Rodrigo Tadeu Gonçalves

Edição bilíngue integral do poema De Rerum Natura de Lucrécio
https://grupoautentica.com.br/autentica/livros/sobre-a-natureza-das-coisas/2025
https://www.amazon.com.br/Sobre-Natureza-das-Coisas-Lucr%C3%A9cio/dp/6559280799/ref=rvi_5/139-4214272-9123822?pd_rd_w=G2wIU&pf_rd_p=efdee74a-69c9-4b49-9f9d-7952b2b8eb2e&pf_rd_r=HXT9EQA1Z337M3Y5E2B1&pd_rd_r=14727686-9499-4a00-9540-631ae8bde5ab&pd_rd_wg=JQSJ2&pd_rd_i=6559280799&psc=1

O relativismo linguístico, a ideia de que os idiomas que falamos podem tingir ou mesmo determinara nossa percepção da realidade, é talvez a mais sedutora das ideias linguísticas. Nos círculos acadêmicos, e fora deles (entre poetas, filósofos, romancistas e cineastas), circulou e circula a possibilidade de que o mundo seja filtrado de modo incontornável pela língua que dominamos, ou que, nesses termos, nos domina. Este livro é, dessa maneira, uma contribuição fundamental para o debate dentro e fora da universidade. Ao mostrar o histórico da ideia relativista, descrever suas formulações mais influentes, mapear as investigações empíricas que questionaram sua validade e, mais ainda, ao tentar encaixar o princípio relativista, devidamente desmistificado, em teorias mais amplas sobre a linguagem, o autor rescreveu a obra definitiva sobre a questão. (quarta capa de Caetano Galindo) - https://tinyurl.com/wnql35x

This book provides a theoretical and philosophical framework for the analysis of Plautus within a performative and philosophical perspective on language and theatrical performance. The book offers an insightful understanding of Plautus’ texts as more than simple literary remains of “archaic” Latin literature, but as witnesses of a process of using language to perform an entire world through the recognition of the power of language itself as a creative and constitutive agent of theatrical codification and variation of its own rules and conventions. The analyses of several of Plautus’ plays are carried out through the lenses of Cassin’s proposal of an effet monde as a result of a performative sophistic view on language, as well as Florence Dupont’s unique stance on Roman Comedy as an example of non-Aristotelian theater, based on metatheater and convention-variation as special characteristics of a ludic theater which plays around with its own rules after putting them in the foreground. Barbara Cassin and Florence Dupont also contribute with a foreword and a preface.

Neste artigo, derivado da apresentação realizada no VIII Encontro "Tradução dos Clássicos no Brasil", empreendo uma demonstração de paralelos importantes entre a configuração poética da filosofia de Epicuro por Lucrécio em Sobre a natureza das coisas e da filosofia de Pitágoras por Ovídio nas Metamorfoses, com ênfase na recuperação intertextual do primeiro poema realizada por Ovídio da relação entre poesia e filosofia no discurso de Pitágoras, no livro XV de seu poema.

Resumo: Neste artigo, apresento uma modalidade de tradução de poesia antiga em que se busca emular a estrutura métrica e rítmica dos padrões de longas e breves nas sílabas e pés poéticos greco-romanos através de oposições entre sílabas tônicas e átonas em um sistema que permita, na leitura em voz alta e/ou na performance artístico-recitativa, a possibilidade da equivalência entre tônicas e sílabas longas e átonas e sílabas breves. Aliadas ao uso adequado de outros elementos poéticos encontrados nos versos de partida, as traduções métricas podem se apresentar como recepções criativas ao mesmo tempo fiéis e inovadoras dos textos antigos, servindo não apenas para comunicar seu sentido, mas para veicular sua forma de maneira esteticamente independente e produtiva. Palavras-chave: hexâmetro datílico; recepção dos clássicos; tradução literária; tradução rítmica.

This chapter presents an overview of important contemporary receptions of Plautus from the 20th century onwards, especially regarding the hybrid nature of the processes of rewriting/translating/adapting Plautus for a (post-)modern context. After a brief overview of some of the most important rewritings of the last century, the chapter focuses on two receptions: Richard Lester's film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and Spanish playwright Alfonso Sastre's Los Dioses y Los Cuernos (1995).

