João Cabral de Melo Neto has finally arrived in France:

Poèmes choisis, by Mathieu Dosse

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the translation of João Cabral de Melo Neto's poetry into French in the collection Poèmes choisis, undertaken by Mathieu Dosse in 2022. Firstly, we will propose a brief dialogue between João Cabral's modernist aesthetic project and the European tradition of the 20th century. In a second moment, based on theoretical translation studies (Berman, 2022; Venuti, 2021), we will verify whether translation practice is ethical or violent and ethnocentric, considering lexical choices, how João Cabral's syntax is translated, and the choice of poems itself. Finally, we intend to verify which João Cabral – since the Brazilian critical tradition analyzes the author as a poet of different phases – was translated into French.