Patrick White's Theatre: Australian Modernism on Stage, 1960–2018

One of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting. In Patrick White’s Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new analysis of White’s eight published plays, discussing how they have been staged and received over a period of 60 years. From the sensational rejection of The Ham Funeral by the Adelaide Festival in 1962 to 21st-century revivals incorporating digital technology, these productions and their reception illustrate the major shifts that have taken place in Australian theatre over time. Varney unpacks White’s complex and unique theatrical imagination, the social issues that preoccupied him as a playwright, and his place in the wider Australian modernist and theatrical traditions.

Insularity, Identity, and Alterity in Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves

In his novel A Fringe of Leaves (1976), Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White takes up the famous case of the 1836 shipwreck and subsequent survival on an island of Eliza Fraser, a Scottish woman who managed to return to white colonial society after having spent several weeks among a tribe of Aborigines in Queensland. White uses this story for an investigation of human processes of categorization as tools of the construction of notions of identity and alterity in contexts in which social, racial, and gendered otherness collide in the separateness of various insular spaces. In shaping the character of Ellen Roxburgh as Fraser’s fictional equivalent, he chooses a hybrid figure the liminality and the border-crossings of which lend themselves both to an investigation and a critical questioning of strategies of self-constitution dependent on imaginings of negative others. On a more concrete historical level, White thus questions the ideas of race, class, and gender early Australian colonial society was founded on and raises issues that are still of consequence even in the 21st century.

The First Translation of Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala into Spanish

This paper analyses some aspects (use of footnotes, intertextuality, punctuation and maintenance of cultural elements) of Las esferas del mandala, the first Spanish translation (by Silvia Pupato and Román García-Azcárate and published in Barcelona in 1973) of The Solid Mandala, written by the Australian Nobel Prize winner Patrick White in 1966. Through the selection of excerpts from the original considered problematic to be rendered in translation, we observe the solutions found, as well as some strategies adopted by the Spanish translators to compose the final product presented to the readers. This contrastive reading hopes to engender interesting ideas to help future translators of the novel, while valuing the translation act.

A construção da personagem Arthur por meio de sua conexão com a cozinha no romance "The Solid Mandala", de Patrick White

RESUMO: Este artigo apresenta a relação da personagem Arthur com as atividades na cozinha, mais precisamente a fabricação de pão e manteiga, como um modo de favorecimento de sua construção narrativa (seguindo as proposições da holandesa Mieke Bal) no romance The Solid Mandala (1966), do escritor australiano Patrick White, prêmio Nobel de Literatura em 1973. A partir de trechos selecionados, demonstramos como se dá essa atividade na trama e todas as repercussões advindas delas, destacando a socialização entre personagens, mas principalmente a constituição identitária de Arthur: é ele quem tem a “missão” de fazer esses produtos que, inevitavelmente, vão sustentar a ele e a seu irmão até o final de suas vidas (desse modo negando a “trivialidade” da atividade). Se esse romance demonstra o poder que a literatura possui de transcender a nossa mera existência em qualquer espaço, podemos fazer a mesma analogia com a culinária: a literatura está para a cozinha assim como a cozinha está para a literatura, alimentando seres. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Literatura Australiana, Patrick White, Cozinha, Personagem, Narrativa, Tradução. ______________________________ ABSTRACT: This paper analyses the relationship of the character Arthur with his activities in the kitchen, more precisely the baking of bread and churning of butter, as a way to favour his narrative construction in the novel The Solid Mandala (1966), by the Australian writer Patrick White, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. From selected excerpts, we demonstrate how these activities takes place in the plot and all the repercussions coming from them, highlighting socialization among the characters, but mainly the identity formation of Arthur: he is the one who has the “mission” to make these products which, inevitably, will sustain him and his brother until the end of their lives (thus denying the “triviality” of such works). If this novel proves how powerful literature is in making us transcend our mere existence in any space, we can make an analogy with cooking: as literature is to cooking so cooking is to literature, nurturing beings. KEYWORDS: Australian Literature, Patrick White, Kitchen, Cooking