Die Stimme der Schrift: „Sebald-Sound“ auf Portugiesisch

This paper examines the procedures used by literary translators to translate prosodic aspects of W.G. Sebald’s texts, the so-called “Sebald-Sound”, into Brazilian Portuguese. In doing so, the translators operate in an area that is situated between the written and the oral in that they seek to elicit a voice from the writing of the source text and to reproduce it in the target text. The present study sets out to trace on the basis of the textual aspects in which this happens, discussing two Brazilian translations of The Rings of Saturn as examples. The parameters investigated were sentence structure and text structure. The examination of textual structure showed that both translations produce a rather dissonant sound of The Rings of Saturn through their differing fashioning of the features of W. G. Sebald’s text. The syntactic analysis, on the other hand, revealed that both translators reproduce W.G. Sebald’s syntax in contrasting and, at the same time, approximate ways, through a more formal approximation in one case and by drawing on syntactic procedures of Portuguese that have a similar effect but differ from the German syntax in the other case.