An American Prayer:

a descriptive analysis of two translations into Portuguese

Abstract

This paper aims at describing two translations of the poem “An American Prayer”, by Jim Morrison, published in 1970, into Portuguese: Manuel João Gomes’ translation (1992) and Fabiano Calixto’s translation (2010). Despite his well-known career as the lead vocalist of the band The Doors, Jim Morrison also had a close relationship with poetry by having written two books of poems. Among many of his poems, perhaps “An American Prayer” is one of his most iconic poems. By attempting to analyze both translations to Portuguese of Jim Morrison’s poem, taking into consideration their preliminary data, the macro-level, the micro-level, and the systemic context, with the help of the English poem as a source text, the current research makes use, as a theoretical support, of Skopos theory (VERMEER, 2004), in which the target text is taken into account by its function; Polysystem theory (EVEN-ZOHAR, 1990), in which the cultural system is subdivided into several other systems; and the Descriptive Translation Studies Analysis Model proposed by Lambert e Van Gorp (1985). The analysis’s final considerations lead to believe that the target poems fit their own purposes, being, each one of them, immersed in specific skopos that reflect the lexical choices made by the translators.