This chapter proposes a critical approach to innovative poetic translations of classical texts as a major form of reception, and it chooses the case of Brazil as an example, given its peripheral condition regarding the major European and North American contexts – which encourages different and new methodolo- gies of Classical Studies in general –, and given a seriously incomplete nature of a corpus of translations of classical texts in Brazil (e.g., the complete works of many important ancient authors, such as Plautus, Terence, Quintilian, Plutarch, Lucian, just to mention some more widely known examples, are ei- ther incomplete or almost inexistent in Brazil – although some Portuguese edi- tions do exist, but without actually filling this important gap). This focuses on the nature and function of translation as an on-going process of making the ancient culture available again in a country where Latin and Greek are no lon- ger taught in schools since 1961, but where attention to the Classics has been growing since Classical Scholarship and a wide-range reading public are grow- ing very fast since the 1990s and 2000s. Thus, one of the most important duties of current scholarship has been to ally traditional Classical Studies with new approaches in Reception and Translation Studies, enhancing the availability of good literary translations which could serve both as scholarly texts and as literature.

Entender o lugar que a tradução acabaria ocupando em Curitiba, em geral, e na Universidade Federal do Paraná, em particular, é uma tarefa mais complexa do que parece – mesmo para muitos daqueles que contribuíram para a consolidação desse lugar –, e certamente poderia ser melhor investigada em monografias, dissertações e teses dedicadas a esse assunto, do que no que se pode esboçar em algumas poucas páginas. A intuição nos faz crer, no entanto, que talvez se trate menos de uma singularidade do lugar ou das pessoas desse lugar – no sentido de algo que só pudesse ter acontecido ou só aconteça em Curitiba – do que uma singularidade do modo de relação que funda um lugar para a tradução por essas bandas. Assim, estudar o lugar da tradução em Curitiba talvez seja mais revelador da importância e do significado da própria tradução, como prática social, do que das especificidades desse lugar – por mais que essas duas coisas caminhem sempre juntas.

A coluna Pensata abre espaço para que autores reflitam sobre um tema sugerido pela equipe do Cândido. Nesta edição, o professor Rodrigo Tadeu Gonçalves escreve sobre os diferentes sentidos que a palavra “tradução” teve ao longo da história. Texto disponível em http://www.candido.bpp.pr.gov.br/modules/conteudo/conteudo.php?conteudo=1706

This chapter examines Um Deus Dormiu lá em Casa (A God Slept Here), by Brazilian playwright Guilherme Figueiredo, one of the most innovative rewritings of Plautus’ Amphitruo. The general goals of the chapter are to identify the departures of Figueiredo’s play from the Plautine model and discuss its relation to contemporary Brazilian society and theatre, focusing on matters of metatheatre and self-reflexivity created by the way Figueiredo altered the basic structure of the plot removing the divine characters from the play and giving human characters the task of pretending to be the gods.

Keywords: Plautus; Amphitruo; Brazilian theatre; Metatheatre; Guilherme Figueiredo

Antigonick (2012) is Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles’ Antigone. The preface to that translation, called “the task of the translator of antigone”, shaped as a poem/letter to the title character, features mentions and comments about other performances of the play, especially Brecht’s and Anouilh’s, among other references, such as John Cage. This article intends to discuss how these intertextual and intermedia references contribute to a reading which encompasses the vast tradition of receptions of the classics without failing to consider the particularities of the translator’s work and her compromise with the “woman of word”, Antigone. In order to conceptualize the intermedia dialogue of the preface we make use especially of Ubersfeld’s text A representação dos clássicos: reescritura ou museu (1978) and the concept of intersemiotic translation present in “Estudos interartes: conceitos, termos, objetivos” (1997) by Claus Clüver. We believe that a close analysis of this preface can offer important ideas about the creative process and the project of translation carried out by Carson.

The essay provides an overview of the dossier as a whole and assesses its contribution to current scholarship in classical reception studies. It outlines the discursive framework in which the papers, individually and collectively, inscribe themselves and highlights the ways in which they reinforce, challenge, and expand the critical horizon.

