Translating Marina Carr for a Brazilian audience: The interweaving of memories in theatre and translation

In 1998, Marina Carr's play By Bog of Cats ... premiered at Ireland's famous Abbey Theatre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival. Carr's play was first written by a female dramatist to be produced on main stage of national theater for decades, a testimony to a new moment Irish theater, rife with potential for women dramatists, as well as a testament to this extraordinary playwright's great talent. On 31 May 2001, play premiered at Victory Gardens Theatre, presented by Irish Repertory of Chicago, but 14 September 2001 production at San Jose Repertory Theatre, with Holly Hunter lead role of Hester Swane--just three days after terrorist attacks of September 11--catapulted Carr to fame United States. Melissa Sihra has noted that the show ran for a month resulting an overall attendance of eighteen thousand people (1) play's violence was apparently appropriate to somber national mood: Sihra argues that in retrospect By Bog of Cats ... offered a sense of comfort and catharsis to audiences, where a lighter drama or comedy would certainly have been inappropriate at this time (2) Perhaps these times of war and terrorist bombings, this dark play remains appropriate to our situation. By Bog of Cats ... is a revenant drama, featuring a series of persistently questioning apparitions. These include Ghost Fancier, who appears at beginning of play for Hester Swane but who has gotten there too soon; ghost of Joseph Swane, brother of Hester Swane; and ghostly memories of figures from past such as Hester's mother, Josie, who disappeared thirty-three years ago, and Xavier Cassidy's son, who was poisoned by strychnine. While these ghosts figure specific argument that will follow, another array of spectral presences--the ghostly presences of Irish dramatists from past, whose work Cart has heavily drawn on, yet modified--suggests how best to understand comparative dramatic context of play. In her 1998 essay, Dealing with Dead, Carr casts question of literary influence ghostly terms. Discussing Odysseus's conversations with dead chapter 11 of Odyssey, The Book of Dead, she suggests that these discussions exemplify talking about writing and how to gain access to hidden knowledge, to past, to dead, to that other world. And what he seems to be saying is you must give blood, blood being sacrifice demanded for tongues or ear of dead. (3) Carr further observes that these passages from Homer demonstrate incredible bravery on part of writer. It's about courage to sit down and face ghosts and have a conversation with them. It's about going over to other side and coming back with something, new, hopefully; gold, possibly. (4) Carr, too, has had courage to face ghosts and have conversations with them. As her fellow Irish playwright Frank McGuinness observed his program note to Abbey Theatre production of By Bog of Cats ... 1998, Death is a big country. And hers is a big imagination, crossing border always between living and dead. (5) Contemporary Irish playwrights are much debt to their predecessors W. B. Yeats, John Synge, and Samuel Beckett--three of greatest playwrights of twentieth century. Carr has managed to learn from these ghosts of Irish playwrights past, borrowing from them and ultimately concocting her own inimitable theater. Although Euripides' Medea clearly influenced Carr's play, this essay will focus on specific ways which Carr's play proves Christopher Murray's thesis that in modern Irish dramatic history ... each successive writer rewrites his/her predecessors. (6) Apprehending spectral presence of these earlier Irish playwrights will enable us to gain some appreciation for continuing emphasis on language Irish drama, from its beginnings Abbey Theatre of Yeats, Gregory, and John Synge to its experimental apogee, theater of Samuel Beckett. …

This article offers a retrospective analysis of aspects of my translation for the stage of Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… into Brazilian Portuguese. By focusing on the iterative aspects of theatre translation as well as the translation of dialect, this article will elaborate the notion that theatre translation takes place at both individual and collaborative levels in which the translator works in dramaturgical capacity. These two levels cannot be dissociated because they constantly influence and inform one another. Although theatre translation begins as an individual task, originating in the complex act of reading the play-text, its final trajectory is deeply influenced by the creative insights of the production team. The overarching objectives of this article are, therefore: firstly to account for the overall process of translating for the stage, from the early drafts of the translation to the rehearsal process, and ultimately to the staged reading of the play; and secondly, to offer a narrative for how the cultural encounter between the exporting and importing cultures has taken place through translation and theatrical performance.

