The life of a text: Bertolt Brecht's Three Penny Opera. Studies in literary and cultural transfer

UnrestrictedIn the following study I will address the issue of the cultural impact of translation and adaptation. I will concentrate on the example of Bertolt Brecht's Three Penny Opera, written in 1928 and first performed in Berlin, a work, which itself represents an adaptation of John Gay's Beggar's Opera published two-hundred years earlier, in the London of 1728.; Both texts achieved major success on stage during their time, and particularly in the case of the Three Penny Opera, have remained highly popular performance pieces throughout the world. Gay's work takes place during a time where London society found itself radically divided between the extremes of poverty, power, political influence, and abject misery. Brecht's dramatic piece, composed in collaboration with his colleague Kurt Weill, is set during a time near the end of the Weimar Republic, when Germany was attempting to reinvent itself, when it tried to break with old conventions and traditions, criticizing and exposing the morals and dealings of bourgeois society.; I propose to analyze the key Leitmotive of both plays, the respective cultures and societies in which they were created, and then suggest transposing its core plot structure to a modern-day Los Angeles, against the backdrop of the Rampart Police Scandal and a culture permeated by gangs and their activities, which so deeply affect predominantly young and disempowered minorities and their communities.; Translation, particularly when it is combined with the practice of adaptation, can become an influential cultural tool, and may have an important impact on the canon of a fresh target system by contributing to the creation of a new discourse. Together, they may function as catalyzing agents, when they are consciously employed in socio-cultural projects, perhaps aligning themselves with specific social groups and classes. In re-directing a seemingly inherent ethnocentrism, translation and adaptation even have the potential to become subversive of entrenched ideologies and the functioning of its institutions.; One of the key arguments I will present here is that adaptation represents repetition without replication, that it has produced another version of the source text, yet not an exact copy of it. By re-actualizing the original version, a text can be continually re-interpreted in an extended intertextual engagement between source and target culture and their social, historical, and political aspects and conditions. Brecht himself, in many of his theoretical writings, insisted that drama in particular, comprises several distinct aspects which can combine and work together to transform theater into an effective and powerful tool for social awareness and change. Let meillustrate this principle by offering a rather free translation of the core-message contained in the Three Penny Opera:; Ihr, die euren Wanst und unsre Bravheit liebt, / Das eine wisset ein für allemal: / Wie ihr es immer dreht und wie ihr's immer schiebt / Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.; You, who feed your guts and like us all submissive, / You better don't forget this simple truth: / However you may twist it and whatever strings you pull / The bills come first, and morals feed the fool