare into Portuguese with a commentary by Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho, highlighting Carneiro’s anthropophagic method.

Geraldo Carneiro testimony

With the publication of the ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ (Cannibalist Manifesto) in 1928, the poet, novelist and playwright Oswald de Andrade made the expropriation of ideas and texts written by others one of the laws of his aesthetic: ‘I am only concerned with what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the cannibal’ (Andrade [1928] 1991: 36). Oswald de Andrade’s literary anthropophagy was a conceptual novelty in Brazil. As we all know, however, literature has always fed off other literature. Literary cannibalism has existed since the dawn of time (or since the beginning of a written tradition), under the pretext of imitating the classics, or using the more recent alibi of intertextuality.

One of the biggest cannibals of literature is William Shakespeare himself. A play like Romeo and Juliet, according to Stephen Greenblatt, has among its various sources the play The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke, which in turn is derived from a French text, adapted from the Italian version written by Matteo Bandelo, which has as a source a tale by Luigi da Porto, which is in turn adapted from one by Masuccio Salernitano (Greenblatt 2016). As is widely known, Shakespeare rarely took the trouble to come up with his own plots – to use that odd metaphor that is common currency today, as if writers were gods able to create stories out of nothing. Shakespeare probably preferred to concentrate his efforts on rewriting them with better words – words cannibalized from everything that he saw and read. With this practice, he anticipates his disciple Molière, another cannibal of dramaturgy, who declared: ‘Je prends mon bien où je le trouve.’

My first professional encounter with Shakespeare was in 1981, when I was commissioned to translate The Tempest. A group of young actors, called Pessoal do Despertar (People of Awakening), had looked at all the translations available in Portuguese. Having found these translations to be less poetic than their reading of the original had led them to expect, and having read some of my poems, they chose me to undertake a challenge that they considered almost impossible: producing a translation with the poetic qualities of the original. The first scene that I worked on from that play was a kind of trial by fire for everyone involved. It is Act 3 Scene 1, the love scene between Prince Ferdinand and Miranda, which I translated with a certain liberty:

Já amei mulheres diversas,

Por suas mais diversas qualidades;

Nenhuma assim, com toda a minha alma,

Pois sempre alguma sombra de defeito

Pairava sobre a graça mais perfeita

E desfazia o meu encantamento;

Mas você, ah, você é tão perfeita,

Parece feita da pequena parte

De perfeição que há em cada criatura. (Shakespeare 1992)

After working on this fragment, I imagined that it would be relatively easy to translate The Tempest. This turned out to be wishful thinking: the task took me four months. I felt overwhelmed in the face of so many beautiful images, and I confess that I was not fully satisfied with my translation, although my stage adaptation ran in Rio de Janeiro between 1982 and 1984. Among the characters in The Tempest the figure of Caliban particularly caught my attention. His name is interpreted by some people as an anagram of ‘cannibal’. It is through him that the Europeans – among them his master, Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan – transmit the image that they have painted of the savage of the New World. During the first decades in which the new territory was colonized, navigators thought that America might be an extension of Paradise. However, after their early difficulties there that image changed. Instead the newly arrived came to consider this place an extension of Hell (Souza 1987). Although Caliban is one of the villains of The Tempest, since he allies himself with the plotters who attempt to overthrow Prospero from his throne, Shakespeare does not shy away from giving a voice to this character: Caliban: ‘O senhor me deu água com frutas e me ensinou o nome da luz maior, que ilumina o dia, e da luz menor, que ilumina a noite. […] E eu, que sou seu único súdito, era antes o meu próprio rei’ (Shakespeare 1992). In short, Caliban’s speech seems to prefigure the anti-colonial attitude of the Cannibalist Manifesto published over 300 years later, and the perspective of all the peripheries of empires since time immemorial.

