In search of paraphrase

• Grant number: 14/17321-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: December 01, 2014
• End date: March 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: John Milton
• Grantee: Alípio Correia de Franca Neto
• Supervisor: David Helier Treece
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: King's College London, England
• Associated to the scholarship: 11/51993-4 - Paraphrase search: Michael Hamburguer and poetry translation, BP.PD

Abstract

Michael Hamburger is considered one of the greatest poetry translators of the 20th Century. Although Hamburger did not create a translation theory, his inumerous critical writings and declarations on the translation of poetry, along with his own extensive bibliography of translations, are considered responsible for the emergence of a proprietary approach to poetry translation, which, simultaneously, gives the impression of being a counterpoint to the Poundian approach as well as being complementary and elucidative with regards to issues still being debated. Furthermore, it presents points of contact, including the commitment to produce literary or poetic compositions in the target text, although with some degree of rigour in terms of semantic proximity.Thus, our research has a number of objectives: to review Pound concepts with regards to the translation of poetry; to trace the positions of Michael Hamburger in all his writings on the subject; to contrast these appoaches; and to focus on the idea that Hamburger's approach to the translation of poetry is fundamentally distinctive from that of Pound, especially with regards to their divergence of opinion concerning the relationship between criticism and the activity of translating a poem. Our research will also attempt to show that Hamburger, even while taking advantage of Dryden's old distinction with regards to the three types of translation, aspired to what the Augustan translator called "paraphrase", and that it is possible that requisites are established for the translation of a poem, as well as for a more objective evaluation of its literary value, and of its standing as a "translation" and not an "appropriation" or a "transcriação" , as Haroldo de Campos described it, by means of a more exact definition, not to mention a typology, of a paraphrase. Finally, our research will analyse the translation of poems by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, made by Augusto de Campos, compared to the originals in the English Language, in an attempt to show that they correspond to what Dryden and Hamburger considered "imitations", at the same time as proposing new translations of these poems, according to the characteristics of what could be considered a "paraphrase". (AU)