Ana Maria BERNARDO (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)

Poetry Anthologies as Projects of Weltliteratur. A Cultural Translational Approach

When dealing with the external history of translation, one may wonder why Goethe’s ambitious plan of Weltliteratur is so hard to accomplish in certain cultural contexts. Poetry anthologies are a case in point. Although the usually small dimensions of poems allow a greater representativeness of more literatures and more poets of a given culture, there are many other constraints acting upon the anthology design that deserve special attention as to their interpretation (different status of foreign literatures, canonization of poets, cultural dialogue between foreign literatures and the national one, editorial, political and translational constraints that determine the selection of poems in an anthology, among others).
Along the lines of the cultural approach to translated literature developed in Göttingen in the eighties and nineties of the 20th century (Turk 1990 and 1991, Eβmann/ Schöning, 1996, Poltermann, 1992, Kittel 1995, among others) which in turn were partially inspired by Even Zohar’s concept as to the functioning of the literary polysystem (1990), and Toury’s norms (1995), particular attention will be paid to the case of poetry anthologies as examples of configurations of otherness and also as representations of the native culture, as well as of the tensions between national and foreign stereotypes in the construction of an alterity horizon. A statistic method especially designed to analyze anthologies that was developed in Göttingen by Rühling (1996) will also be applied. As illustration of the conjectures ascertained, samples will be drawn from the Portuguese anthology Rosa do Mundo – 2001 Poemas para o futuro (Assírio e Alvim, 2001), with the main focus on poems from the German speaking cultures.