Reconsidering Poe's Readership:A Comparative Study of two translations of The Fall of the House of Usher

Abstract

This investigation compares two translations from English into Portuguese of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. The corpus comprises a translation/adaptation for young readers, translated by Claudia Ortiz (2005), and a translation for a general audience (i.e. experienced readers), published by Oscar Mendes (1981). We investigate textual aspects such as lexical choices, omissions, and explicitations in order to compare and contrast source and target texts. Guided by this analysis, we discuss the possibility of enlarging Poe’s readership. This discussion is grounded on the Scope Theory (Vermeer and Reiss, 2002) and the Interpretive Community Theory (Fish, 1990). The comparison of the translations indicates that the adaptation seems to respect the intended audience’s reading experiences and to be consistent with social practices, other than translation, which usually take children and youngsters as primary audience.