A poesia de Sylvia Plath : tradução e recepção de Lady Lazarus e Words por graduandos de curso de Licenciatura em Letras

Abstract

This dissertation it is an ethnography-based research which investigates and analyses how the reception of the poetry of the North-American poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) occurs in its language, English, and translated into Portuguese, focalizing two poems: Lady Lazarus and Words (1965), by students of an undergraduate Arts Course ("Letras") in Literature in Brazil, at a university in a middle-sized town. In previous researches (WIELEWICKI, 2002; WIELEWICKI; OLHER, 2006), a lack of interest and frustration in similar courses by students in relation to literature in English were detected, due, in great part, to non-proficiency in the language, leading them to use literary translations against the will of the professors to solve the problem. Thus, a pedagogic practice was proposed of studying and using translation by them and in the classrooms as a didactic tool, in order to suggest a possible solution to the problem, and wake and improve the interest in the original text. To develop the research, the poems were presented to the students asking their opinion about studying and using translation together with the original, to detect if the pedagogic practice works. Plath, studied in this course, was chosen because of her complex poetry, serving the aims of the research. The data were analyzed supported by reader-oriented approaches "Reception Theories": Aesthetics of Reception (JAUSS, 1994; 1999), Aesthetics Response Theory (ISER, 1996; 1999 a; 1999 b) and Reader-Response Criticism (FISH, 1980), considering a critical pedagogy being the student-reader agent of her/his process of learning. It was detected that students with no proficiency in English tend and need to use translations; however, they, as those who have proficiency, see such use with a negative and traditional opinion about literary translation, besides a low interest in the poetry of Plath, and in poetry in general. Thus, besides being used as an efficient didactic tool, the literary translation should be studied focusing its linguistic, cultural, ideological and political features together with the literary one in a contemporary view, fundamental to the formation of such students (VENUTI, 2002), constituting subject for future researches and discussions.