The Transcultural Adaptation of The Little Prince to Brazilian Cordel Literature

From its origins in novel-to-film studies, adaptations have come to designate a phenomenon that involves not only an increasingly broad range of distinct media, but also different transformative processes. Instead of the type of adaptation process that is known as medial transposition, which comprises the transference from one medium to a different one (Rajewsky 2005), this essay focuses on the notion of adaptation as the transposition from one cultural field to another. This idea of transcultural adaptation, also present in Hutcheon (On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and ‘Success’—Biologically. New Literary History 38 (3): 443–458, 2007; Moving Forward: The Next Stage in Adaptation Studies. In Adaptation and American Studies: Perspectives on Research and Teaching, ed. Nassim Winnie Balestrini, 214–218. Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag, 2011), Sanders (Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006), and Stam (Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation. In Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore, 54–76. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), among others, emphasizes the importance of cultural contexts in adaptations by highlighting the use of circumstantial elements as a “movement of proximation” to the audience’s personal frame of reference (Sanders 2006). While cultural translations corroborate with the notion of adaptation as intertextuality as a means for the construction of expanded adaptive networks (Newell, Adaptation and Illustration: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 477–493. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), they also bring the fields of adaptation and translation studies together, as they suggest that the transposition of a text to a different audience means adapting on both semiotic and linguistic levels (Fehrle and Schmitt, Introduction: Adaptation as Translation: Transferring Cultural Narratives. Komparatistik Online, 1–7 (Special Issue Adaptation as Cultural Translation). Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.komparatistik-online.de/index.php/komparatistik_online/issue/view/15 ). This chapter examines the adaptation of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince by Josué Limeira, with illustrations by Vladimir Barros, considering the notion of transcultural adaptation. In this version the famous story has been adapted to Brazilian northeastern culture with changes on both semiotic and linguistic levels, taking into account the conventions of cordel. On the linguistic level, the analysis concentrates on the transformation of Saint-Exupéry’s story in terms of rhyming and metric schemes; and, on the semiotic level, the transformations in terms of the choice of elements illustrated as well as the style of illustrations. By doing this, I underline the phenomenon of adaptation as a process that brings not only different media but also different cultures in contact.