M.A. / The life and work of Oscar Wilde are characterised by ambivalence and paradox. In certain of his works he identifies with the moral codes pertaining to the Victorian era and in others he satirizes, and even rejects, the existing morality. The translator of Wilde’s literary works is confronted with numerous contextual and textual challenges, for example how to translate the moral codes of the Victorian era in a manner that will be relevant to an Afrikaans readership and how to do justice to his specific style of writing. This study aims to identify procedures and strategies to meet these challenges successfully. In the first instance, a translator needs to familiarize herself with the historical and cultural context in which Wilde’s literary works found their origin. This would necessitate a closer look at the Victorian era in order to understand the dynamics and the moral and ethical codes and dominant influences that shaped Wilde’s writings. Finally, the target culture’s attitudes and feelings concerning the moral issues at stake are analysed to determine the impact and relevance of Wilde’s works in a contemporary Afrikaans society. Certain translation strategies, that also prove the timeless appeal of certain of his works, are suggested and demonstrated. The translation of Wilde’s work appears to be justified as it may also enhance and benefit Afrikaans in its struggle for renewed recognition and identity and in so doing will further the cause of the other nine official languages. The ultimate challenge for the translator, however, is to strive to capture the unique essence of Wilde’s works. The timeless appeal of his work can be attributed to the ‘multi-voicedness’ with which he challenged the Victorians. A successful translation in Afrikaans would therefore need to ‘translate’ this ‘multi-voicedness’ so that an Afrikaans reader is challenged in much the same way as his Victorian counterpart.

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Esta dissertação apresenta uma proposta tradutória do metro de balada inglês, exemplificada pela tradução de parte do poema The Ballad of Reading Gaol, escrito por Oscar Wilde no referido metro. Para tal proposta, adota-se um procedimento formal diverso dos seguidos pelas cinco traduções do poema existentes em português. São utilizadas, para fundamentação da proposta, algumas abordagens teóricas da tradução, como o conceito de retradução segundo Antoine Berman, a teoria dos skopos segundo Katharina Reiss & Hans J. Vermeer, a ideia de temporalidade segundo John Milton e Gideon Toury e de fidelidade baseada em Friedrich E. D. Schleiermacher. Faz-se, em seguida, uma leitura crítica do poema de Wilde, para que sejam levantados os aspectos formais e os efeitos estilísticos nele observados. Também são estudadas as traduções do poema já publicadas em português, para que sejam observados os aspectos formais e efeitos estilísticos que caracterizam cada uma delas. É feita, então, a proposta própria para a tradução do metro de balada, seguida de uma discussão acerca do atingimento dos objetivos propostos. / This dissertation proposes a translation for the English ballad meter, exemplified by the translation to Portuguese of part of the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol written by Oscar Wilde with this meter. For such, a formal procedure, different from the ones followed by the existent five translations of the poem to Portuguese, was used. For justifying this proposal, theoretical approaches to translation will be considered, such as retranslation, by Antoine Berman, skopos, by Katharina Reiss & Hans J. Vermeer, temporality, by John Milton and Gideon Toury, and fidelity, by Friedrich E. D. Schleiermacher. Afterward, a critical study of The Ballad of Reading Gaol will be conducted in order to describe its formal aspects and style. Translations of the poem to Portuguese will also be studied, to analyze their formal and stylistic distinguishes. Finally, the translation proposal for the ballad meter will be demonstrated, followed by a discussion regarding the fulfillment of the research objectives will be conducted.

Based on the author's dissertation. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-279) and index.

This study examines the literary career of Oscar Wilde as the formation and expression of a sensibility exhibiting highly developed powers of both orality and literacy. In other words, Wilde's work and life reveal the mind of both a talented writer and a talker par excellence, and this inquiry explores the development and co-existence of the two modes, in particular as they manifest themselves in Wilde's writing and in his relations with the societies in which he found himself. Chapter One discusses the balance between Wilde's talk and his writing as it was experienced by W. B . Yeats, who emerges as a very persistent and perceptive biographer of this aspect of Wilde's genius. The theoretical framework and terminology developed by Walter J. Ong (1982) is also brought to bear on the discussion as a further illumination of Yeats's accounts. Chapter Two presents an outline of some aspects of the history and culture of Ireland which might explain the formation of a dual sensibility such as Wilde's. In Chapter Three this line of inquiry is extended further into the domestic circumstances in which Wilde grew up, focussing in particular on the influence of his tutor at Trinity, J. P. Mahaffy. A discussion of the links between Wilde and Mahaffy includes consideration of the parallels between their written works, culminating in an interpretation, at the end of the chapter, of the origins and dynamics o f Wilde's essay "The Decay of Lying." Chapter Four continues to explore the links between Mahaffy and Wilde, but shifts the focus to their mutual classicism, which also provides a lens through which to view the further development of Wilde's dual oral/chirographic sensibility at Oxford, symbolized in the person and the work of Walter Pater. I then offer a reading of "The Critic as Artist" as an expression of Wilde's Oxford literary idealism, expressed through his call to "return to the voice." From there this study moves to a discussion of Wilde's subsequent life and work in terms o f a combined orality and literacy. Chapter Five is devoted to an exploration o f the power of the voice and the spoken word in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Chapter Six examines the spoken stories, Salome, and The Importance of Being Earnest through a similar perspective. The Conclusion extends the analysis to Wilde's trial and prison sentence, his last works including De Profundis, and his final years as a storyteller in Paris.

