From words to lines: the dialogical analysis of the process of transposing the backland space, in Grande Sertão: Veredas, to the homonymous adaptation into a graphic novel
Grande Sertão: Veredas. Graphic Novel. Dialogism. Architectonics. Adaptation.
João Guimarães Rosa’s literary output has fostered countless activities and events in literary circles, be them national or international: encounters, seminars, lectures, several literary projects, reports, as well as a wide and relevant academic and editorial production. His oeuvre gives support to the development of studies in different areas and prompts the interdisciplinary dialogue between them, such as literary theory and criticism, cultural studies, philosophy, psychology, history and linguistics. The most well-known and read short stories have been intersemiotically translated into the universe of music, cinema and television. In this context, special attention is given to his masterpiece Grande Sertão: Veredas (ROSA, 2001), which is known worldwide and has been translated into several languages. This novel, as well as his short stories, has become the object of translation into different artistic adaptations. In fact, the novel was adapted into comic books, which have boomed in the Brazilian editorial market in the beginning of the 21st century. In the era of great exploration of technological means and processes that refer to communication and information, such as social media, verbal-visual utterances (BRAIT, 2013) are emphasized as a new approach to literacy and artistic-literary possibilities. In the dialogue between the verbal and the visual, creating a verbal-visual unity in the adaptation into a graphic novel, the fundamental theoretical studies of Brait (2009; 2013; 2014), Ramos (2019), Mccloud (1993; 2005), Eisner (2010) become indispensable to establish an interdiscursive and intersemiotic dialogue between Rosa’s novel (2001) and Guazzelli Filho’s graphic novel (2016), based on the theoretical studies related to literature and language in general found in Bakhtin’s texts (BAKHTIN, 2010, 2011, 2016), which make it possible to broaden the understanding of his theoretical investigations to different forms of language and artistic expression. This allows us to carry out the analytical activity of this research, focusing on the perception and developments of the category of space in the novel, namely, the geographical space and the ideological space, and on how the process of their respective transposition from a strictly verbal interpretation to a verbal-visual one in the adapted work is made effective. Thus, we seek to understand the possibilities, transformations and difficulties presented in this process, aiming to reach a conclusion that states whether the adaptation responds, satisfactorily or not, to the architectonic and compositional projects (BAKHTIN, 2010) of the source literary work.