Resumo: Este artigo apresenta em linhas gerais o dossiê e avalia sua relevância para a pesquisa atual na área dos estudos de recepção dos clássicos. Apresentamos o contexto discursivo em que os artigos se inscrevem, tanto individual quanto coletivamente, salientando os modos pelos quais eles reforçam, desafiam e expandem o horizonte crítico. Palavras-chave: Recepção dos Clássicos no Brasil; Literaturas Clássicas; Literatura Brasileira. This dossier 1 includes most papers presented on a panel organized at the 144th annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in Seattle (USA) in 2013. The panel was the first presented to an Anglophone audience that was devoted entirely to classical reception in Brazil. Following a panel organized at the same convention a year earlier under the title " Postcolonial Latin American adaptations of Greek and Roman drama, " the panel sought to raise awareness among classicists in the northern hemisphere about the classical tradition in Brazil. Despite the wide presence of works from ancient Greece and Rome in Brazilian literature, classical reception in Brazil is still largely unknown outside national academic boundaries. Since then the scholarly landscape has happily changed. There has been a growing number of panels and. 1 Konstantinos Nikoloutsos would like to thank Rodrigo Tadeu Gonçalves for the honor, and challenge, in extending the invitation to give a response to the panel from which this dossier emerged. Many thanks are due to Anastasia Bakogianni for the useful suggestions and criticism she provided when she acted as a referee for the journal New Voices in Classical Reception Studies, to which the papers were originally submitted.

This article tries to articulate the concepts of anthropophagy with its ramifications in Brazilian culture, especially through the ways by which some possible receptions of the ancient world are intermingled with the metaphors of cannibalism and/ or anthropophagy. The analyses propose an overview of a line starting with Oswald de Andrade's " Cannibalist Manifesto " which passes through Haroldo de Campos' poem " Finismundo " and a production of the " Bacchae " by Teatro Oficina, and closes with an approximation between the notion of literary translation and anthropophagy.

Resumo: Este artigo discute os princípios que temos adotado em nossas traduções rítmicas, que tentam emular os ritmos dos versos antigos em português, a partir da apresentação de algumas passagens da tradução em andamento do poema De Rerum Natura de Lucrécio em hexâmetros datílicos brasileiros.

Abstract: This article discusses the principles we have been adopting in our so-called "rhythmic translations" which try to emulate the rhythm of the ancient verse in Portuguese and presents some passages of the ongoing project of a full translation of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura in Brazilian dactylic hexameters.

This article proposes a sophistical-demiurgic approach to Plautus’ Amphitryon through the interpretation of the presence of the gods Jupiter and Mercury and the theatrical and metatheatrical effects of their self-consciousness in the play. The article focuses on Mercury’s prologue and the semi-prologues of the gods in the play at the start of each structural arc (after the proposal of C. W. Marshall). The paper intends to evaluate the ways in which Plautus handles the divine discursive powers in order to mask the theatrical play inside the play, focusing on the performative self-awareness of Jupiter and Mercury.

