Word: shapiros
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...article on Angola by Peter Shapiro, published in your September 18 issue strikes me as being a disconnected piece. The first part describes what are obviously his personal impressions of Angola. He rightly states that "there is no atmosphere of war instead there is a feeling of confidence. The tranquil atmosphere extends far beyond the capital...whites and wealthy blacks travel freely, moving throughout the countryside unarmed." This is what he saw and reported. The second part contain no original arguments rather it merely reproduces the usual accusations made against Portugal which can be found in the literature published...
However, Mr. Shapiro is far from the truth in matters of statistics, and consequently his conclusions are misleading. Some figures will illustrate the point: Portugal's population (European territory), according to the 1970 census, was 9,700,000; not 7 million. Even in 1960 the population of Metropolitan Portugal stood at 8.6 million. The total emigration amounted to less than 1 million over the last ten years, not 1.5 million. Half of the stated 140,000 men in the Portuguese armed forces serving in the entire Portuguese territory (842,686 square miles) is composed of blacks drawn from the local...
...adapting Feydeau, any translator has to take certain liberties. What Shapiro has done is to take liberties equal in inventiveness to the devices he is trying to translate: take, for instance. Miss Betting, the governess whom Feydeau uses to mock the garrulous Madamae Duverger. In the original. Miss Betting is English, unable to understand a word of Madame Duverger's rapid fire French. In this translation, she becomes a deafmute, capable of speaking only in sign language. The comic intent is preserved, even heightened, although the device itself is altered...
...Feydeau has not had the popularity he deserves among American audiences, it is largely because he is almost untranslatable. He is so uniquely French that he defies transferral into a less poetic language. Four Farces by Georges Feydeau, translated by Norman Shapiro, was a National Book Award finalist last year thanks to Shapiro's facility in rising to the challenge of Feydeau, and this production shows that Shapiro's translation makes a good acting text as well as a good reading version...
Georges Feydeau was a French comic playwright before the First World War. His work was originally written for the popular stage but in the 1940s he began to acquire cultural respectability, and several of his plays have been added to the repetoire of the Comedie--Francaise. Wesleyan Professor Norman Shapiro, who lives in Cambridge and is an associate of Adams House, translated a set of Feydeau farces into English, one of which was "Going to Pot." Shapiro has helped out with this production...