Uma tradução comentada dos contos “Desiree’s baby” e “Fedora” de Kate Chopin

Abstract

This work began to understand our interest in Kate Chopin (1850-1904), an authoress from the US regarded to be one of the first feminist authoresses of the XIX century; she also wrote two novels and around one hundred short stories. Both short stories here analyzed, “Desirée’s Baby” (1987) and “Fedora” (1893), can potentially still captivate a contemporary audience. The general objective is making a annotated translation of those two short stories, not only with commentaries about the source language, but also with annotations and footnotes about source culture, to build a reading guide for individuals or communities and for institutional/educational ends. The specific objectives are to cultivate the study of Chopin, present XIX century US context and culture and discuss interpretations of the short stories regarding gender, race and sexuality. The translation was done using some theories such as Nord’s functionalism; to aid in the debates and discussions in the commentaries and notations; as well as it is the foundation for our translation process used here. Lastly, we concluded that our reading guide is a good contribution for this area of study, with it being possibly deepened and expanded by future studies; plus, we suggest that it should be applied to other of Chopin’s short stories or even to other authors’s stories and from other times. Thus, we suggest the repetition of this study, as done here or in similar ways, especially when and if involves being summarized and adapted to be used in educational contexts.