This paper examines Nelson Rodrigues’ Anjo Negro (Black Angel, 1946), one of the earliest Brazilian plays with a black protagonist. Although it draws on Greek Tragedy (particularly Medea and Oedipus Rex) and Christian symbolism, the play performs a deconstruction of classical tragic models in order to reinvent the idea of the tragic in a modern framing (cf. Lopes, 1993; Szondi, 2004; Rabelo 2004; Motta, 2011). The play is about the married life of Ismael (“a big black man”) and Virginia (“the white wife, most candid”) after the death of their third child.  Soon we discover from the couple that their children were conceived in rape and killed by their mother for being black. Ismael’s stepbrother, Elijah is seduced by Virginia. Right after their sexual encounter, Ismael finds out what happened, and with Virginia’s help he kills Elijah. The child in Virginia’s womb, who would supposedly break the circle of filicides, turns out to be a beautiful white girl, Anne Mary. Ismael blinds her, so that she cannot know he is black and, fifteen years later, he seduces her. In the end, Ismael and Virginia find out that they really love each other, accepting their nature as an interracial couple, and leave Anne Mary to die locked up inside a glass mausoleum. The play was censored in 1946 under the claim that it could "trigger a racial war aiming at creating social hatred and disorder" (Ribeiro, 1948) but, due to the intervention of intellectuals, it was performed in 1948 with immediate success. Menotti del Picchia, in a very positive contemporary review, identified important Aeschylian overtones in it (Picchia, 1994) and later Abdias do Nascimento would insert the play in the most important anthology of black Brazilian drama (Nascimento, 1961), a turning point for black literature in Brazil.
The play is an excellent case study through which to examine the ways in which Greek tragedy and myth intermingle with nonclassical elements (cf. Pinto, 2009) and are used to suit the needs of a racial and social Brazilian context, filtered through the lens of a modern psychological discourse (Delfino et al., 2006). Although not a traditional rewriting of Greek Tragedy, one can identify some important topoi in the play. For instance, although every character has a meaningful Christian name, Virginia is cast as a white Medea (cf. Burlim, 2009), who kills her offspring, while Ismael wants to get rid of his otherness and be part of a white patriarchal society. Another Greek tragic element is a chorus of ten black women responsible for commenting and framing the scenes. Also, Elijah is a Christian Tiresias, a blind androgynous character, responsible for delivering a curse by Ismael's mother. Finally, Ismael can be seen as an inverted Oedipus, because not only he seduces his stepdaughter, but also kills her.
The main issue raised in the play is the fact that neither the black protagonist nor his white wife can cope with the underlying racial attitude of their society (cf. Moutinho, 2004; Fernandes 2008a,b; Moura, 2012).  All complications arise from Ismael’s self-prejudice, and his desire to incorporate Virginia’s whiteness results in an isolated world. Their house (as opposed to Medea's palace in Euripides) is never reached by the sun, while Medea in Euripides escapes with her grandfather's chariot. Paradoxically, the breaking of the circle is also the re-enactment of its own beginning.  In sum, Rodrigues redeploys Greek tragic themes, within his complex view of how historical Brazilian racial tensions imbricate the repression of primal human desire.

