Assessment of Translational Poeticalness in the Poem “Les pas”, by Paul Valéry

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7992.2016v23n1p72

This paper aims to collate three translations into Portuguese of the poem “Les Pas” by Paul Valéry (1922), made by Guilherme de Almeida (1965), Claudio Veiga (1972) and Nelson Ascher (1989), in order to highlight the strategies adopted along each translation to account for the efects of meaning and form of the original poem. For that, I began my analysis by making a survey of the most signiicant aspects of the original text, such as the sound scheme, the metrical features, the grammatical structure of the verses and the lexical semantics scenery. I selected these aspects based on criteria in the methodology developed by Britto (2002), who defends the idea that the translation of poetry is possible, as well as its evaluation. Thus, I identified the most significant formal and semantic elements of the original poetic text and then applied the concepts of “correspondence” and “loss” to the diferent translations of the poem “Les Pas”.