As florestas em nossas mentes: tradução, alteridade e ecologia em Ursula Le Guin

Abstract

Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction stands out from the genre’s other authors for her greater interest in psychological narratives, focusing on the characters’ interpersonal and cultural relationships. Her novelette “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” (1971), part of Le Guin’s Hainish Universe, is an example of these characteristics, having been chosen as study object of the present master’s thesis due to its relevance in the context of science fiction and American literature. In the story, a group of explorers is sent to a planet covered by an entirely plant-based ecosystem that, as revealed throughout the narrative, has a certain degree of consciousness. Taking into consideration translation’s potential as a critical activity, as well as its active role in the literary polysystem (Even-Zohar, 1979) and the manipulation of the original text by the translator (Lefevere, 2007), this present thesis proposes a new translation of the novelette based on the elaboration of a translation project (Nord, 2016). The first step for this process was biographical and bibliographic research of the author and her vast corpus. Furthermore, an analysis of the work was done based on alterity as a concept, as defined by Bakhtin (2010) e Todorov (1997), both in the relationship between the “self” and the “other” and between “men” and “nature”. Following that, a translation with commentary of “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” was made, with a discussion of the challenges identified throughout the process. The academic exercise of translation enabled a comprehensive analysis of this process, along with Le Guin’s style and the challenges related to retranslation of literary texts based on an interpretation focused on alterity.