Nostalgia: Translation of the Short Story “Homesickness” (1903) Into Portuguese

Abstract

George Moore (1852—1933) was born in County Mayo, Ireland, and wrote prose, poetry, and theatre, using themes that dealt with Irish and English society at the turn of the 19th century (Jeffares, 1965). He lived with the after-effects of the period known as the Great Hunger—when Ireland's crops suffered from plagues and were not enough to feed its population—, and he became involved with the Irish Revival, a movement which intended to reclaim Ireland as a cultural and artistic centre, all within a context of turbulent coexistence with England, its colonizer. His texts explore many of the questions and social problems of his historical and personal context in Ireland, France, and England, where he lived, in addition to inciting intimate reflections on the self, the social role of the self, and on the artist-self (Pierse, 2006). One of these texts was “Homesickness” (1903), the short story presented here. In it, the author addresses the issues of the Great Hunger and Irish immigration from the point of view of James Bryden, an Irishman born in the village of Duncannon, who migrated to the United States at a young age but needs to return to Ireland to convalesce. The short story is part of a series of texts set in rural Ireland and was initially published in the collection The Untilled Field (1903), during the period in which its author participated in the Irish Literary Revival.