This study proposes a comparative analysis of the poetic representations of Fernando Pessoa's heteronym Álvaro de Campos. The corpora investigated are the poems translated by Richard Zenith into the English language and their originals. Stemming from the concept of shift proposed by (CATFORD, 1965CATFORD, J. C. 1965. A Linguistic Theory of Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.), this study expands the concept by adding to it some transitivity elements from Halliday & Matthiessen's Systemic Functional Grammar (2004HALLIDAY, M. A. K.; MATHIESSEN, C. M. I. M. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3ed. Londres; Nova York: Arnold.). Bearing this in mind, the paper discusses whether the textual constructions of the analyzed poems show equivalence with their original. The methodological procedures for that were primarily the identification, classification and interpretation of the clause elements in order to verify whether the possible shifts in the types of processes and circumstances change, somehow, the heteronym's ideational meanings in the translation. The research has shown that the lyrical "I", represented by Álvaro de Campos in the translation, presents a somewhat similar textual construction when compared to the original. Likewise, the heteronym's fictional world representations have not changed in the translated text, which reveals a great concern from the translator's part in keeping a semantic equivalence in the lexical choices he made.
Systemic Functional Grammar; Transitivity; Ideational-Shift; Álvaro de Campos