Ideational shifts of the linguistic representations of Álvaro de Campos in Fernando Pessoa’s oeuvre and their translations into the English language

Abstract

This study proposes a comparative analysis of the poetic representationsof Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym Álvaro de Campos. The corporainvestigated are the poems translated by Richard Zenith into the Englishlanguage and their originals. Stemming from the concept of shift proposedby Catford (1965), this study expands the concept by adding to it sometransitivity elements from Halliday & Matthiessen’s Systemic FunctionalGrammar (2004). Bearing this in mind, the paper discusses whether thetextual constructions of the analyzed poems show equivalence with theiroriginal. The methodological procedures for that were primarily theidentifi cation, classifi cation and interpretation of the clause elements inorder to verify whether the possible shifts in the types of processes andcircumstances change, somehow, the heteronym’s ideational meanings inthe translation. The research has shown that the lyrical “I”, represented byÁlvaro de Campos in the translation, presents a somewhat similar textualconstruction when compared to the original. Likewise, the heteronym’sfi ctional world representations have not changed in the translated text,which reveals a great concern from the translator’s part in keeping asemantic equivalence in the lexical choices he made.