The seven veils of Salomé: A study of wildés play in Portuguese translation

Although marginalized by the English literary community until very recently, Oscar Wilde's play Salomé enjoyed an immense popularity in continental Europe, including Portugal where it has been translated seven times since 1909. How can we explain this discrepancy? Could it be that the darker aspects of the play that so scandalized the British have somehow been softened in translation? This article examines the various Portuguese translations in order to establish the extent to which the translation served as a 'veil' to hide disturbing realities, with particular attention given to forms of interpersonal address and uses of modalization, employed so subversively by Wilde.