Universiẗat, Diss.--Gießen, 1999.

This study examines the literary career of Oscar Wilde as the formation and expression of a sensibility exhibiting highly developed powers of both orality and literacy. In other words, Wilde's work and life reveal the mind of both a talented writer and a talker par excellence, and this inquiry explores the development and co-existence of the two modes, in particular as they manifest themselves in Wilde's writing and in his relations with the societies in which he found himself. Chapter One discusses the balance between Wilde's talk and his writing as it was experienced by W. B . Yeats, who emerges as a very persistent and perceptive biographer of this aspect of Wilde's genius. The theoretical framework and terminology developed by Walter J. Ong (1982) is also brought to bear on the discussion as a further illumination of Yeats's accounts. Chapter Two presents an outline of some aspects of the history and culture of Ireland which might explain the formation of a dual sensibility such as Wilde's. In Chapter Three this line of inquiry is extended further into the domestic circumstances in which Wilde grew up, focussing in particular on the influence of his tutor at Trinity, J. P. Mahaffy. A discussion of the links between Wilde and Mahaffy includes consideration of the parallels between their written works, culminating in an interpretation, at the end of the chapter, of the origins and dynamics o f Wilde's essay "The Decay of Lying." Chapter Four continues to explore the links between Mahaffy and Wilde, but shifts the focus to their mutual classicism, which also provides a lens through which to view the further development of Wilde's dual oral/chirographic sensibility at Oxford, symbolized in the person and the work of Walter Pater. I then offer a reading of "The Critic as Artist" as an expression of Wilde's Oxford literary idealism, expressed through his call to "return to the voice." From there this study moves to a discussion of Wilde's subsequent life and work in terms o f a combined orality and literacy. Chapter Five is devoted to an exploration o f the power of the voice and the spoken word in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Chapter Six examines the spoken stories, Salome, and The Importance of Being Earnest through a similar perspective. The Conclusion extends the analysis to Wilde's trial and prison sentence, his last works including De Profundis, and his final years as a storyteller in Paris. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Oscar Wilde overshadows the German reception of <I>Salome</I> (1891), yet his text is a problematic one. Wilde's one-act drama is a mosaic text, influenced by the abundance of literary and artistic treatments of the Salome figure during the <I>fin de si??cle</I>. Moreover, Wilde did not write <I>Salome</I> in his native tongue, but rather in French, and allowed it to be edited by a number of French poets. Furthermore, the translation of the text proved problematic, resulting in a flawed English rendering dubiously ascribed to Lord Alfred Douglas. <br /><br /> However, there is a German mediator whose translation of Wilde's play is less problematic than the original. Hedwig Lachmann produced a translation of <I>Salome</I> in 1900 that found success despite having to compete with other German translations. Lachmann's translation alters, expands, and improves on Wilde's French original. In contrast to Wilde's underlexicalised original, Lachmann's translation displays an impressive lexical diversity. <br /><br /> In 1903 Insel Verlag published her translation accompanied by ten illustrations by Marcus Behmer. Behmer's illustrations have been dismissed as being derivative of the works of Aubrey Beardsley, but they speak to Lachmann's version of <I>Salome</I> rather than to Beardsley's or Wilde's. Indeed, the illustrations create their own vision of <I>Salome</I>, recasting the story of a <I>femme fatale</I> into a redemption narrative. <br /><br /> In Germany the play proved quite successful, and Lachmann's translation was staged at Max Reinhardt's Kleines Theater in Berlin. It was here that Richard Strauss saw Lachmann's version of the play performed and adapted it for use as a libretto for his music drama <I>Salome</I>. Despite being adapted from Lachmann's translation, Strauss' music drama is often cited as being based directly on Wilde's play, without mentioning the important role of Lachmann's mediation. Moreover, the libretto is often praised as an exact replica of the play put to music. Neither of these assertions is, indeed, the case. Strauss excised forty percent of the text, altered lines, and changed the gender of one of the characters. <br /><br /> I employ G??rard Genette's theory of transtextuality as it is delineated in <I>Palimpsests</I> (1982) to discuss the interrelatedness of texts and the substantial shift that can occur from subtle changes, or transpositions, of a text. Translation, shift in media, excision, the inclusion of extra-textual features including illustrations, and regendering of characters are all means by which a text can be transformed as Lachmann, Behmer, and Strauss transform <I>Salome</I>. Additionally, I will be using Lorraine Janzen Kooistra's term bitextuality, as described in <I>The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin de Si??cle Illustrated Books</I> (1995) to reinforce Genette's notion that extra-textual elements are also significant to a text as a whole. Finally, I employ Jacques Lacan's theory of gaze as outlined in "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" (1956) and "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the <I>I</I> Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience" (1949) to discuss the function of gaze within the three texts. <br /><br /> In this thesis, I will be addressing these three German intermedial re-envisionings of <I>Salome</I> and arguing for their uniqueness as three distinct representations of <I>Salome</I>. In this thesis, I will argue that Wilde's text is a problematic precursor and that Hedwig Lachmann's text not only alters, but also improves on the original. Additionally, I will argue that Marcus Behmer's images, while influenced by Beardsley, focus more closely on the text they are illustrating and thus provide a less problematic visual rendering of the play. Finally, I will argue that Strauss' libretto for <I>Salome</I> is mediated through Lachmann's translation and that it is further substantially altered. <br /><br /> In order to show the ways in which the texts differ from one another, I have chosen to focus predominantly on the motifs of the moon and gaze. By analysing the way in which each text represents these motifs it is possible to track changes in characterisation, motivation, and various other salient features of the text.

