Abstract
Published in Another Time in 1940, “Musée des Beaux Arts” belongs to a crucial moment in the life of the poet W. H. Auden: his emigration to the United States, where he obtained American citizenship in 1946. The poem is based on paintings by Bruegel the Elder that Auden observed in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium, in particular the work Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. In the text, Auden addresses the themes of the presence of suffering in everyday life and human indifference to the pain of others, two pertinent themes in a world that was on the eve of World War II when the poem was written. These themes are given a sophisticated treatment in terms of poetic technique, with a masterly use of the resources of free verse. In this article, we will perform a detailed analysis of the verse of “Musée des Beaux Arts”, observing the poem with intense and sustained attention, so that its movements of form do not escape us. We will then present our translation of the text into Brazilian Portuguese and comment on the translation strategies, which sought to recreate the main formal characteristics of the original.
Keywords
Poetry Translation; Prosody; Modern English Poetry; W. H. Auden