Elysio de Carvalho: Oscar Wilde’s Translator and Decadentist Author overlooked by Critics?

Abstract

The present study attempts to present the writer Elysio de
Carvalho within the context of his activities as a translator and writer at
the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, by mainly taking into account
his contribution in the dissemination of Oscar Wilde’s literature in Brazil
and the aesthetic legacy of his writing and translation. These facets are
little studied when confronted with Carvalho’s decisive character both as
an editor and as an intellectual of Letters. These facets converge to his
political activity and his involvement with anarchic tenets and, his future
conservative ideology. Literary theoreticians’ and critics’ works, among
whom Edmundo Bouças Coutinho (2006), Peter Raby (2010), among
others, are used as a basis for literary discussion regarding these themes.
After that, a translation, by Elysio de Carvalho, of Oscar Wilde’s poem
The ballad of Reading Gaol, by Carvalho entitled A ballada do enforcado,
was translated in 1899, in this way introducing Oscar Wilde’s literature
within the Brazilian literary system and the theater play entitled Uma
tragedia Florentina, written in 1924. In this study, we seek to uncover
marks of his translation project by means of an analysis of his translational
choices and Carvalho’s aesthetic, stylistic and cultural transposition of
Wilde’s works. For this purpose, the theoretical texts by Susan Bassnett
(2005), Andre Lefevere (2007) are utilized, as well as the foundations
of Itamar Even-Zohar’s Polysystems Theory (1990), theoretician who
founded the Cultural Studies in Translation. The relevance of Carvalho’s
translation is verified by means of the transference of Oscar Wilde’s
literary and aesthetic marks, through the images, metaphorical and
semantic constructions present in both the poem and the theater play.