Three poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson in Portuguese:

collective translation and the preservation of literary criticism of black women’s writing

Abstract

This article presents the poems “I Sit and Sew” (1918), “You! Inez!” (1921), and “Violets” (1917), by Alice-Dunbar Nelson, translated into Portuguese. The texts are the result of collective, dialogical and shared translations. We present biographical aspects of Dunbar-Nelson that are important for the critical study of her texts and the preservation the literary criticism produced about the writing of black women from the diaspora (Hull, 1980; 1988). We also examine the context in which the poems were published and written, discussing their interpretation and the challenges faced during the translation process. We reflect on the theories of translation underpinning this paper (Britto, 2012, 2017) and think of translation as a project of political importance, insofar as it expands the possibility of reading black English-speaking authors in the Brazilian context.