The ninth session of the Fernando Pessoa and English Culture seminar will take place on June 12th and will be broadcast live on Youtube.

This session’s speaker is Carlotta Defenu with the presentation Fernando Pessoa tradutor [Fernando Pessoa translator]. In addition to working professionally as a translator, Fernando Pessoa had a great interest in poetic translation. The vast collection of documents stored in the author’s Archive contains lists, projects and drafts of translations, with a special focus on authors belonging to English-language literature. The translations of the three poems by Edgar Allan Poe, which Fernando Pessoa published in 1924 and 1925 in the magazine Athena, represent an excellent example of the translation skills of the poet of heteronyms.

A critical reflection on the genesis of these translations will shed light on the translation techniques and methodologies applied by Pessoa in constructing a Portuguese version of Poe’s poems, allowing his versions to be both faithful to the semantic content of the original texts and capable of capturing Portuguese equivalences to the complex rhythmic and phonetic structure of English poems.

Meeting poster here.