After The Tempest, I was called to translate and adapt As You Like It. This time, however, the group who commissioned the translation recommended that I did not confine myself to the original text but, rather, to take the liberty to adapt, create and remove scenes. I remember having followed the group’s suggestions wholeheartedly. I added a series of quotations of dictums and verses of Brazilian poetry written by myself and others to the text. For example, when the old Adam is on the verge of exhaustion, at the end of a long walk through the forest, he asks his master Orlando stoically to abandon him, and blurts out: ‘Esta é a parte que me cabe neste latifúndio’ (This is my place in this latifundium). The reference to the line from João Cabral de Mello Neto, taken from his tragic poem Morte e Vida Severina (The Death and Life of a Severino), has a comic effect here. I added this as well as other fragments or anachronistic creations that were compatible within the context of the piece, extracted from erudite and popular sources. I also removed certain scenes in prose and added others in verse. I suggested to the audience and critics that they should try to work out which were the legitimate scenes and which were the illegitimate scenes; which were from the Bard and which were from the bastard – that is to say, mine. The director of montage, Aderbal Freire Filho, liked this game of mine and asked for more. As is widely known, the play ends with a famous epilogue spoken by Rosalind. Aderbal suggested to me that we write a new epilogue. I accepted his proposal, and so at the end of the play, Rosalind turns towards the audience and speaks as follows:

Não era hábito, no teatro elisabetano,

Uma mulher se incumbir de fechar o pano.

Aliás, naquela época não havia cortina,

Nem se permitia à classe feminina

A audácia de fazer teatro épico, lírico

/ou burlesco,

Na ilusão de certo parentesco

Entre a mulher e o diabo:

Uma questão de chifres e de rabo.

Mas vamos ao que interessa:

Eu estou aqui para dizer o epílogo da peça,

Essa ciranda de paixões, essa batalha

Em que a justiça farda, mas não talha,

Ou vice-versa.

E aproveitando o rumo da conversa,

Falando sério,

Eu quero esclarecer mais um mistério.

É a história de um tio meu, que é mago,

A que eu me referi de modo vago,

É rigorosamente confiável;

Ele inventou um artifício formidável

Pra conjurar as forças do acaso

E, conforme o caso,

Os humores inconstantes da plateia.

E eu vou lhes revelar qual é a ideia.

Vocês querem aprender?

The audience responds in chorus: ‘We want to.’ Then Rosalind speaks again:

Primeiro, erga a mão direita para o céu,

Até a altura do seu improvável chapéu.

Depois a esquerda, num movimento

/semelhante,

Num gesto suplicante e singelo.

Agora alinhe as duas em paralelo,

Num arremedo de aceno.

Não tenha medo de parecer obsceno.

E enfim manifeste ruidosamente o seu agrado,

Caso contrário eu me sentirei arruinado.

During the performance the audience kindly responded when addressed during the false epilogue, the idea for which was stolen – or rather, cannibalized – from Shakespeare himself. At this point I had just published my translation of The Tempest. By coincidence, my friend the poet and translator, Jorge Wanderley, had just been awarded funding to translate the totality of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets into Portuguese for the first time. Wanderley himself had already collaborated with me on the printed edition of A Tempestade, translating the verses for Ferdinand and Miranda’s wedding scene. Knowing that a translation of a verbal repertoire as vast as Shakespeare’s is a collective task for successive generations, I could not resist collaborating and started with Sonnet 18:

Te comparar com um dia de verão?

Tu és mais temperada e adorável;

O vento em maio açoita a flor-botão

É o império do verão não é durável.

O sol às vezes brilha com rigor

Ou sua tez dourada é mais escura;

Toda beleza enfim perde o esplendor

Por acaso ou descaso da Natura;

Mas teu verão nunca se apagará,

Perdendo a posse da beleza tua,

Nem a morte rirá por te ofuscar,

Se em versos imortais te perpetuas;

Enquanto alguém respire e veja e viva,

Viva este verso e nele sobrevivas.

I started to work with Shakespeare’s sonnets regularly. For example, I translated Sonnet 76 as follows:

Por que meu verso é sempre tão carente

De mutações e variação de temas?

Por que não olho as coisas do presente

Atrás de outras receitas e sistemas?

Por que só escrevo essa monotonia,

Tão incapaz de produzir inventos,

Que cada verso quase denuncia

Meu nome e seu lugar de nascimento?

