178 Reviews 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 _GoBack _GoBack _gjdgxs _GoBack _GoBack