Androgyny evokes nowadays a plethora of images and associations. In order to discover the meaning of ‘androgyny' conveyed to authors of the so-called Decadent literature movement I found it necessary to give a brief history of the term. However, two androgynous images – ‘hermaphrodite' and ‘asexual' androgyny – have always co-existed and were especially in vogue in the literature of the Fin-de-Siècle period to denote an emerging homosexual identity and especially so in the works of Oscar Wilde. In order to illustrate this I take a psychological approach in an analysis of androgynous literary figures based on R.D. Laing's theories. Particularly in The Divided Self, Laing shows what kind of behaviour patterns stigmatised individuals display, prone as they were to suffering from a heightened consciousness of the ‘self'. In particular, characters not necessarily conforming to one or the other gender are determined by certain stages of ontological insecurity which can be traced in androgynous characters in Decadent literature. In this context ‘Camp' plays an important role, androgyny being one of its central images. Because signs of effeminacy in men were the first visible signs of homosexuality, I examine how ‘camping it up' was a method of dealing with their stigma. The first and most well-known male image associated with what we would now term ‘Camp' is that of the dandy. There are several types of the dandy and each of them undergoes an analysis as to whether they contain psychological signs of stigmatisation. The same procedure is applied to works of authors from the period of French Decadence of the nineteenth century and other literary works which influenced Oscar Wilde. It was there where an increasing psychologisation of protagonists, and especially also stigmatised characters first began to be recognised. I will demonstrate how much Oscar Wilde was greatly influenced by the literary French Decadent tradition of shifting the outer plot to an inner plot. In particular in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but also in his other works, this becomes clear by referring to R. D. Laing's categories of psychological character studies which display, as in Wilde's works, the effects of stigma caused by a gender nonconforming identity.

This dissertation examines the popular theatre of the late-nineteenth century and focuses on the most commercially successful and popular playwrights of the era: Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, and Oscar Wilde. Looking at the major popular playwrights reveals that the commercial stage had different concerns than the avant-garde theatre of Ibsen and Shaw. Foremost among these concerns was religion, and starting with Jones’s 1884 play Saints and Sinners, a massive change swept through the commercial stage as religious prejudice and official censorship fell by the wayside. In its place, religion started to become a topic that was once again seen as acceptable, and the fin de siècle stage was awash with syncretic religious views. This syncretism was aided by the publication of scripts and the religious pluralism of the day. Though publication aided the literary and religious quality of the texts, they were crafted as staged works, complete with the shared, collective experiences and emotions of the audience, a collective affect that mimics the collective emotional experience of a congregation in a church, and the stage thus became one of the largest venues for ecumenical religion during the late-Victorian era. The alacrity with which this happened challenges not only the common conception of the secularization of the late-Victorian stage, but also of the larger culture