Ana Marques dos SANTOS (University of Warwick, UK)

The importance of being anthologised. Oscar Wilde as a case-study for a reflection on anthologies of translated literature.

Anthologies and collections have been published in Portugal regularly at least since the late nineteenth century and have crucial functions within any given literary system. This is also true also of anthologies of translations, one function of which is the introduction of foreign literary authors and works to the target literary system – such as in the case of William Faulkner and Herman Melville, two authors whose first Portuguese translations appeared in anthologies, according to recent research.
This paper takes on the task of investigating another English-speaking author, one who has been even more intensely anthologised in Portugal – Oscar Wilde. Further to establishing whether or not anthologies or collections were the means by which the readers first got into contact with the Portuguese Wilde, the paper studies the ways in which the work of this author was presented to the Portuguese audience. According to Carlos Ceia’s ‘e-dictionary of literary terms’ and, more specifically, Eunice Cabral’s definition of “literatura confessional” therein, Wilde is illustrative of the fact that in modern confessional literature “a sinceridade da experiência individual posta em discurso literário visa sobretudo a vida do autor, esquecendo o texto,” since his work De Profundis has been considered a ‘documento humano.’ This label was assigned to the translation of the 1905 work by the publishing house Portugália Editora, when it decided to include De Profundis in the collection ‘Documentos Humanos.’ The fact that such an assessement is used as a justification for the way an academic researcher considers the literary work indicates the importance of the anthology or collection – and, implicitly, of the anthologist or organiser - as agents of the literary system. Furthermore, it exposes one of the ways in which anthologies take part in the process of formation of the translated literature canon.
This role played by anthologies is also closely associated with the selection of works being published and, particularly, its repetition amongst different publishers throughout time. Oscar Wilde’s case is again very useful, given that a large number of his major works were translated and published by rival publishing houses in their respective anthologies or collections, at approximately the same time. This is the case of, for instance, The Picture of Dorian Gray, translated as O retrato de Dorian Gray and published by Edições Gleba as one of the “Romances Célebres” and by Portugália in “Os Romances Sensacionais,” or, in the case of the short stories, “The Canterville Ghost,” which, in 1946, came out as “O espectro de Canterville” in the “Antologias Universais” collection by Portugália, but had been published only three years before under the title “O fantasma de Canterville” as one of the “Novelas Inquérito.”
The present case-study of Oscar Wilde’s presence in Portuguese anthologies further contributes to the study of the anthologists and translators associated with the different collections and publishing houses of the Portuguese versions of his work.