References:
Alves, Lourdes Kaminski & Leites, Wallisson Rodrigo. "O teatro de Nelson Rodrigues - a linguagem e a composição trágica em Anjo Negro." Travessias, vol. 3, n. 3, 2009. pp. 103-109. 
Branco, Lucio Allemand. "O negro é um "outro": a representação dramática do negro no Brasil a partir da polêmica racial entre Nelson Rodrigues e o seu "sucessor" Plínio Marcos". Anais do XII Congresso Internacional da Associação Brasileira de Literatura Comparada (ABRALIC), Curitiba 2011.
Brookshaw, David. Raça e cor na literatura brasileira. Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto, 1983.
Burlim, Lívia Aparecida. Anjo Negro e Medéia: tragédia nos trópicos. PhD Dissertation. São Paulo: PUC, 2009.
Delfino, Eliana Maria; Reis Filho, José Tiago; Foscarini, Sílvia Regina Gomes  e  Avelino, Wanda. "Anjo negro: gozo da cor". Estud. psicanal. 2006, n.29, pp. 89-93.
Fernandes, Florestan. A integração do negro na sociedade de classes. Vol. I: Ensaio de interpretação sociológica. São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2008a.
Fernandes, Florestan. A integração do negro na sociedade de classes. Vol. II: No limiar de uma nova era. São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2008b.
Lopes, Ângela Leite. Nelson Rodrigues: trágico então moderno. Rio de Janeiro, Editora UFRJ/Tempo Brasileiro, 1993.
Macintosh, Fiona. "Parricide versus Filicide: Oedipus and Medea on the Modern Stage" in Brown, Sarah Annes & Silverstone, Catherine (eds.). Tragedy in Transition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 
Magaldi, Sábato. Nelson Rodrigues - dramaturgia e encenações. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2000.
Magaldi, Sábato. Teatro da obsessão: Nelson Rodrigues. São Paulo: Global, 2004.
Mendes, Miriam Garcia. O negro e o teatro brasileiro (entre 1889 e 1982). São Paulo: Hucitec, 1993.
Motta, Gilson. O espaço da tragédia: na cenografia brasileira contemporânea. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2011.
Moura, Christian Fernando dos Santos. "A brutal solidão negra no paraíso racial: a representação do negro no teatro brasileiro moderno a partir da leitura da peça Anjo negro, de Nelson Rodrigues" Pitágoras 500, vol. 3, 2012.
Moutinho, Laura. "'Raça', sexualidade e gênero na construção da identidade nacional: uma comparação entre Brasil e África do Sul". cadernos pagu (23), 2004. pp. 55-88.
Nascimento, Abdias do. Dramas para negros, prólogos para brancos. Rio de Janeiro: Teatro Experimental do Negro, 1961.
Ons, Carolina. "Nelson Rodrigues e a censura teatral". Anagrama, ano 2, vol. 2, 2009
Passos, Juliana da Silva. Entre Evas e Marias: a representação feminina em Dorotéia. Master's thesis. Curitiba: UFPR, 2009.
Picchia, Menotti del. "Anjo Negro" in Rodrigues, Nelson. Teatro Completo. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1994.
Pinto, Liliane Negrão. Nelson Rodrigues e o espetáculo trágico do castigo: a moralização cristã em Álbum de Família, Anjo Negro, Dorotéia e Senhora dos Afogados. Master's thesis. Campinas: Unicamp, 2009.
Prado, Décio de Almeida. O teatro brasileiro moderno. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1975.
Rabelo, Adriano de Paula. Formas do trágico moderno nas obras teatrais de Eugene O'Neill e de Nelson Rodrigues. PhD dissertation. São Paulo: USP, 2004.
Ribeiro, Violeta. A respeito de 'Anjo Negro'. Correio da Manhã, Rio de Janeiro, 11 abril 1948. Enciclopédia Cultural da Literatura Brasileira.
Rodrigues, Nelson. Teatro completo de Nelson Rodrigues. Vol. 2. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1981.
Rodrigues, Nelson. The theater of Nelson Rodrigues. 2 volumes. Selected and arranged by Joffre Rodrigues. Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 2001.
Rodrigues, Nelson. Nelson Rodrigues por ele mesmo. Org. Sonia Rodrigues. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2012.
Souto, Carla. Nelson Rodrigues: o inferno de todos nós. Araraquara: Junqueira & Marin, 2007.
Szondi, Peter. Ensaio sobre o trágico, Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2004.

This chapter analyzes the construction and function of female characters, and the figure of Juno in particular, in "Anfitrião, ou Júpiter e Alcmena" (1736), a puppet opera based on Plautus’s Amphitruo by the Brazilian Portuguese playwright Antônio José da Silva. I begin with a brief discussion of Silva’s life and the genre in which he composed. I provide an overview of the main points regarding the plot, focusing on female characters and their theatrical and metatheatrical functions. In doing so, I defend the hypothesis that Silva’s Anfitrião is a particular kind of rewriting of Plautus’s Amphitruo, one that centers on its female figures, and Juno especially, through a doubling of the basic Plautine plot.

Preview in Google Books: https://books.google.com.br/books?id=OybvoQEACAAJ&lpg=PP1&hl=pt-BR&pg=PA232#v=onepage&q&f=false

Paper given at the conference "Untimeliness/Extemporaneidade" at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), organized by Brooke Holmes (Princeton), Rosa Andújar (UCL) and Maria Cecília de Miranda Coelho (UFMG) as part of the Postclassicisms Network.

The author presents the tradition of the dactylic hexametre in Portuguese in light of its recent developments, in the wake of Carlos Alberto Nunes’ work. Conceived in opposition to the most important Portuguese-speaking translator of Homer, Manuel Odorico Mendes, who creates the tradition of decasyllables to transpose the classical epic into Portuguese, the new tradition of hexametre, from the xxth century onwards, evinces a radical newness.

This article presents different models of polymetric translations of Latin poetry into Portuguese. In the first session, we present three different polymetric translations of Roman New Comedy plays, those of the Baron of Paranapiacaba, Leandro Dorval Cardoso and Rodrigo Tadeu Gonçalves. In the second session, Horace’s Odes are presented in Guilherme Gontijo Flores’ poly- metric translations, which are then contrasted with the history of the translation of the Odes in Portuguese.
Keywords: poetic translation; Latin literature; polymetry.

