O Filho Eterno, de Cristovão Tezza: Entrecruzamentos Culturais na Tradução da Língua Portuguesa à Língua Inglesa

Abstract

The current dissertation presents an analytical reading upon the translation process of the book O Filho Eterno (2007), by Cristovão Tezza, whose translation to the English language is given the title The Eternal Son (2013), by the translator Alison Entrekin. To do so, we aim at establishing a comparative perspective between the Original Text (OT) and the Translated Text (TT), identifying the path followed along the translation process. The Translation Studies, from 1980s on, consolidates itself as an autonomous research and intellectual production field, not anymore as a branch of the Comparative Liteature or Linguistics. Literature scholars, for too long, focused themselves on a defensive posture, upon fidedignity aspects of the OT and the TT. Linguistics, yet, very poorly has explored the cultural aspects of the translation analysis. This comparative study between the O Filho Eterno and The Eternal Son broadened the literary analysis possibilities as it permitted a reflection on the understanding the creative expression lines used in the book through the double, the autofiction and the silence. The interdicts and the vertigo feeling from the original narrative are suppressed on the translation throughout a simplification of the creative resources, such as punctuation, word omissions and explanatory insertions; furthermore, a lexical and semantic diversification of the recurrent use of the original Filho for preferable terms of the translator as son, child, baby and Felipe, that, along the plot, turn out to be a guideline for the foreign reader. The TT simplification can be analyzed from four settled moments of the book: waiting the messianic son as a prize (son), not-acceptance of the child with Down Syndrome (child), the rising empathy with the stimulus sessions (baby) and the identity construction of Felipe with talents, tastes and features, beyond his Syndrome. The whole process is interweaved by the construction of the father and son double, established with feedbacks and reflections from the father-character, under the lens of a selective omniscient narrator that also ensured the narrative distance and the autofictional aspect of the book. Under such perspective, language is continuously challenged as the comfortable values of the symbolic plan categorization is doubted, such as comprehension, apprehension and valuation measures of the world’s narrator from O Filho Eterno come down to the experience of helplessness, inexpressible and of full meaningful silence. This study is based upon the theorical and critical approaches by Mona Baker (1993, 1995, 1996), Itamar Even-Zohar (1978), Susan Basnnett (2005), Philippe Lejeune, (2008), Diana Klinger (2006), Santiago Kovadloff (2003), Roland Barthes (1977, 2004), among others.