Abstract
From the second half of the last century on, we have seen a certain number of translations of English language poetry into Brazilian Portuguese. Some of these are landmarks in the field of poetic translations in Brazil. The aim of this article is to present a preliminary investigation and comparison of the effect that translation choices had in the reception of two authors, namely, William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound. Another point in the investigation is the longevity of these translations in the catalogues of their publishers. Availability, scope, quality and intention play a role in the way Yeats and Pound were translated and how they were read in Brazil. Keywords: Translation; poetic translation; English language poetry; reception.
Highlights
From the second half of the last century on, we have seen a certain number of translations of English language poetry into Brazilian Portuguese
From the perspective of this encounter, and the way both poets are read in comparison, this work will investigate the Brazilian reception of their poems through a comparative analysis of their translation history in Brazil
The focus will be translations published in book form, especially books and anthologies devoted exclusively to each poet
Summary
When considering the literary connections between the poets William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, one episode is probably the most remembered, if not the most mentioned: the time, between 1913 and 1916, they spent working together at the Stone Cottage. They might wonder what Ezra Pound is doing in an already mysterious volume, a peculiar blend of occultism, pre-Socratic philosophy, and mediunically received poetic images, forming a complex system that would work as a skeleton key for the art of all ages In this piece Yeats discloses the nature of his appreciation of Pound’s art at that point: “Ezra Pound, whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more than with anyone else” (Yeats 2015, 3). Ready to “eliminate abstractions”, Pound takes liberties with his revision of Yeats’s poems, and suggests improvements for the text of the play “At the Hawk’s Well”, but in the end “the tone, too, is definitely that of Yeats and no one else” (Ellmann 1979, 214-215) In this sense, Pound’s hand is seen, as in the case of his revision of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, as an artistic collaboration rather than an influence
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