Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada (Aug 2017)
Walter Scott´s Waverley distorted translation by the Brazilian Romanticism: the case of Caetano Lopes de Moura
Abstract
Walter Scott's first Brazilian translator, the Paris-based Bahia physician Caetano Lopes de Moura, started from both the original work of the Scottish novelist and the French version by Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret to carry out his own translation of Waverley (1814), launched in Paris in 1844 by Aillaud. The French version - the “lingua franca” for nineteenth-century culture, as Pascale Casanova points out - was responsible for legitimizing Scott's influence in continental contexts - examples of which include the works of Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Alessandro Manzoni and Alexandre Herculano - and worldwide - as seen in the American Fenimore Cooper and the Brazilian José de Alencar. However, Lopes de Moura distances himself from both the English original and the French translation by producing a rather particular version of Waverley, emptying one of his central premises, which is the contumacious criticism of the romanesque convention. This can be seen, for example, in the suppression of the fundamental chapter I, which criticizes the romances of chivalry. It would be such a distorted version - that completely subverts the role that Scott attributes to the hero in the narrative dynamic - that our Romantic writers would read, especially Alencar.
