Um Poeta Lírico text

15 Maio 2017, 14:00 • David Alan Prescott

Analysis of specific difficulties of translating a text by Eça de Queiroz from 1896 into English in 2017. How should we deal with the French expressions that Queiroz uses in italics, such as "bureau", when English did not do so at the time? In the text, Queiroz's narrator refers to breakfast as "almoço", as the character would have done at the time, given that "pequeno almoço" was not yet popular among upper class Portuguese society yet -- or at least had not reached Queiroz's narrator's idiolect. He also refers to "almoço", in Portuguese, as "lunch" in English, although this may have been incorrect on the part of the writer. Queiroz uses "bureau" and "lunch" for flavour in his descriptive text about a cosmopolitan Portuguese man who travels. What becomes of the passage (and of the character) if we eliminate these examples of flavour in our translation?