Child of the Dark e I’m going to have a little house:

os erros e reinterpretações da obra de Carolina Maria de Jesus em língua inglesa

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article critically analyzes the translation choices made in the English-language versions of the works Quarto de Despejo: diário de uma favelada (1960) and Casa de Alvenaria (1961), by Carolina Maria de Jesus, translated by David St. Clair (1932-1991), Robert M. Levine (1941–2003), and Melvin S. Arrington Jr.. This article is based on an excerpt from my dissertation Exporting Brazilian literature: Quarto de Despejo and Casa de Alvenaria in English and the oral presentation at the II Encontro de Literatura de Autoria Feminina at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora. The study aims to investigate how certain translational stances — especially in the first translation — contributed to significant distortions of the original work and, consequently, of Brazil's cultural image abroad. The analysis is based on the concepts of rewriting, by André Lefevere (1992), of cultural markers, as proposed by Francis Aubert (2006), in addition to the discussions contained in the book Traduzindo no Atlântico Negro (Carrascosa, 2017) and in the article Estudos da Tradução & Mulheres Negras à luz do feminismo (Araujo; Silva; Silva-Reis, 2019). By highlighting structural, semantic and cultural differences in translations, we seek to show how the absence of a conscious translation project leads to ethical and political impacts, affecting the way in which literature written by black Brazilian authors circulates internationally.