Challenging Lusofonia: Transnationality, Translationality, and Appropriation in Tulio Carella’s Orgía/Orgia and Hermilo Borba Filho's Deus no pasto

Abstract

During his 1960-61 stint as theater professor in Recife, Argentinian playwright and critic Tulio Carella (1912-1979) kept a diary that disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War. Before its disappearance, Carella’s colleague and friend Hermilo Borba Filho (1917-1976) translated the text into Portuguese and published it in Brazil as Orgia (1968). Four years later, Hermilo inserted much of his translation of Carella's text into his own novel, Deus no pasto. This unusual translation flow highlights issues such as the displacement of the original, the validity of adaptive transformation, and the challenging of normative fonias. I explore the transnationality of Carella's diary, asking whether a text extant only in Portuguese can form part of the Hispanophone canon and whether a text not originally written in Portuguese can be considered part of the Lusophone canon.