Duas traduções de Waiting for Godot para o Brasil: o jogo do absurdo de Beckett do inglês para o português.

Abstract

In a game involving stylistic and cultural issues, the literary translator, whose strategy is marked by particular socio-historical conditions, encounters clashes when translating elements that are specific to the atmosphere of the source text, especially if they do not exist in the same configuration of the unique culture of the target text. The present research analyzes two translations of Waiting for Godot (1952), by the Irish writer and playwright Samuel Becket (1906 - 1989). The objective is to compare the translators’ choices for strategies found in Beckett’s theater, as well as other cultural elements present in the play. These points had previously been identified as problematic for the process of translation/transposition of the text. Being a work 'with more than one original', since it was auto translated by Samuel Beckett, it was also the objective of this research to consider the availability of the originals in French and English for the translators' work. The work in French, adopted as a supporting text, made it possible to clarify when each translator chose to follow one and not the other original. In order to categorize the different deformations which were found in the comparison of the translations, we chose to use Berman's (2000) analytic of translation. His classification of the deformations that work within the translated text, along with the notions brought by theoreticians such as Campos (2010), Even-Zohar (1990), Faleiros (2012), Jakobson (1959) and Lambert (1990), made it possible to investigate the implications of translating a literary text, and to point out the stylistic and cultural reflections of this process. Complementing the theoretical structure of this work and grounding the discussions on the literary and cultural bias of the corpus, Camus (1991), Esslin (1961), Laraia (1986), Sartre (2007) and Teles (1983) connect us to the historical, cultural, phylosophical and literary elements of the play. The analysis of the translation of Beckett’s strategies revealed that deformations, observed in the ‘creative re-creation’ of the translators, did interfere in the maintenance of the strategies brought by the author and, in some cases, even cancelled them. It was the case of strategies such as repetition and contradiction between speech and action, which were, at some point, erased by the translation of Flávio Rangel. It should be noted that strategies that were more explored in the English version, such as Beckett’s catechism, were not incorporated into the translations. The translators’ choices for cultural elements, observed in the second category of analysis, showed us that, while it is common for the translator Flávio Rangel to choose solutions that adapt his text to the script format (as he had originally designed it for the theatre), it is common for the translator Fábio de Souza Andrade, led by editorial issues, not to have the freedom to decide which original to follow (of a play which exists in two identities). The result is a hierarchy between the originals, so that the text in French, which chronologically precedes the original in English, is the one perpetuated in Portuguese.