Brazilian Readings of British Decadentism: Abgar Renault and Pedro Nava Recreate W. B. Yeats and A. V. Beardsley

Abstract

The paper focuses on a double affinity, which concerns Literature and the Visual Arts, involving Brazilian and Anglo/Irish works. The text likewise traces the affinities between Pedro Nava’ s illustrations of Renault’s poems and Beardley’s drawings for Salome. Centring on Abgar Renault’s translations of poems by Yeats and Wilde, the essay tries to trace the process of appropriation and re-invention which enables the Brazilian poet to transtextualize the Irish writers’ poetry, interweaving source and translated texts. The Brazilian poet’s choice of poems, which concentrates on different stages of Yeats’ production, further reflects Renault’s own stylistic choices: like Yeats, he starts as a symbolist, but moves on to a post-symbolist poetics, more attuned to modern taste. The paper relies on Augusto de Campos’ notion of translation as a persona, in which the translator gets into the foreign text’s skin, so as to “re-pretend everything again”. A parallel is also drawn with Machado de Assis’ translation tactics in Ocidentais: the appropriation of European poetry illustrates Machado’s own project for the construction of Brazilian literary identity.