“Em lembrança de nossa amizade”: tradução comentada da correspondência literária de Oscar Wilde para William Ward

Abstract

This thesis is structured into six chapters, each exploring different aspects of the correspondence between Oscar Wilde and William Ward during the period in which the writer resided in Oxford. The introduction offers an overview of the work developed, while the second chapter aims to conceptualize letters as a literary genre and discuss their implications within correspondence studies and autobiographical literature fields. The theoretical foundation is based on the works of McPherson (1986), Costa (2013), Kohlrausch (2015), Maciel (2021), Fernández Campa (2020), and Vanderbilt University (2024), all of which address the history and relevance of letters as subjective documents that are fundamental to various fields of research. The third chapter, entitled "Sender and Recipient: The Relationship between Oscar Wilde and William Ward," is grounded in sources such as Mead (1995), Venier (2005), Rollemberg (2000), Ellmann (1998), Rangel (2011), Vyvyan Holland (1954), and Merlin Holland (2000), as well as journalistic sources like the BBC television network in London and the printed newspaper The Guardian. This chapter explores the significance of the specific period during which Wilde and Ward were together in Oxford, shedding light on crucial aspects of their personal relationship and contextualizing the choice of their correspondence as the object of study. The fourth chapter, "Annotated Translation of the Literary Correspondence Written by Wilde to Ward During His Stay in Oxford," begins by discussing the translation theories used to guide the translation process of five letters from Oscar Wilde, dated from 1876 to 1877, extracted from the book The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. The Descriptive Translation Studies proposed by Gideon Toury (2001) and systematized by Lambert & Van Gorp (2011), as well as Berman’s (2007) insights on translation ethics and retranslation, were essential for establishing the criteria behind translational choices and for supporting the writing of commentary on the fifth chapter, which was inspired by the dissertation by Carvalho (2017) and the doctoral thesis by Oliveira (2023). The research concludes that the translation of these letters enabled the revelation of aspects of Wilde’s religious, social, and personal life to the Brazilian public, highlighting the importance of translation commentary for understanding the works and the author’s historical context, while paving the way for future translations and retranslations.