Un/Natural Motherhood in Marina Carr’s The Mai, Portia Couglan, and By the Bog of Cats . . . Karin Maresh (bio) I don’t think the world should assume that we are all natural mothers. And it does. . . . The relationship between parent and child is so difficult and so complex. There’s every emotion there. We mostly only acknowledge the good ones. If we were allowed to talk about the other ones, maybe it would alleviate them in some way. MARINA CARR As Karen Bamford and Sheila Rabillard note in their introduction to this collection of essays, the mother-daughter bond that was deemed “too difficult” to stage by women playwrights at the height of second-wave feminism in the 1980s has become more common in the plays of the past quarter century.1 This is especially true of Irish drama, most notably through the work of Marina Carr. The mothers in Carr’s plays remain as depressed and tormented as their predecessors; however, they suffer for different reasons. Whereas the mothers of early-twentieth-century Irish drama suffered the deaths of their children, often to the nationalist cause, the mothers in Carr’s plays suffer because they defy the core concepts of essential motherhood that have defined motherhood in Ireland for so long. They are selfish, rather than self-less; they are often ambivalent about rather than accepting of motherhood and marriage; they are openly sexual rather than chaste; they are damaged from maternal abuse or neglect; and they harbor violent tendencies that result in abuse, suicides, and filicide. [End Page 179] In short, the women of Carr’s The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996), and By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998) are “unnatural” mothers who suffer because they are women for whom the ability to mother does not come naturally, or because they mother their children in ways that contradict the patriarchal model of essential motherhood entrenched in Irish culture. Self-sacrificing mothers, whose needs and desires are always secondary to those of their children and any male characters, can be found in numerous Irish plays of the early twentieth century. Often these women are depicted as suffering martyrs, or “Moaning Mammies,” as defined by Áine McCarthy in her study of Irish mothers in twentieth-century Irish fiction (97).2 For example, J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904) depicts a mother of the Aran Islands who loses all six of her sons to the treacherous sea. In the end, she is left, along with her two daughters, to keen for her sons: “They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me.”3 In Lady Augusta Gregory’s Gaol Gate (1906) a mother mourns the death of her son wrongly accused by the state, and, calling upon nationalistic stirrings, declares her son’s baby boy lucky in being able to boast of such an honorable father who remained loyal to his countrymen even in the face of death. The suffering, self-sacrificing mother is also represented in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924) through the characters of Juno and Mrs. Tancred. Both women lose their sons to the Irish Civil War, and the saintly Juno endures the antics of her drunkard husband and the unplanned pregnancy of her unwed daughter. The mothers in these plays are devoted to their children—especially their sons—and do not question their essential categorization as woman/mother. They are mothers first and individuals second. In fact, mothers present in much of twentieth-century Irish drama, with only a few exceptions, are, as Diane Stubbings argues, “merely apparent” and contained within the male character(s)’ story.4 This reflection of the social positioning for women in Irish society—women who are “rendered invisible, or when visible . . . [are] seen one-dimensionally,”5 as Patricia Kennedy notes in Maternity in Ireland—continues in Irish drama through most of the century. They are characters who are the result of the idealization of motherhood by the Catholic Church in Ireland, especially during the mid-twentieth century when, according to Clare O’Hagan, the Church urged women to act “as patriarchal gatekeepers, promoting motherhood and family...

This chapter follows a project that began in Beijing Foreign Studies University in 2008. As part of a workshop in Irish Drama, we concentrated on Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… (1998). The workshop culminated in a public presentation of the two scenes from By the Bog of Cats… in Mandarin and in English. This was to be the start of a project that would take over two years to complete, the full translation into Mandarin of By the Bog of Cats… by Li Yuan. This chapter looks at the practicalities involved in the staging of a play from Ireland with actors and audiences from China. It explores the restrictions, misunderstandings, and joys of attempting to present a play embedded in one culture with a cast and audience members embedded in a very different culture.

Embarking on her career by imitating the Beckettian style at the end of the 1980s, Marina Carr (1964- ), a contemporary Irish female playwright, later moves to a phase in which she rewrites ancient myths, Greek tragedies and some other classical works, including those of William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf. While Carr brings the female voice and agency into sharper focus in her adaptations, her revisions integrate the global myth or story with local Irish elements. What emerges here is that Carr puts the global in conversation with the local considering that her source text stands for the universal, and her elaboration on Irish culture and troubles resonates with the particular. It is noted that, following the Celtic Tiger period in Ireland, the time Carr initiates her dramatic career, Irish drama has undergone a radical change with globalisation. However, it is the particular argument of this paper that Marina Carr’s way of rewriting corresponds with glocalisation, a term which suggests the incorporation of the local into the global. From the early stage of her writing to her recent works, Carr’s use of glocalisation in her adaptations can be pinpointed. This article explores the elements of glocalisation in Carr’s adaptation of Euripides’s Medea in By the Bog of Cats… (1998) and Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding in Blood Wedding (2019) as examples from two different periods of her oeuvre. Hence, this paper considers the Irish playwright’s method of adaptation in terms of glocalisation.

