“A terceira margem do rio”: one writer and two translators

Abstract

The present paper aims at verifying if two different translators into English get close to or distant from the poetic construction of “A Terceira margem do rio” by Guimarães Rosa and how they do it. In order to do so we compare the short story and its translations: the first one, by Barbara Shelby, published in 1968, and the second one, by David Treece, with first edition in 2001, analyzing the translations as results of a reading comprehension practice of a kind of text which we call – according to Massaud Moisés – poetic short story and unveiling in their lines – as well as between the lines – the proximity or distance from that poetic elaboration. This comparison does not intend to show which of the two texts best corresponds to the original one since we believe that translations are other texts, new literary works, made in specific contexts. Our understanding is that the translation of Guimarães Rosa’s short stories must be carried out in a similar approach to the translation of poetry because, if it is faced as prose, the expression plan tends to be totally lost and the content plan is what remains. In other words, what is left is what the write considers to be only the background of the bigger truths he would like to express. The theoretical background of this paper is composed by studies on Guimarães Rosa’s works in general and the selected short story in particular as well as studies about literary translation by Antoine Berman, Mario Laranjeira, Paulo Henriques Britto and Ana Cristina César.