Pornodyssey: translating rhythm, register and raunch

Pornodyssey: traduzindo ritmo, registro e rebuliço

Abstract

The celebrated novel Pornopopéia, by Reinaldo Moraes, represents a type of joycean Ulysses of the city of São Paulo’s underground in the excesses of the 1980s extended to the beginning of the 21st century. Despite its importance in contemporary Brazilian literature and perhaps because of its literary and linguistic complexity in producing its distinct humor, it has never before been translated into English. This article reports some results of a post-doctoral research in which we carried out a literary, commented translation of this epic novel. The theoretical framework of the research was based in general on a model of language from the perspective of the Theory of Genre and Register (TGR) (MARTIN; ROSE, 2008) and on Berman’s concept of ‘tradutology’ (2012), while the translation practice was informed by adaptations of Rothenberg’s concept of ‘total translation’ (2010), Frota’s Jazz Theory (1989), Toury’s ‘norms’ (1995), Milton’s (1998) discussion of metaphors for the practice of translation. Some results point to the following features as contributing to humor and presenting distinct challenges in the process of translating them:  code-mixing and switching, punning haiku, rapid changes in registers from erudite to street, sonority (hard rhymes), neologisms, blends, and other linguistic, semantic and generic transgressions, along with those of a social nature. Ultimately, with this research we hope to offer the anglophone reader the pleasure of this text by Reinaldo Moraes, simultaneously disseminating Brazilian literature and culture to a broad anglophone speech community through the translation, and ultimately contributing to reflections on the practice of translation in translation studies.