In this article I intend to analyse existent proposals of polymetric translation of Titus Maccius Plautus (3rd- 2nd centuries B.C.) in order to propose Portuguese translations of Plautus with the same metric effect in Portuguese. The examples we analyse are from Plautus’ comedies Amphitruo, Aulularia and Captivi by Sir Robert Allison and from Asinaria and Bacchides by Edward H. Sugden (we also analyse a translation of the Greek new comedy author Menander published by Maurice Balme in 2001). The three translators employ various kinds of verses, following the trochaic and iambic polymetric variations found in the comedies. Our analysis will try to legitimate this mode of translation, not yet found in Portuguese, aiming to test the applicability of those kinds of verses to maintain the rhythmic breaks and uses of iambic senarii, trochaic septenarii and lyric verses (specific from the Greek-Roman traditions of the tragic and comic genres) in dramatic translations in Portuguese. In order to do that, we present some excerpts of Plautus comedies in translation into Portuguese in different kinds of verses.

This presentation intends to analyze Alfonso Sastre's Los dioses y los cuernos ("The gods and the cuckolds") as a special reception of Plautus' Amphitruo, focusing on his use of metatheater, anachronisms, literary allusions (many of them to the Latin text itself), comic and literary stage directions and modern elements of performance as a way of recreating Plautine metatheater in a postmodern context.

Scholarship on this play is minimal. Romano (1998) claims that Sastre's play is one of the first rewritings of Plautus to go back to the metatheater of the Roman palliata through the extensive use of non-realist devices. Diez (2010) compares Plautus and Sastre regarding infidelity, the role of women (Juno turns the tables on Jupiter in a very innovative way at the end of the play) and some technical devices, such as the rupture of dramatic illusion, but her analysis goes no further. Bertini (2010) has produced one of the few books about Amphitruo and the theme of doubling which deals with modern plays, and his analysis of Sastre's play puts it in the context of the recent rewritings of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The main point to be developed is that, differently from other more recent rewritings of Plautus' play, such as Norberto Ávila's Uma noite sobre a cama ("A cloud over the bed"), first staged in 1991, Antonio Abelaira's 1980s made-for-TV  Anfitrião, outra vez ("Amphitryon, again") and even Guilherme Figueiredo's Um deus dormiu lá em casa ("A god slept here"), first staged in 1949 (although Gonçalves 2012 defends it as a very important twist in the myth's lineage), Sastre's play actually achieves a high degree of general metatheatrical effect via not only the usual breaks in dramatic illusion, anachronisms, literary allusions (the main points in Romano's argument), but the Spanish playwright actually transcends the limits of realist classical theater by producing a marked return to ancient metatheater in a coherent reception of the Plautine metatheatrical framework. His clever use of  lector et auctor in fabula (e.g. Mercurio complains to the author about a very severe anachronism, and the author himself answers in the play with a ""don't worry", cf. Sastre, 1995:33, among other examples I intend to analyze), his constant references to the very performance that is being staged (in the famous first dialogue of Sosia-Mercurio, the slave speaks Latin, and the god reminds him that the play they are in is actually a translation, cf. Sastre, 1995:62), and even his literary and comic stage directions (longer passages will be presented) blur the lines of modern dramatic conventions, creating a postmodern equivalent reception of Plautine metatheater. The argument is that a performance-translation-rewriting of this kind is one of the first to be able to reinstate the contradiction of a play which is and is not a translation and is and is not an original at the same time, such as is the case in Plautus (which, for instance, frequently mentions his model as the play is being staged, but with a new, Latin name (cf. e.g. Pl. Asin. 10-13: "huic nomen graece Onagost fabulae; / Demophilus scripsit, Maccus vortit barbare; / Asinariam volt esse, si per vos licet"). Sastre, like Plautus, creates anew what is being retold, making a kind of hybrid theater which is radically new and old at the same time. A thorough analysis of this kind of rewriting via new models of performance can shed new light on the old texts, allowing for a more diverse and meaningful study and teaching of the ancient texts, and all the more so when one considers the lack of modern rewritings of ancient Roman Comedy which actually manage to achieve so sophisticated a level of metatheater, one of the fundamental touchstones of the Roman palliata, which Sastre achieves through a kind of palimpsestic collapse of different traditions, hypotexts and devices.

