A sparkle of life: discussing translation, adaptation and plagiarism based on Moacyr Scliar’s Max and the Cats and Carolina Nabuco’s The Successor
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-4301.2019.1.33734Keywords:
Plagiarism. Adaptation. Translation. Authorship.Abstract
This article aims to discuss two cases of alleged plagiarism committed by English-language writers against Brazilian authors. The Brazilian works are the novel The Successor (1934), by Carolina Nabuco and the novella Max and the Cats (1981), by Moacyr Scliar. The plot of the former bears some resemblance with Rebecca (1938), written by Daphne du Maurier and the latter shares a premise with Life of Pi (2001), by Yann Martel. First, a summary of each work is presented in order to situate the reader and their similarities and differences are discussed. After that, in order to understand whether there are grounds for talking about copyright infringement, there is a section about the legal aspects of plagiarism. Then, there is a section presenting what is understood by adaptation and whether or not it relates to translation. The general conclusion is that the original use of an idea, naturally, does not exempt an author from acknowledging their sources, even more so when the idea is taken on loan from a lesser known work and/or author.
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