Tradução e ilusão

Abstract

T HE PRACTICE of literary translation and theorization in the field of Translation Studies do not always walk side by side. Here is a good example: in the last decades several important theorists have highlighted the relative autonomy of translation from the original, some going as far as challenging the idea that translation is somehow secondary in its relation to the original text. 1 The notion of faithfulness has been criticized, relativized and deconstructed in articles, theses and books. 2 And today there is a whole line of research in the area, that of descriptive studies, which analyzes translations and the role they play in the literary system in which they are included, without even taking into account the originals related to them. Nonetheless, paradoxically literary translators today tend, in general, to take the issue of faithfulness to the original more seriously than it was common fifty or sixty years ago. Such is the conclusion of recent studies comparing translations in Brazil in the midtwentieth century with others, more recent, from the same original texts. 3 And when we examine translations from the nineteenth century the difference is even more striking. No one is saying, of course, that there were no translators in the past whose work was guided by the goal of reproducing, as faithfully as possible, the characteristics of the original as regards meaning, form and style; or that there are no translators today who take excessive liberties with the original. But it seems clear that nowadays a typical literary translation by a recognized translator tends to remain closer to the original in several respects than a typical translation from the mid-twentieth century or even from more distant times.More precisely, to use the current terminology coined by the influential American theorist Lawrence Venuti, literary translations today tend to be more foreignizing, when in the past the dominant translational strategy was essentially domesticating. 4 Although these terms are recent, the two conceptions of translation were distinguished two hundred years ago by the German thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher (2001). Domesticating translation aims to facilitate the work of the reader by modifying whatever might seem strange to him, thus bringing the text closer to the linguistic and cultural universe that is already familiar to him. The foreignizing strategy does the opposite: it maintains many of the original characteristics of the text -references that not obvious to the reader of the translated text, stylistic features unknown in the target culture, and even some elements of the source language -in order to bring the reader closer to the linguistic and cultural universe of the original work. If the domesticization of the text tends to make the translated text seem to have been written in the language of the translation, foreignizing keeps the reader permanently aware that what he