Francisco Manso is a director whose work includes the adaption of literary works from Cape Verde such as "O Testamento do Senhor Nepumoceno", "A Ilha dos Escravos" and "Os Dois Irmãos". The goal of this paper is to analyse the second one as a mistranslation of "O Escravo", a novel published in 1856.
Paper long abstract:
The adaptation of literary works to the cinema puts a complex series of theoretical and practical questions that have been discussed for a long time. The problem is more serious when the distance from the book to the film consists in the passage from colonial to post-colonial times and the director chooses a sharp transformation of the plot and contours of the characters, giving the film a very different orientation from the one that characterized the novel.
This paper will discuss the case of Francisco Manso, a well-known Portuguese director and producer, whose work includes the adaptation of literary works from Cape Verde: that's the case of "O Testamento do Senhor Nepumoceno" (1997), "A Ilha dos Escravos" (2008) and "Os Dois Irmãos" (2018). I will analyse the second film, which seems to me a mistranslation of "O Escravo", a pioneer novel by José Evaristo de Almeida published in 1856.