Rhythmus und Übersetzung: Probleme rhythmischer Analyse bei der literarischen Übersetzung

This article aims at presenting (A) a specific understanding of ‘rhythm’ in literary texts, called ‘rhythmic configuration’ in my PhD thesis; (B) the translation work based on the aforementioned concept; and lastly, (C) the exemplification of such work by translating an excerpt from the poem “Chor der Geretteten” from Nelly Sachs into Portuguese and providing a brief commentary. The rhythmic configuration is here understood as a network of linguistic repetitions and variations in a given literary text. It can be of five types: repetitions and variations (1) at phonemic level, (2) at the level of syllable stress, (3) at morphemic or pseudo-morphemic level, (4) at the level of the vocabulary and (5) at the level of larger semantic-syntactic sequences. Once pointed out in a given text, the levels of rhythmic configuration should be hierarchized by the translator (based on what he/she judges to be the most relevant levels in that given text) and, lastly, the translator should be able to create, in his/her language, a text whose levels of rhythmic configuration are analagous to those of the source-language text. The following concepts were particularly important in the development of the concept of rhythmic configuration: paramorphism (Campos), parallelism (Hopkins) and discontinu (Meschonnic).