FROM PARÁ TO MANAOS IN TRANSLATION: AN ANALYSIS OF TRANSLATION MOVEMENTS AND INTERLANGUAGES AND INTERGENRES MAGNETISM

Abstract

The corpus of this study is the text From Pará to Manaos, chapter V of the book A Journey in Brazil, by Elizabeth Agassiz, published in 1868 by Ticknor and Fields and translated from English to Portuguese in 2023, by Silvia Benchimol to compose the publication Traduzindo a Amazônia III. In addition to the centripetal property, which makes the writings about this work converge to its textual, social, ideological, narrative, linguistic and aesthetic elements, we emphasize its centrifugal power that provokes, from the center – the text – movements in different directions. The language meanders through different discursive genres in an orchestrated way – travel diary, report, letters, footnotes – accompanied by the translation. In the meticulous descriptions that reveal the writer’s enchantment for the mystery and exuberance of the forest, the language is strongly marked by literary and poetic aesthetics, fostering images with photographic precision that transport us to those places. No less evident are the scientific references that spill over the text, a rich and specialized glossary. The translation receives the source text and re-conceives it in another language in the same locus of the events, providing the translator with a dip in memories and facts, reconstructing personal experiences in the act of rewriting.

Keywords
Interlanguage magnetism; Mixture of genres; Translation movements