Abstract;Marina Carr, one of the prominent Irish feminist playwrights, deviates from the mainstream patriarchal portrayal of women in her modern plays. She moves away from the stereotypical image of Irish mother as an emblem of the nation and the land, hence, seen as a selfless, loving, sacrificing woman who identifies herself with the motherhood. Instead Carr introduces broken, maltreated, and defiant women to the modern Irish stage. Her adaptation of the myth of Medea for her play By the Bog of Cats…is considered as a challenge to the classical Greek and Irish drama. Both Medea and Hester Swane are outsiders, betrayed by husbands, outcast from their homeland and community. Their search for identity and independence lead them to commit unspeakable actions. Yet, while Medea was driven by her desire to revenge on a betraying husband, Hester reacted to ongoing fear of abandonment and loss. This paper highlights Carr's talent in portraying modern ordinary mothers who defy the male-dominated society and seek a social status in her own right. Mothers who show an untraditional love for their children; a mother who are ready to sacrifice herself for the welfare of her daughter, saving her from a bleak future with a selfish father, dysfunctional grandmother, and immature step mother. Thus, Hester Swane represents new unconventional Irish mother who is willing to defy the norms to prove herself.

Neste artigo, examino as diversas influências subjetivas envolvidas no processo de tradução para o palco, levando em consideração a minha própria tradução para o português do Brasil da peça By the Bog of Cats... de Marina Carr (1998) (tradução ainda não publicada). O que impulsiona esta discussão são as abordagens ir-, anti- e pós-racionais de teoria e prática da tradução, conforme sugeridas por Robinson em Who Translates? (2001). No caso desta discussão em particular, meu foco será o teatro, a encenação e a encenação da tradução. Ao invés de fornecer respostas, este artigo busca levantar questionamentos sobre as “vozes” ou “forças” envolvidas ao traduzir-se para o palco.

Günümüzde önemli bir İrlandalı oyun yazarı olan Marina Carr (1964), oyunlarında kadınların farklı deneyimlerini göstererek dikkat çeker. The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996) ve By the Bog of Cats… (1998) adlı oyunlardan oluşan Midlands üçlemesi, farklı derecelerde saldırganlık ve şiddetle donatılmış alışılmadık anne tasvirleriyle İrlandalı okuyucu/izleyici üzerinde büyük bir etki yarattığından yazarın kariyerinin merkezindedir. Midlands üçlemesinin son oyunu olan By the Bog of Cats… İrlanda sınırlarını aşarak daha çok izleyiciye ulaştığından daha da başarılıdır. Bu oyun Hester Swane tasvirinde mükemmel annelik mitini reddederken, Carr anne karakterinin kişisel sorunlarını ve isteklerini öne çıkarır ve okuyucu/izleyicisini Hester’in farklı türdeki şiddetiyle şaşırtır. Bu anne kızının babası onu terk edince ve başka bir kadınla evlenmeye karar verince zorda kalır. Yedi yaşındayken kendisini terk eden ve Midlands bataklığına geri döneceğine söz veren annesini bekleyen Hester toprağından ve kızından ayrılmak istemez. Bu onu farklı türde şiddete sürükler; öyle ki, kızını bile öldürür ve intihar eder. Bu çalışma, Hester’in şiddeti ve özellikle intiharı ardındakini incelemeyi ve başkarakterin intiharını bir kişinin ölümünü, ölmeden önceki sorunları, duyguları ve düşünceleri bağlamında inceleme süreci olan psikolojik otopsi bağlamında vurgulamayı amaçlar.

Many poets and playwrights in the later twentieth century adapted Greek tragedies and the plays of Chekhov for the Irish stage. In the later period, Marina Carr has been the most prolific dramatist, initiating a whole series of adaptations with By the Bog of Cats … (1998), a version of Medea set in the Irish Midlands. Hilary Fannin’s Phaedra (2010) was an experimental collaboration with composer Ellen Cranitch, which took off not only from Racine’s play but Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Hippolyte et Aricie. Lucy Caldwell set her Three Sisters (2016) in 1990s Belfast against the background of the Troubles, most provocatively reframing the action from the viewpoint of the character of Natasha, played as a Chinese immigrant. Taking these texts together, we can identify the contemporary perspectives three twenty-first-century Irish playwrights have brought to bear on European theatre of the past.

