As traduções de Maurício de Sousa em histórias em quadrões: estrangeirização através do pastiche

Abstract

In 2001, the Brazilian cartoonist and writer Maurício de Sousa made thirtyseven translations, painted in acrylic, of famous international paintings considered masterpieces. He brought paintings of artists such as Paul Gauguin, Diego Velázquez, Vincent Van Gogh, among others, from different times, nationalities and tendencies, to the Brazilian cultural context when using his characters from the Turma da Mônica series as central figures of these re-readings. In the preface to the book, História em Quadrões, Sousa stated that he intended to encourage creativity and spread the sacralized universe of Art History in a fun way, probably having as target his captive children and youth audience, the consumers of his comics that are inserted in the domain of mass culture. For this, he used the pastiche, a genre recognized by several theorists as an imitation with a playful purpose that recreates a literary or artistic work without necessarily having the function of making criticisms or satires, thus differentiating itself from parody. When we analyzed how the translation process took place, we concluded that Sousa demonstrated a tendency to "foreignization" of his translations, a term revalidated by theorist Lawrence Venuti, from Friedrich Schleiermacher's previous conceptualization, to classify a type of strategy in which the translator reaches visibility by introducing foreign traits of the source culture into the target culture, aiming at the viewer's estrangement, so that the latter, through confrontation with nonlocal idiosyncrasies, tries to decipher and understand the various cultural signs of other nationalities, always being aware that that work is about a translation.