O Jovem Rei, de Oscar Wilde, e suas traduções para o português: períodos compostos e arcaísmos

Abstract

Although literary translation is one of the most traditional and most practiced translation activities nowadays, there are still plenty of problems and difficulties related to the activity and to literary texts, some of them are complex, some are unsolvable. Literary text overall raises challenges that dictionaries and grammar books cannot help to solve and demands a keen aesthetic sensitivity in retrieving not only the message, but also the author’s formal aspects, lyricism and style, as well as a host of aspects that pass by and cross mutually in the structure of a piece of art. Considering the hard work of literary translator and using the principles of qualitative and descriptive research, we investigate how ten translations to Brazilian Portuguese of The young king, by Oscar Wilde, deal with two formal features typical to the style of the Irish Victorian writer, i.e., the long complex sentences and archaic words. Based upon the analysis of those features and according to the classical theories of Translation Studies, we identified the most recurrent translation method and developed a critical thought about the problems involved in literary translation. Result shows that literary translation tends to produce more literal translations.