A Grande Vaga de Frio (‘The Great Frost’): The transmigration of Orlando into Portuguese

Abstract

In October 2017, Luísa Costa Gomes, Portuguese dramatist, created for the stage what she called a ‘genre transformation’ or more accurately, she argues, a ‘transmigration’ of Woolf’s large-spectrum fictional (utopian, fantastical, parodic) biographic narrative, that spans three centuries of English history, while accompanying the extraordinary life trajectory of its protagonist, Orlando. The rich and manifold ambivalence of the text is explored in Luísa Costa Gomes’s ‘transformation’, first of all in terms of its rendering into a dramatic monologue which condenses the original narrative in about forty pages of what she calls a ‘programmatic reconstruction of the source text’, which, she offers, is but a ‘commented and seasoned active reading’, after all the ‘fundamental prerequisite of any reading’. The play aims to capture the essence of Orlando’s fluidity in between genders, in between cultures, and historical moments. It amplifies the inner dialogues of the text with the texts of history and those of the male and female protagonists that embody it, plus the implicit dialogue between the authorial voice and the voice of the dramaturg as that of yet another reader. The new text thus ‘transmigrated’ into Portuguese, resounds as a ‘haunted monologue’ that is, after all, deeply plurivocal and uncannily dialogical.