Your Country is of Great Subtlety: Aspects of the Brazilian Translation of Patrick White’s Voss

Resumo

A number of the dialogues in Patrick White’s Voss (1957), especially those involving Laura Trevelyan, involve an implicit debate about what is meant by country and what it means to live in a country. Is the colony of New South Wales simply a province of the British Empire, a little piece of Britain transplanted on the other side of the world, or is it a place where British settlers will have to adapt their ways and gradually be transformed into something new? In these dialogues, each speaker makes use of words such as country, colony, property and land in order to express their vision of the place where they find themselves, frequently forcing a shift of meaning from one sentence to the next. This study examines how this debate is carried out in the novel and how it functions in Paulo Henriques Britto’s 1985 Brazilian translation.