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Breaking Bad (2008-2013) in Italy. Chapter 14 examines cultural 
adaptations involving images and associations in translating 
English-language commercials into Chinese. The chapter argues 
that the translator should first identify the conative, cognitive, 
and aesthetic needs engaged in motivating the receivers of the 
commercial in the English-language source culture to buy a 
certain product and then construct a translation using the same, 
similar, or a different combination of triggers (lexical and cultural) 
to activate a set of needs leading to a purchase of that product in 
the target Chinese culture. 

There is a list of contributors and the abstracts of their 
contributions at the back of the book.

This book is a cutting-edge contribution to the rapidly developing 
field of comparative translation studies. Covering multiple 
languages (Afrikaans and some other South African languages 
[Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, Xhosa], Arabic, Chinese, French, German, 
Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish), the book is 
a rich source for teaching theory and practice of multi-media 
translation to a wide cross-section of classes with mixed “first” 
and “second” language backgrounds and identities.

     Alexander Burak

The Video Poem as Transnational Vacation Artifact: Donny 
Correia, writer and director. Madryn.  Mallarmida Filmes, 
2012. 11 min. 

A dystopic present reverberates from the doldrums of post-
industrial society in the opening moments of Brazilian Donny 
Correia’s video poem, Madryn.1 The film, a transnational, tri-
lingual, postmodern postcard, explores the quotidian distress 
of modern life through this poetic portrait of a coastal vacation. 
Through sonic resonance from British musical composers (Danny 
Sanchez and Elizabeth Ann Martin of SEVERIN), collaged verse 
from Argentinian poet Silvia Iglesias, and voice-over excerpts 
from T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Correia enacts a poetic vision 
of the borderless pursuit of reprieve throughout the (dis)locating 
flux of contemporary modern life.  

1   The entire film can be viewed on Youtube, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=xtrq0ZXpKgI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtrq0ZXpKgI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtrq0ZXpKgI


Delos    179

In the digital expanse of voided screen space, compounded 
video layers serve to collapse the diaristic into the poetic as 
when the face of a woman superimposes over a turbulent ocean.  
Nostalgia emerges in the woman’s face marked with tears in 
her eyes as she gazes and confounds the viewer with effusive 
emotion: the salt of the ocean is provoked in the viewer through 
the (salt) tearing face, implicating the viewer through a reversed 
cinematic gaze.  Here the film surfaces as poetic travelogue: 
a filmic postcard with iconic imagery from the quintessential 
vacation artifact’s scene (beaches, intimacy).  

Through genre experimentation Correia comments on and 
critiques the passage of the body through various geographies 
marked by different economies.  The film moves from the zone 
of labor into a place marked by economies of leisure, with all 
of the various psychic configurations of this experiential map 
redrawn.  The ocean reappears, this time more mercurial and 
otherworldly-seeming, glossed in a layer of surrealistic distortion.  
The oceanic tides suggest a world of restoration where “coming 
undone” means finding where the postindustrial has infiltrated 
the senses, distorting even the picturesque beach.  Equating 
self to environment through superimposition, the face of the 
anonymous beloved from before appears coeval to a coastal 
fade of lampposts and palm trees (Figure 1).  The movement 
of the body across various borders in the film is both literal 
(transnational) and symbolic (borderland of the psyche).  Madryn 
represents the interstitial zone where these interior and exterior 
geographies intersect. 

In the film, airports and air transit affirm themes of a transnational 
memory artifact while the essence of modern psychic stress 
remains untangled from the respite tones of holiday.  Shots of 
hazardous warning signs at an airport shake with the tremor of 
a handheld camera, embodying the distress of the economy’s 
labor demands on the body in transit.  Here the traveling body 
traffics the self away from these pressures, but also documents 
the therapeutics of this movement between boundaried spaces.  

While the video poem presents itself as intimate diarist 
travelogue, Correia enacts a conversation across poetic (as 
well as national and cultural) borders by making use of British 
voice-over reading excerpts from Eliot’s The Wasteland.  Eliot’s 
modernist clarion call is echoed sonically in the aural tones that 
recur in the film and can be found as trace anxiety in Iglesias’s 
poetic emergencies that present almost apparitional in their 
interruption of the pleasant everydayness of pedestrian vacation 
scenes.  Invoking Eliot’s wasteland continues the critique of 
modernity, striking a poetic register evocative of Britain’s industrial 
era to create a correspondence with life in São Paulo



180    Reviews

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3



Delos    181

 (where Correia resides) today (Figure 2). This voice-over verse 
collage marks a world in which the threat of modernity as Eliot 
renders it has become reality and been “imported” across borders 
in a reoccurrence of history’s nightmares. 

The influence of French New Wave film, like that of Agnes 
Varda or Jean-Luc Godard, is traceable in this work in tones 
that shift between pedestrian, everyday documentary and the 
distorting chills of the workaday world in all of its existential 
precarity.  These filmic scenes, like Eliot’s and Iglesias’s verse, 
respond to the threat of collapse from the demands of society, 
yet do so with the intimacy and tenderness of a flâneur moving 
through a new world (Figure 3). 

The film ends when the editing shifts scene and Correia 
appears: a close-up of his mouth, bathed in an orange light, 
gesturing to the camera through various states of fatigue (Figure 
4). Is this a world rendered distorted and made unrecognizable 
by the present technocratic modes of labor confronted in the 
globalized present?  An eye gazes out exhaustedly at the world 
where a solar dot appears reflected on the iris, shuttered by 
blinking, suggesting a paganist return to the body unvexed by the 
world, gazing out, not to be subsumed in flux. Madryn is a filmic 
portrayal of the self boundaried by the discursive, geographic and 
cultural borderspaces that comprise the transnational.  Correia 
channels these cultural flows in this poetic work while charting 
and redrawing the artistic body as it travels through these various 
states of address.

 

     Sean Negus

Figure 4


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