Building on my previous works about Blake in translation, this paper aims at reflecting on the reception of Blake in Brazil from the perspective of the translations of his works in the Brazilian literary system. Besides presenting a chronological panorama of the translations of Blake’s works into Brazilian Portuguese, which portrays a history of a little more than six decades, the paper will analyze (drawing from André Lefevere’s concept of “rewriting”) the preferences that these translations manifest for certain texts, as well as will investigate the ideological and poetological motivations/constraints underlying the translation projects. Finally, the framework of the Brazilian translations will be compared to the translations of Blake’s works published in Portugal, as they are also available (at least some of them) in Brazil, and it will be argued that the Brazilian and Portuguese translation systems have developed different and complementary images of Blake in the context of the Portuguese language.
Juliana Steil is a lecturer in Translation Studies at the Universidade Federal de Pelotas, Brazil. Her research interests revolve around literary translation and the work of William Blake. Among her translations into Brazilian Portuguese are Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (A Época da Inocência), with Jonas Tenfen (Record, 2011), and Anthony Pym’s Exploring Translation Theories (Explorando Teorias da Tradução), in collaboration with Rodrigo Borges de Faveri and Claudia Borges de Faveri (Perspectiva, 2017).