Adaptation and Nation: Theatrical Contexts for Contemporary English and Irish Drama

Greek Tragedy and the Celtic Tiger: The Politics of Literary Allusion in Marina Carr’s Ariel ISABELLE TORRANCE ARIEL, a play by contemporary Irish playwright Marina Carr, premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in October 2002, in a production directed by Conall Morrison, during the Dublin Theatre Festival. It is one of a number of plays written by Carr that are inspired by Greek tragedy, the most famous of which is her earlier By the Bog of Cats . . . , loosely based on Euripides’ Medea. First produced in 1998, By the Bog of Cats . . . went on to become a major international success, with productions starring Academy Award Winner Holly Hunter at the San Jose Repertory Theatre in 2001 and at Wyndhams Theatre in London during the winter season of 2004–2005. The play has now been translated into several languages. More recently Carr has returned to the Greeks after a hiatus, writing Phaedra Backwards, which was produced at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton in 2011, and Hecuba, which premiered at the Swan Theatre in Stratfordupon -Avon in 2015. Both plays received mixed reviews. Carr’s Ariel, however, received overwhelmingly negative reviews, and within the ever-increasing volume of scholarship on Marina Carr’s plays, Ariel is often referenced only briefly, if at all, and is infrequently addressed in its own right. Carr was interviewed about the play by Melissa Sihra prior to Ariel’s completion. Later, Cathy Leeney discussed Ariel’s reflections on the relationship between human beings and the planet. Then Rhona Trench approached the play through the lens of Kristeva’s theory of abjection in a chapter of her book on Carr, while Zoraide Rodrigues Carrasco de Mesquita observed some broad similarities and differarion 25.3 winter 2018 ences between Ariel and Greek tragedy and drew connections with the essay entitled Ariel by Uruguayan author José Enrique Rodó. At the same time, Danine Farquharson briefly offered a negative scholarly analysis of Ariel, concurring with negative reviews of the performance.1 Among the reviews of the 2002 production of Ariel, Marianne McDonald, a leading expert on Greek tragedy and its modern adaptations in Ireland, has written the most detailed and informative piece.2 McDonald notes that some of the director’s decisions impacted negatively on the production, compounding problems in the performance of an already difficult play. As McDonald so insightfully observes, one of the challenges posed by the play is its plethora of literary echoes ranging from the Old Testament, to Hamlet and Faust, and into contemporary Irish dramas by Martin McDonagh and Sebastian Barry, all in addition to the collection of Greek tragedies on which the main plot elements are based. Although such complexity of allusion seems to have contributed to the difficulties of performance, I argue here that, as a text, Ariel rewards re-reading precisely because of its sophisticated intertextual depth and breadth and for its accompanying reflections on Irish society at the turn of the millennium. In addition to the primary framework of Greek tragedy, I discuss references to the Bible, to Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Eugene O’Neill, Sylvia Plath and Pier Paolo Pasolini, on which rest a series of weighty themes and images. Central thematic concerns of family, religion, and politics are adopted from the Greek models and transposed into a twenty-first century Irish context. First, I will outline how Ariel announces itself as a complex intertextual work, not only through its obvious engagement with Greek tragedy but also through the multiple literary allusions created by its title. In three subsequent sections, I discuss how the themes of politics, family dynamics, and religion have been adapted from Greek tragedy and made pertinent to an Irish audience. Finally, I offer some conclusions on the relationship between Ariel, Greek tragedy, and the Celtic Tiger phenomenon. greek tragedy and the celtic tiger 70 1. what’s in a name? from iphigenia to ariel: aeschylus, isaiah, shakespeare and plath ARIEL presents an Irish couple, Fermoy and Frances Fitzgerald , and their three children, Ariel, Elaine and Stephen. The eldest daughter Ariel disappears on her sixteenth birthday. The disappearance coincides with Fermoy’s meteoric rise and success as a politician. It is eventually discovered that Fermoy had actually murdered his...

This paper discusses the state-of-the-art of drama translation by contrasting traditional and contemporary practice-based approaches. Starting from some of the most prominent voices in Translation Studies (Bassnett 1984, 1988, 1991 and 1998) and moving to contemporary views (Johnston 1996 and 2010; Upton 2000; de Senna 2009), this study will demonstrate how Translation Studies currently offer insufficient resources to deal with the problems of translation for the stage. Translating for the stage presents problems that go far beyond the relationship between different language pairs as it deals with non-verbal systems that are created by and that create verbal signs, and as it is a work of art to be performed to potential audiences with cultural backgrounds different from that of the original play. Finally, it will provide a personal account of an ongoing drama translation project of Marina Carr’s play By the Bog of Cats… (2005) into Brazilian Portuguese that I am carrying out in the light of a more creative and contemporary mindset.