Pois saiba, amor: só escrevo a seu respeito,

E sobre o amor, são meus únicos temas;

E assim vou refazendo o que foi feito,

Reinventando as palavras do poema;

Como o sol, novo e velho a cada dia,

O meu amor rediz o que dizia.

For Sonnet 116 I tried to translate it keeping its baroque syntax:

Não tenha eu restrições ao casamento

De almas sinceras, pois não é amor

O amor que muda ao sabor do momento

E se move e remove em desamor.

Oh, não, o amor é marca mais constante,

Que enfrenta a tempestade e não balança;

É a estrela guia dos batéis errantes,

Cujo valor lá no alto não se alcança.

O amor não é o bufão do tempo, embora

Sua foice vá ceifando a face a fundo;

O amor não muda com o passar das horas,

Mas se sustenta até o final do mundo.

Se é engano meu e assim provado for,

Nunca escrevi, ninguém jamais amou.

After the sonnets, I was asked to translate Love’s Labour’s Lost, whose title itself is enough to intimidate a translator. The Portuguese translation is enshrined as Trabalhos de Amor Perdidos. A more fitting title would be ‘In Search of Lost Alliterations’. However, my translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost is only a trial exercise. I was not capable of finding equivalents for the dozens of examples of word play that Shakespeare uses in the play. Some critics have spoken dismissively of the poet’s passion for puns and all kinds of word play. In defence of Shakespeare, however, I would argue that those who do not like word play, in general, do not like it because they do not have an aptitude for it. Unlike the adaptation of As You Like It, in Love’s Labour’s Lost I tried to stay as close as possible to the original:

O sol de ouro não beija assim tão doce

O orvalho sobre a pétala da flor,

Como teu olhar que em raios derramou-se

E derramou meu pranto e me encantou.

Nem brilha cor de prata a luz da lua

Por entre as transparentes profundezas

Como brilha o esplendor da face tua

Entre as lágrimas minhas de tristeza.

Cada gota carrega-te em cortejo

Em teu triunfo sobre o meu amor.

Quanto mais lágrimas por ti despejo

Aumenta a tua glória e a minha dor.

Mas não te encantes por ti, eu te aconselho,

Nem faças minhas lágrimas de espelho.

Rainha das rainhas, tu ultrapassas

O que se pense ou diga de tuas graças.

After that, at the request of the director Paul Heritage and the actor Maria Padilha, I translated some key scenes from Antony and Cleopatra. The production was first staged in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, as part of a project called Amor em Tempos de Guerra (Love in Time of War), and also ran in the theatres of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, directed by Paulo José. In one of the readings of the play, in a state school located between rival favelas, there were gunshots, with drug gangs exchanging tracer bullets, which leave marks in the sky. It was as if we were in the middle of a war between Mark Antony and his rival, the future emperor, Augustus. As many readers will appreciate, there is not space here to discuss all of the wonderful moments in the text. Here is just a small extract, Cleopatra’s monologue when she is on the brink of committing suicide:

Me dá meu manto. Põe minha coroa.

Tenho desejos imortais em mim.

Depressa, Iras. Parece até que escuto

Antonio me chamando. Já o vejo

Se erguendo pra elogiar meu gesto nobre.

Ouço-o zombando da sorte de César.

Já vou, meu esposo. Que minha coragem

Comprove o meu direito a esse título.

Sou fogo e ar: meus outros elementos

Entrego à natureza mais vulgar.

Está tudo pronto? Então venham colher

O derradeiro ardor dos lábios meus.

Adeus, gentil Charmian. Iras, adeus.

My next commission was the translation of key scenes from Romeo and Juliet, directed by João Fonseca. After translating Romeo and Juliet, I selected some of Shakespeare’s lyrical speeches and published them in a bilingual edition, with the title O ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Dialogue I: Shakespeare and Cultural Anthropophagy in practice
• Part Two Dialogue II: global conversations and intricate intersections
• Part Three Dialogue III: insiders and outsiders
• Part Four Dialogue IV: re-cultivating and re-disseminating Shakespeare beyond the institution
• Afterword: fat king, lean beggar?
• Index
• Imprint