DIFERENÇAS QUE CARACTERIZAM O DRAMA A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE E SUA TRADUÇÃO UM BONDE CHAMADO DESEJO

O objetivo deste artigo é a comparação entre o original em língua inglesa do drama A Streetcar Named Desire, de Tennessee Williams, com a tradução em português, Um bonde chamado Desejo, de Vadim Nikitin, a fim de identificar as categorias linguísticas que apresentam diferenças entre as duas versões. Nos anos noventa, o conceito do tradutor subserviente foi substituído por outro, visivelmente manipulador, entendido como um sujeito inserido em um contexto cultural, ideológico, político e psicológico – não podendo ser ignorado ou eliminado. Como resultado dessas imposições, o tradutor é obrigado a fazer escolhas nem sempre fiéis às da língua do texto original, implicando em diferenças na interpretação do texto. A análise tem o apoio da Linguística Sistêmico-Funcional (LSF), uma proposta teórico-metodológica, de Halliday (1994), Halliday; Matthiessen (2004) e seus colaboradores. Como Martin e White (2005, p. 7) explicam, "a LSF é “um modelo multiperspectivo, designado a dar aos analistas lentes complementares para a interpretação da língua em uso". Os resultados da análise mostram a impossibilidade de uma tradução exata e fiel ao original, devido a dificuldades de natureza tanto referentes à subjetividade do tradutor, quanto às características tipológicas das línguas em confronto.

Blanche and Stanley, polar opposites. A pragmastylistic analysis of interactions from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire

The paper is an attempt at demonstrating how the language used by fictional dramatic characters contributes to their characterization, that is, how the readers (audiences) perceive them based on inferences drawn from a variety of textual cues. These cues include explicit selfand other-presentation as well as implicit hints retrieved from conversation structure, aspects of turn-taking or features of the language used by the character. In this paper, Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski from Tennessee Williams’ play The Streetcar Named Desire are analyzed and characterized as being polar opposites.

Trans-Mediation of Gender in Elia Kazan’s Adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire

Elia Kazan is among the first directors who adapted Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) for the cinema. Kazan’s film adaptation was almost faithful to the original manuscript by sticking to Williams’s words and sentences. However, even if one ignores the cultural and historical contexts, the alterations that take place in the process of trans-mediation cannot be disregarded, since the telling mode in the text changes to the showing mode in the media. With this hypothetical basis, the present study aims to detect the possible alterations in the adaptation of the play to examine gender roles in both texts. Using the ideas of Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation (2013), the authors have studied the verbal signs in the play together with the verbal and visual codes in the movie to assess how the film adaptation has incorporated the ideas of femininity, which are the main concerns of the play, too. The results of the study suggest that the alterations from the literary text to film have contributed to the development of female identity.

Collaboration, adaptation, and unmade projects

The chapter examines two key roles from different stages of Vivien Leigh’s career that highlight her work as an active collaborator in adapting roles from stage and page to screen. It looks firstly at her work on A Streetcar Named Desire in the early 1950s, considering how she exercised authorial agency in assisting with the adaptation of the script from stage to screen. The chapter then examines how she navigated the interlocking issues of age and gender and their impact on star labor in the 1965 adaptation of Ship of Fools. I consider how materials such as script annotations, paper correspondence, and phone call transcripts speak more broadly to the archive’s potential to deconstruct the film performance by mapping out its prehistory, interrogating this as a process of personal and collaborative development. The chapter also considers the material record of projects documented in Vivien Leigh’s archive that did not come to fruition.

Dreaming New Orleans

Having passed the tercentenary of the “Mississippi Bubble” of 1720, the financial fiasco that accompanied the founding of New Orleans, the city continues to risk everything by gambling on the collateral of its dreams. Like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, “The City that Care Forgot” is playing out a mortgage melodrama under constant threat of dispossession, dreading the last stop on an itinerary that begins with Desire, changes at Cemeteries, and dead ends in Elysian Fields.

Tennessee Williams’s Creative Frisson, Censorship, and the Queering of Theatre

The world around Tennessee Williams in the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s was changing at an astonishing pace, the cultural revolution of the period rendering most of his themes of sexual closeting and repression almost inconsequential. At least the entrenched cultural taboos against which he wrote seem to have disappeared by the mid-1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, Broadway productions of his work grew infrequent, while those mounted tended to have short runs. He told interviewers from Theatre Arts magazine: ‘I think my kind of literary or pseudo-literary style of writing for the theatre is on its way out.’ European productions of his work, on the other hand, seemed regenerative: Howard Davies’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1989), in which the director used Williams’s original third act and not the version rewritten by Elia Kazan for the New York premiere; Peter Hall’s revival of Orpheus Descending (1989–91); Benedict Andrews’s A Streetcar Named Desire (2014), followed by his 2017 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – a revival deemed ‘so courageous’; and in Italy, Elio De Capitani’s productions of Un tram che si chiama desiderio (1995) and Improvvisamente, l’estate scorsa (2011), both in fresh, new, up-to-date translations by Masolino D’Amico – all these have maintained an edge to Williams’s theatre lost in so many American productions. All seem to suggest the continued vitality of Williams’s work in Europe by directors willing to probe and rediscover Williams’s depths, who consider him ‘a playwright worthy of further artistic investigation’, as European audiences, correspondingly, seem less inclined to dismiss him as an artist whom history has overtaken. S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. His critical, bilingual edition of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was published as Un tram che si chiama desiderio / A Streetcar Named Desire (Pisa: Editioni ETS, 2012). His Włodzimierz Staniewski and the Phenomenon of ‘Gardzienice’, co-edited with Tomasz Wiśniewski and Katarzyna Kręglewska, is forthcoming (Routledge).