Paco e Tonho auf Deutsch: tradução e realização cênica de Dois perdidos numa noite suja, de Plínio Marcos, na Alemanha

Abstract

This article investigates the relations between the German translation of Plínio Marcos’ Two Lost in the Filthy Night and the first two stagings of the Brazilian play in Germany, shortly before the country’s Reunification: one in April 1988, in the German Democratic Republic; and the other in May 1990, in the Federal Republic of Germany. Both were based on the same translation by Henry Thorau, published in 1985, and received negative reviews in the newspapers of the time. By comparing the original and the new text from the perspective of Antoine Berman’s “systematics of deformation” and analysing the available critical apparatus, we examine how the interlingual process (Portuguese-German) is the starting point of the intersemiotic negotiation (text-performance) and what intermediary interpretation the theatre team had access to during the staging process. In this way, we discuss the translation tools and strategies that reconfigured, in another cultural environment, a language full of slang, idiosyncratic expressions and curses which carry within them a lot of the ethical-moral dilemmas of the characters and the very Brazilian universe in which they are inserted. We argue that some simplifications in the treatment of the dialogues have made the dramaturgy less complex and therefore less productive on stage.