Drummond and Bishop: the gauche in translation

Abstract

The writer Carlos Drummond de Andrade, considered one of the most important Brazilian poets of all time, owns a huge literary criticism about his work in national territory, but the studies about the translation of his poems are still small in number.  His work, however, has been translated into more than ten distinct languages. Regarding this and assuming that throughout his more than twenty poetry books published in the country his personality as a poet is formed of what it is called here “gauche poetics”, this work discusses, from the comparative study between some of Drummond’s poems in the original and its translations into English, made by North-American poet Elizabeth Bishop, the relation between the gauche issue associated with the concept of melancholy and the translation act itself that, as it will be shown here, are closely interconnected.