Translating Tango: Sally Potter's Lessons (Critical Essay)

IN the mid nineties Sally Potter, director, writer and dancer, decided to make a film about Argentine tango in which she would play the leading role opposite a well-know tango artist, Pablo Veron. She made two important decisions about the screenplay: the first was that it would be in three languages, Spanish, French and English, the second that the two main characters would be Jewish and exiles who would make a pact and fall in love. The resulting film proved to be an exploration of translation in terms of cultural identity and border-crossings. Sally Potter's film about the dynamics and process of tango also became a meditation on Argentina and on the politics of exile. A little over a decade earlier, by 1982, Argentina was emerging painfully from the trauma of a dirty war during which up to twenty thousand persons were killed, tortured or disappeared by a succession of oppressive military rulers. Many of the victims were Jewish. Two famous examples of individuals who were imprisoned and tortured are those of Jacobo Timerman and Alicia Partnoy whose testimonies, written in exile, appeared in the eighties. Argentina, paradoxically, is the Latin American country with the largest Jewish population and also has a long history of recurrent anti-semitism. (1) Timerman saw in the dirty war a resurgence of the paranoia and viciousness of the Holocaust. (2) By 1994 there had been terrorist attacks on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and on the Jewish Community Center.