Translation of the dialogues of Burma Jones, a character from John Kennedy Tooles book A Confederacy of Dunces / Tradução do dialeto literário de Burma Jones, da obra A Confederacy of Dunces, de John Toole
AUTOR(ES)
Kátia Regina Vighy Hanna
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
2006
RESUMO
This paper aims to translate the dialogues of Burma Jones, a character from John Kennedy Tooles book A Confederacy of Dunces. This characters speech is a representation of the Black English Vernacular (BEV) style, which raises questions about the literary dialects and the problems involved in their translation. Tooles work is almost unknown to Brazilian readers, except for a translation by Cristina Boselli, distributed only to members of Círculo do Livro and therefore available to a limited readership. In that translation, Jones speech is not presented with any trace of dialectal variation, being only marked as belonging to a colloquial register. Chapter I advocates for the relevance of preserving the translation of the different literary dialects, especially Burma Jones. This is done through examining how the author employed the linguistic heterogeneity to stress the characterspeculiarities and the social position they occupy in the fictional society of the book. This relation being established, Chapter II considers the literary dialects in their formal construction and the representative, ideological and humorous effects they create in a fictional work. This analysis highlights works from Brazilian literature in which black characters speeches have received a different treatment, in order to verify how the authors have portrayed them. Chapter III addresses translation theory and emphasizes the translators violent intervention, as s/he creates aesthetic, ideological and political meaning in any act of translation, and specially when translating literary dialects. This concept is supported by to some authors on contemporary translation theory, who challenge the concepts of "fidelity" and "original work". In conclusion, I present a dialectical translation of the most relevant dialogues of Burma Jones, followed by comments on my decisions
ASSUNTO(S)
dialeto literário; john kennedy toole; literatura brasileira; literatura norte-americana; tradução d american literature; brazilian literature; dialectal translation; john kennedy toole; literary diale