In this presentation, I intend to discuss one of the most innovative rewritings of Plautus' Amphitruo, a Brazilian play by Guilherme Figueiredo entitled Um Deus Dormiu lá em Casa, first staged in Brazil 1949 and translated into English in 1957.  I intend to point to its most radical points of departure from the Plautine model and to discuss its relationship with Brazilian post-war society and theater.
Figueiredo’s play does not figure in comprehensive studies of the reception of Plautus' Amphitruo (Lindberger 1956; Margotton & Huby-Gilson 2010; Ferry 2011), with the exception of Bertini (2010), who considers it "the most revolutionary of all re-elaborations of the Amphitruo theme." Even in Brazilian scholarship, studies on this particular play by Figueiredo are very meager, with the exception of Cardoso (1996), Gonçalves (2012) and Gomes (2012). Some important Brazilian theater critics mention him briefly in their studies on Brazilian drama, usually in a positive way (cf. Prado 1988 and Magaldi 2004). In view of the almost complete lack of information and scholarship on Figueiredo, I intend to discuss the most important characteristics of his play, as well as some of his own theater criticism, published as a series of dialogues entitled Xantias.
Although Figueiredo wrote and performed, even in Europe and in the United States, other plays with ancient themes (cf. his retelling of Satyricon's Milesian tale on the widow of Ephesus, Sat. 110.3-113.1), A God Slept Here should be praised for its unique treatment of the plot of its model. Its most peculiar trait is the total absence of the gods as characters: possessed by jealousy roused by a prophecy from Tiresias which said that a man would sleep in his house the night he was supposed to go to war against the Teleboans, Amphitryon decides to leave briefly with Sosia, only to return immediately, both disguised as Jupiter and Mercury pretending to be disguised as Amphitryon and Sosia. The main themes of the play consequently shift to Amphitryon’s impiety, lack of rhetorical skills, cowardice and jealousy. A very unique treatment is given to Alcmene, as well: she is very pious and constantly complains about her husband's social faux pas, but she is also coquettish, almost wanting to be possessed by a different, more powerful man, or even a god. Amphitryon's homecoming, then, can be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy, which gives rise to a brilliant use of metatheater culminating in an aporetic ending, in which the general's farce will force him to choose between being a war deserter or a cuckold.
The main questions to be debated are: the important ways in which we seem to have a double layer of metatheater (characters disguised as gods disguised as themselves), which is used to create interesting comic effects through slips of the tongue, false starts, and, as the situation gets more complicated (especially in Act II), multiple attempts by "Jupiter-Amphitryon" to leave the role and put an end to the farce, all interpreted by Alcmene as attempts to reinforce the role of god; the radical reinterpretation of the roles of husband and wife, the former in a lowered, stooge-like manner, and the latter in a complex new portrayal of Alcmene as a mid-20th century urban woman, very self-aware and liberated; and finally, the fact that, by removing the gods altogether, Figueiredo seems to reanalyze the possibilities of the myth itself. There are no gods, but the only possible solution to the aporia at the end of the play is a deus ex machina: Amphitryon has to acknowledge, before the angry mob which came to kill Alcmene for being unfaithful, that it was Jupiter that visited his house, thus creating the myth.
The aforementioned novelties in the treatment of the Plautine model will be discussed in relation to the Brazilian post-war period of re-democratization from 1945 to 1964, the year of the overthrow of the military government, and in the context of national modernist drama.

Nesta conferência, analiso as relações entre o poder performativo (eventualmente próximo do discurso sofístico) da construção da metateatralidade no Anfitrião de Plauto a partir da relação entre a identificação das personae de Mercúrio e Júpiter e seu poder autoinstituído derivado de sua “divindade”. A análise procura demonstrar as fortes relações entre a instituição das personae teatrais e o discurso autoconsciente dos personagens divinos, além das consequências importantes para a peça como um todo: o embate entre deuses e mortais representa, no nível metateatral, o embate entre comédia e tragédia (com reflexos na própria estrutura genérico-composicional), e o poder performativo do discurso dos ditos “personagens divinos” se mostra em todas as oportunidades consciente da própria capacidade teatral, levando o metateatro já comum em Plauto a um nível de sofisticação não atingido nas outras peças.