This report attempts to give an overview of the history of translation and interpretation in Brazil from the 16th century to the present. It seeks to show important historical characters, works and processes in Translation Studies in Portuguese America in order to discover a possible Brazilian translation tradition. The main paradigms of the History of Brazilian translation are also found in the historical events that took place during each century. In brief, the essay is a panoramic and critical view for non-specialists of the history of the Brazilian tradition of interpretation and translation.

This work offers an analysis of the female protagonist in By the Bog of Cats…, by Irish playwright Marina Carr, first premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 1998.I propose in this article a fresh ecocritical reading of the play and its female protagonist, Hester Swane, by arguing that the natural force which drives and impulses her throughout the theatrical text is not simply resorted to as a means of conveying or representing the so-called "female nature", but that it is first and foremostly used for reinforcing binary positions, mainly related to gender and nature.In these terms, the ecocritical focus is informed by Dereck Gladwin's and Timothy Clark's works, whereas I also refer to the concept of female agency in the terms discussed by Judith Butler and Lois McNay, for a thorough analysis of this protagonist's coping mechanisms in face of a set of constraining elements which might have impaired her of fully achieving her individual capacities.

Issues of Lyric Diction of Brazilian Portuguese as Applied to José Siqueira's Oito Canções Populares Brasileiras Marcel Ramalho (bio) LANGUAGE AND DICTION In the early twentieth century, the Brazilian nationalist movement in the arts brought concerns about the development of Brazilian art song and pronunciation of Brazilian Portuguese in classical singing. Alberto Nepomuceno (1864–1920) was the first Brazilian composer to express his desire to develop a Brazilian art song tradition. He and other composers used the German Kunstlied and its high level of expressivity and symbiosis between words and music as the parameter through which they would measure the excellence and effectiveness of sung Brazilian Portuguese. In order for that excellence to be achieved, a thorough study of the sung national language with the goals of understanding its musical possibilities had to be performed. Spearheaded by Mário de Andrade (the same intellectual who led the Modernist movement and the Week of Modern Art of 1922), the Primeiro Congresso da Língua Nacional Cantada (First Conference for the Sung National Language) happened in São Paulo City in 1937. The main goal of this conference was to "unify the way in which the language was spoken and sung by the elimination or minimization of the use of regional dialects. As with music and other arts, the shift was toward the creation of a national language."1 The intent of establishing a standard pronunciation of Brazilian Portuguese for singing was "animated by the desire to serve the cause of Brazilian nationality in the arts of language and singing,"2 with the resulting norms published in 1938. The organizers of this conference had a second conference in mind, which was supposed to occur in 1942. Due to political reasons, this second conference never happened. In 1956, the Primeiro Congresso Brasileiro da Língua Falada no Teatro (First Brazilian Conference for the Language Spoken in Theater) took place in Salvador, but the goal of this congress was not the establishing of a pronunciation standard. According to the organizers of the event, this task would happen naturally through the work of radio, television, and cinema, among other media (with no mention of singing).3 Almost seventy years after the Primeiro Congresso, the pronunciation of sung Brazilian Portuguese once again gained prominent place as a subject for discussion and research among Brazilian and American scholars. In 2007, new norms were published after discussions that took place between [End Page 363] 2003 and 2007 in several different music conferences in Brazil, including the IV Encontro Brasileiro de Canto (4th Brazilian Singing Convention), which happened in São Paulo in 2005. The main goal of the Normas para a Pronúncia do Português Brasileiro no Canto Erudito (Norms for the Pronunciation of Brazilian Portuguese in Classical Singing) was "to establish a standard for a recognizable Brazilian pronunciation for classical singing, without foreign or regional features, laying aside the consideration of international influences and of the important regional and historic varieties of our language for future studies."4 An English version of these norms was published in the Journal of Singing in 2008.5 In 2017, Marcía D. Porter published Singing in Brazilian Portuguese: A Guide to Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire, the purpose of which was "to provide professional and amateur singers and pianists, voice teachers, coaches, students of singing and others interested in lyric Brazilian Portuguese (BP) a tool or guide to help with the pronunciation of the language."6 This article discusses aspects related to lyric diction of Brazilian Portuguese as applied to the Oito Canções Populares Brasileiras (Eight Popular Brazilian Songs), by José Siqueira (1907–1985). Given the regional character of Siqueira's overall opus and of these songs in particular, it is this author's understanding that several adaptations of the 2007 norms are necessary because, as stated by Brazilian linguist Thaïs Cristófaro Silva, "linguistic systems are dynamic and, in that sense, any document of a normative character will present limitations."7 The limitations in this case are related to meeting the needs of this specific repertoire and the cultural identities it aims to portray. In that sense, this article is aligned with the...