Divergências em traduções de Machado de Assis para o inglês: A Singular Occurrence e A Strange Thing

Abstract

This research proposes a comparison of two translations into English of the Brazilian short story “Singular ocorrência” (1883), by Machado de Assis: the version published in A Devil’s Church and Other Stories (1977), organized and translated by Jack Schmitt, named A Strange Thing, and the one published in A Chapter of Hats and Other Stories (2008), by John Gledson, named A Singular Occurrence. As a basis for identifying trends in both translations, the research utilizes the deforming tendencies postulated by Antoine Berman in La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain (1991), aiming to observe how avoidable those deformations are and what they mean to this work of fiction and to literature as a whole. Through comparative and classificatory analysis, we identified passages that paint a pretty good picture of examples of deformations and the variety of decisions between the two translators, and we managed to obtain interesting conclusions about the influence held within a translator’s choices.