A translation of O cágado, a Guimarães Rosa’s poem, into spanish

Abstract

The relationship between Portuguese and Spanish is at once a factor that facilitates and hinders interlingual translation. Unlike the translation between languages ”‹”‹that are very different from one another, the linguistic transfer between languages ”‹”‹with parenthetical relationship occurs through more recurrent use of direct translation modalities. However, the same proximity that makes the Spanish seem more accessible to the Portuguese-speaking people and Portuguese to the Spanish-speaking people than other languages ”‹”‹imposes traps even to the professional translator, especially if there is no aprioristic decision regarding the approach taken. In order to explore the challenges of literary translation between source languages ”‹”‹and target languages ”‹”‹in principle closely related, this paper proposes a translation, into Spanish, of the poem O cágado, written by the Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa and inserted in the collection Magma, of posthumous publication. Far from arbitrary, the selection of Magma as an object of analysis is justified because it is a book of poems scarcely studied by the critics of this writer from Minas Gerais ”“ better known for his narrative production ”“, besides to coordinate modernist influences with the style properly Rosian and, thus, to anticipate subjects resumed in later works, such as Sagarana and Grande Sertão: Veredas.  Considering the peculiarities of the poem, as well as the Rosian writing tout court, we opted for a translation exercise whose primacy rests on the rhythmic element. This theoretical perspective is based on authors specializing in poetic translation, especially Henri Meschonic, who takes up the studies of his predecessors, such as Ezra Pound. In addition to presenting an unpublished translation, we carried out a metatextual exercise of reflection on the main challenges faced in the translation process. The practice of translation, followed by reflection about the very experience of re-creation, showed that the translation from Portuguese into Spanish, especially from a text of the poetic genre, presents syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors that facilitate the process of translation and others that make it difficult.