Machado de Assis: a tradução como prática de escrita criativa

Abstract

In the spectrum of intellectual and artistic production by the extraordinary Machado de Assis, probably the least discussed aspect is his work as a literary translator. Machado translated into Portuguese fully or partially 48 works from French, English and German originals and made several stylistic and semantic changes to these literary texts. The question that motivated this research is whether these stylistic modifications were based on his own style of writing, based on the perspectives of Malmkjaer and Taivalkoski-Shilov. For Malmkjaer (2004), style is the consistent and statistically significant regularity of occurrence of terms or structures in a text among all those available in a language. Taivalkoski-Shilov (2013) argues that an author's writing embodies their social and discursive positions as well as their style, and that translators also have their own discursive presence in a text. Therefore, the objectives of this investigation were to quantitatively identify, through corpus linguistics, textual stylistic parameters of four corpora specially constructed to provide data on Brazilian literary writing and translation practice in the 19th century, as well as qualitatively analyze whether the stylistic parameters of translations of Machado parallel to his authorial production. The structure of the four corpora was formed by: four prose translations written by Machado de Assis; his ten novels; seven contemporary translations to those made by Machado; eleven novels from other writers in the Brazilian canon of the 19th century. Their construction involved extensive field research in the physical collection of the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library), including the rare works section, as several works had not been digitalized in their entirety. In addition, scrutiny of the Hemeroteca Digital of the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library's Digital Newspaper Library) was essential to discover the correct source texts and the first editions of the translations published in periodicals. At the same time, we sought to identify the possible influence of indirect translation processes and creative writing in translations, using precepts of genetic criticism by Bowman (1990), seeking to outline, as far as possible, the voice of the translator Machado de Assis in the domain of his translated works. The quantitative analysis was carried out with the complete corpora in the initial phase, along with samples of the first chapters of the corpora texts in the phase which required automatic tagging and manual review before executing the concordancer, which is a software that matches words and their contexts, allowing searches in large corpora. The qualitative analysis was performed by comparing Machado's translations for “Trabalhadores do mar”, “Suplício de uma mulher”, “Queda que as mulheres têm para os tolos” and “Oliver Twist” and their multiple source-texts, according to stylistic analysis criteria by Nord (2016), Leech and Short (2007 [1981]), and Carvalho’s style markers (2010). The results demonstrated that there were important stylistic transformations in Machado de Assis's translations, in particular the “Brazilianization” of foreign works — for which the term “machadiamento” of the works can be proposed —, the textual conciseness and the resulting semantic changes. It was noticed, through quantitative and qualitative analyses, using criteria from Leech and Short (2007 [1981]) and Machado's styles (Carvalho, 2010), that there were stylistic changes in Machado de Assis's translation that were close to his authorial writing. It was also verified that Machado's perspective on translation goes beyond the text, revealing a keen vision of the cultural and stylistic subtext of the works he proposed to translate. Furthermore, contact with different authors, cultures and styles seems to have influenced his translations, feeding his authorial production, in a practice that we propose to define as nurturing translation.