Alexandra Assis ROSA (University of Lisbon, Portugal)

The Short Story in English meets the Portuguese Reader: A Contribution Toward the ‘External History’ of Portuguese Anthologies of Short Stories Translated from English


The short story is the first literary form in which American writers excelled, and the first in which their critical theories predominated; the influence of Poe’s work especially spread throughout nineteenth-century Europe, and if towards the end of the century French, Russian, and British writers emerged to challenge American supremacy that merely emphasized the reciprocal nature of the exchange.
(Keating 1981: 19; my emphasis)



This paper aims to research how intercultural exchanges contributed for the development of the short story in Portugal. To researchers in Translation Studies, statements such as the one quoted above quickly bring to mind Itamar Even-Zohar’s well-known formulation that “no literature could manage without interference” (1990: 59). However, whereas it is rather easy to find similar statements on the importance of intercultural exchanges for the development of the short story as literary form, it is not so easy to find studies on the role played by translation in such exchanges.
In order to research to what extent Portuguese short story writing may have been influenced by interference especially by English-language literary systems through the indirect channel of translation, one must firstly launch the preliminary work of cartographing the translation into Portuguese of short stories. Within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies, and as part of an ongoing research project, this paper aims to contribute for the external history of the translation into Portuguese of the short story in English, taking its publication in anthologies as a form of creative rewriting, adaptation or manipulation (Lefevere 1992: 8).
The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, it intends to provide answers to questions such as whose, which, when, where, by whom, why and how short stories in English were selected, translated and presented to the Portuguese reader. The cartography of such a territory will be based on the presentation and analysis of a selection of data (available at the Portuguese National Library archives) regarding the introduction of the short story in English through translations published in anthologies. Secondly, resorting to Gérard Genette’s definition of peritext – i.e. elements pertaining to the volume, such as title, subtitle, preface, postface, notice, foreword, notes, blurbs, book cover, dust jacket, etc. (Genette 1987)– , this paper proceeds to analyse the role played by peritextual discourses in a selection of anthologies. This analysis is expected to yield insights into how such anthologies introduced the short story in English to a public reading it in Portuguese version.