Memento mori: A tradução do poema fúnebre “The Poor Ghost” da poeta vitoriana Christina Rossetti

Abstract

In “The Poor Ghost,” the English-Italian poet Christina Rossetti tells, in verse, the dialogue between a ghost and her living lover, who rejects her out of fear of what she symbolizes: death. In a reminder of memento mori, the poem alludes to the Victorians’ obsession with death, from love to fear of the end of life. Given the English-Italian author’s funereal style, some questions arose for the conception of this monograph, which are: How did death exert its macabre influence in the Victorian Era? To what extent does the motto memento mori integrate Christina Rossetti’s poetry? And how could poetic translation remove her name from years of historical invisibility, from the dead past to come back to life in the present, being recognized as one of England’s greatest poets? And, as I share the same admiration that, in her pages, Virginia Woolf has for Rosseti, for the beauty of the Victorian woman's artistic work, I had the general objective of translating and commenting on the translation process of “The Poor Ghost”, in relation to the rhymes, syllables poetics and figures of speech from the original, if I managed to maintain the form and letter in my first attempt at poetic translation. Regarding the problems, and complementary to the general objective, the specific objectives guide the research as they solve each of the previous questions, namely: 1) Introduce the eminent imminent Death, with a specific subtopic for the memento mori in the Victorian Era, 2) Approach the theory of Poetic Translation and Commented Translation and 3) Comment on the translation process of the poem “The Poor Ghost” by Christina Rossetti. In the final considerations, I pointed out my translation “A Pobre Fantasma” as consistent with the poet’s funereal signature, from her Victorian thanatography, however, with improvements in form so that it has a greater similarity with the original “The Poor Ghost”.