Fernando Pessoa and the musicality reflected on the translation of “Annabel Lee”

Abstract

The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa translated poems of the North-American story-teller, essayist and poet, Edgar Allan Poe. It is not hard to find compatibilities between Poe and Pessoa concerning their poetics, considering that both poets used “to play” with the sounds of their source languages. Pessoa, the poet-translator, had as a theory the preservation of the foreign text structure, its stylistic devices. Pessoa’s great "obsession” was to maintain the structure of the original poem, its rhythm, its musicality, its essence.  Based on his theory, which it is grounded on the search of rhythmical-melodic equivalence between original and translated text, this article presents an analysis of the translation of Poe’s “Annabel Lee”, by Fernando Pessoa, taking into consideration mainly its musical aspect.