Autotradução no Brasil: o caso da poesia bilíngue de Paulo Henriques Britto

Abstract

The present research arose from discussions among a group of students participating in the extramural project called "FORTRALIT" at the Languages and Literatures Institute of the Rio de Janeiro State University, who were interested in understanding the field of translation and the role of the translator. By understanding that there are several branches within the Translation Studies field, this work set out to investigate the self-translation practice of the poet, translator, and professor at the Department of Letters of PUC-Rio, Paulo Henriques Britto. Published and unpublished poems were selected for comparative analyses in order to understand the translation choices made when the translator and the author are the same person. Our theoretical support is based on the research done by Simona Anselmi, professor of English Language and Translation at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, which can be found in her work entitled On Self-translation: an exploration in self-translator's teloi and strategies (2012). In this research, she classifies self-translation motivations into four macro categories in order to help us understand the telos, that is, the purpose and goal, behind self-translation. Our work is divided into four chapters: the first one contains a brief introduction to the activity of self-translation; the second one mentions the investigations on the presence of some self-translators in Brazilian literature seeking to understand their motivations; the third one is entirely dedicated to our research object, Paulo Henriques Britto; and the fourth one presents the analyses of the self-translated poems. We believe that although several times the self-translator acts in a more detached way when making decisions during the translation act (ANSELMI, 2012, p. 21) since it is his own work, it was shown to us in our analyses that there is no arbitrariness. The choices are based on what the self-translator deems most pertinent when approaching the first text - also called the original text.