Trip to Pará in The Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon (Chapter XVIII), by William Lewis Herndon
Keywords:
Translation Studies, Translation commentary, Amazon, Travel narratives, EcotranslationAbstract
This article aims to provide commentaries on the translation into Brazilian Portuguese of Chapter XVIII from The Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon (1854), written by U.S. Navy Lieutenant William Lewis Herndon. The book is a travel narrative describing the expedition undertaken by the author in 1851, departing from Lima toward Pará. The chapter in question details his one-month stay in Belém, capital of the state of Pará, offering a rich and detailed panorama of the time. This research seeks to comment on the translation process through the translation ethics (Berman, 2013) and to present a critical analysis that explores the foreign gaze, its colonizing intentions, and the preexisting concepts present in Herndon's narrative. The environmental features addressed in the text allow the analysis to be framed within the parameters of Ecotranslation, as proposed by Cronin (2017) and Torres (2023), an approach that emphasizes the ecological and sustainable dimension in the translation process. This study aims to underscore the importance of translating the aforementioned travel account, which portrays the Amazon region of Pará, and to demonstrate how Ecotranslation can give voice to nature and to the anthropic relationships with the Amazonian space. Therefore, this research highlights not only how translation grants access to a significant historical document, but also how it reinforces the connection between translation, culture, and the environment.
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