Conference about the recent developments of the period of post-doctoral research with Barbara Cassin and Florence Dupont. Logological/sophistic aspects of translation and (meta)theatricality in Plautus, with some general discussion on Roman translation in general and a focus on Plautus' 'Amphitryon'. Work in progress, to appear as a book.

Brazilian playwright Guilherme Figueiredo’s Um deus dormiu lá em casa (“A God Slept Here”), written in 1949, is one of the most peculiar translation-rewritings of Plautus’ Amphitruo, because of its special use of the myth of Jupiter’s visit to Alcmena: motivated by jealousy, Amphitryon returns sooner sooner than expected from the war against the Teleboans, together with the slave Sosia, both disguised as Jupiter and Mercury pretending to be disguised as Amphitryon and Sosia. The main theme of the play is Amphitryon’s impiety and his fear that Alcmena would be visited by another man that night, as foretold by a prophecy by Tiresias. He is suspicious of King Creon, here portrayed as having a keen eye for beautiful women. The self-fulfilling prophecy is the basis of a brilliant use of metatheater, since Amphitryon’s charade turns himself into the very cuckold he is trying to avoid being.
Thus, very important questions of translation and adaptation arise, such as: (i) the gods themselves are absent from the play: the tradition established by Plautus’ text depends heavily upon the metatheatrical problems raised by Mercury and Jupiter’s transformation into Sosia and Amphitryon’s doubles – no previous adaptation of Plautus has discarded the gods as characters, in a long line that includes Vital de Blois, Shakespeare, Molière, Camões, Dryden, Kleist and the two Giraudoux, for example. The metatheater is transferred to the self-awareness shown by the pair of deceivers when they discuss the best way of interpreting the gods interpreting themselves. Therefore, we have a double layer of metatheater; (ii) the myth developed by Plautus into a peculiar comedy (considering the conventions of the New Comedy) is built by Figueiredo with a close relationship to the cycle of the House of Thebes, including Tiresias, Creon, and several references to Oedipus’ unfortunate family. Moreover, tragedy is present as a butt for parody in an interesting way, since the myths around the House of Thebes set the main background for the play, introducing the possibility of a cross-over of genres in a new way for the Amphitruo tradition, and finally, (iii) the absence of the gods has an important consequence for the myth of the birth of Hercules: in spite of the fact that every detail of the cycle of Thebes is mentioned, there can be no Hercules. As a consequence, the main theme of the play – jealousy – leads to a grim conclusion: Alcmena, herself a very different character from Plautus’ on account of her unchaste and vain nature, is accused of infidelity by the whole town, which leads to Amphitryon’s final public lie that the real Jupiter was in his house, to protect his honor for being absent from war because of jealousy.
Based on these three points, this paper aims at analyzing Figueiredo’s play in relation to the problems of adaptation, translation and rewriting discussed by Robinson (2003) and Lefevere (2007), as well as regarding the problems of the theory of literary genres as discussed by Bakhtin (1993), Conte (1994), Schaeffer (1989), among others. This paper is part of a wider project of studying translations as more powerful performative acts capable of establishing a literary tradition and new genres.

Introduction to the tradition of hexametric translations of Homer and other Greek and Roman authors in Brazil. Reading and analysis of translations of Homer, Virgil, Ovid and Ennius by Carlos Alberto Nunes and the "Nunic tradition" in Brazil. To appear as a chapter in Philippe Brunet's book on hexametric translations of classics throughout the world.

Conference about the recent developments of the period of post-doctoral research with Barbara Cassin and Florence Dupont. Logological/sophistic aspects of translation and (meta)theatricality in Plautus, with some general discussion on Roman translation in general and a focus on Plautus' 'Amphitryon'. Work in progress, to appear as a book.