Machado de Assis, poeta-tradutor

Abstract

We aimed at studying and profiling, as broadly as possible, the poet-translator Machado de Assis based on the poems he translated in confrontation with the sources he may have used. The corpus studied comprises all interlingual translations included in Crisálidas (1864), Falenas (1870), Americanas (1875) and Ocidentais (1901) and the eleven translations of poetry that the author chose not to include in his books. Adopting the bermanian view of translation criticism, we studied each one of his translations of poetry investigating in them the traces which could help us find a translation project, a machadian modus operandi of translating. Assuming that the translations were not produced isolatedly, nor are they merely secondary texts, we tried to correlate them to the rest of his production, both poetic and fictional, in an attempt to demonstrate that also these translated poems can be organically inserted into the rest of his authorial production. Such choices led us to adopt the thesis that the practice of translation emerges as a space of poetic experimentation in which the poet-translator sought his autonomy and reaffirmation of his literary tradition, leading to a poetic in which the various and recurrent dissentions in relation to the texts and authors he translated point to a frequent and increasingly visible independence of the poet-translator when faced with the foreign text. This led us to conclude that the Machado de Assis’ poetic translations were always made with no slavish deference to the foreign text or author, carrying along with them the marks of the poet translator, making us read these poems as new originals which were instrumental in his formation as a writer