Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ABSTRACT
According to Antoine Berman (1995) when we try to understand the logic of a translated text
we are immediately led to translation work and, therefore, to translator. In the first case, we are
interested in knowing the reason of the choices made in the textual transposition. In the second case,
we intend to comprehend the translator’s style, his/her translation position, that is, his/her conception
or perception about translating, which, although is not easy to formulate, can be reconstructed with the
personal translations and the several utterances made by the translator concerning his/her own
translations.
In this perspective, the work Poems (1988) was chosen not only for being the unique
anthology translated by the French poet Paul Éluard in Brazil, but also for having been accomplished
by a professional whose reflections regard his own trade. For this reason it can said that his work
offers to translations readers a meaningful preface both concerning himself as a poet and the
possibilities to figure out the accomplishment of his translation project.
Thus, this assignment wished-for comprehending, through the analysis of two aspects of the
translation process exposed by Paes, the translations of four surrealist poems previously selected.
Firstly, if the translator gets to situate the reader in the social and historical context of Éluard by
transposing to the first texts the images and impressions which characterize the eluardian surrealist
poetry. Secondly, if the dialectic vision that Paes has about the poems triggered the work with the
several levels of fidelity pointed out by Mário Laranjeira in Translation Poetry, as well as if it
contributed to the appearance of an autonomous text that comprises the elements of both first and
second languages-cultures.