O processo de criação da tradução da peça: “Statements after an arrest under the immorality act", de Athol Fugard

Abstract

“Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act” (1974), by the South African playwright, novelist and director Athol Fugard (1932 -), worldwide famous for his engagement in political and human rights issues, reflects the social conscience of the author within South African context in the 1970’s (O'NEIL, 2004), when Apartheid was still in force. Considering the importance of Fugard's work for world literature, the referred dramatic text was translated from English to Portuguese by the Research Group from the Federal University of Bahia, entitled Translation, Creation Process and Sound Media in 2011. The analysis of such creation process was developed from the theoretical-methodological perspective of the genetic criticism, or, as it is better known nowadays, the studies of creative processes. Therefore, our starting point was the idea that such field of research focuses on the act of production/writing of a given work, having as its object the manuscripts that outline the creative dynamics of such text in order to describe and explore its creation (GRÉSILLON, 1994). Thus, we have sought to reconstruct the creative process of the translation of the referred Fugard’s text from English to Portuguese in order to get closer to the way the work was conceived and accomplished, through the analysis of the manuscripts left behind by the translators (BIASI, 2000). With the development of the genetic studies in the last years, the concept of manuscript has been expanded and thus the present study focuses on the analysis of process documents created in digital media. Furthermore, it was possible to reflect on cultural aspects, as well as on the social, political and historical context of the translated work. We have worked with the concept of translation functionality so as to reflect on the function of the translated text in the target culture (VERMEER, 2014 [1984]). Studies on foreignization and domestication have also proved to be relevant to the research developed herein (VENUTI, 2002) and we could trace indexes of such genesis in the process documents that supported the analysis of the creative process in focus.