Hopscoth of Translate: The Heaven and the Hell of Translating Cecília Meireles’s Children’s Poems into Italian

Abstract

This article presents translations from Portuguese to Italian of children’s poems “Colar de Carolina” e “Jogo de Bola” from Cecília Meireles’s 'Ou isto ou aquilo' (1964). Children's literature is still little studied and, for many, seen as a minor genre, which highlights and justifies the importance of focusing on this theme. It is also important to expand the diffusion of Cecilias's literature inside and outside Brazil. The translation was based on the considerations of theorists such as Aubert (1993), Calvino (2015), Jakobson (2001) e Paz (2009). The article proposes a relation between the translation effort and a game of hopscotch and presents reflections on children's literature and its role in the formation of children. Furthermore, it brings analyses of the chosen poems and comments about their translations, pointing out the strategies used to make the translations viable, the resources maintained, and the difficulties throughout the process. In the translations, the images and messages present in the Cecilias’s poems were given prestige, as well as the permanence of linguistic-stylistic resources used by the author, as musicality, alliteration, puns and rhymes.