Female Theatrical Performances. Cecília Meireles and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

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Abstract

The purpose of this reflection is to compare the writing practices of the two poets, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Cecília Meireles, with the translations they made of Hamlet, Shakespeare, Breyner in 1987, and Orlando, Virginia Woolf, by Meireles in 1948. From the analysis of these translations, compared to some poems of both poets, it is intended to develop Giorgio Agamben’s (2007) claim that the modern poets elaborate their subjectivity without allowing it to be marked by a “place” to which they owe “return” in the name of a primordial originality of their lyrical word. The subject resulting from this process is free to live in this present moment in which they find themselves with their incompleteness and understand that they are made of an analyzable anguish. Contemplating language is the way to produce non-essential subjectivities. Translation is one of the most efficient ways of thinking about the word. Being operated by incessant displacements, translating is to constantly interrogate and distress oneself for the meaning of the very materiality of the word structure without reaching the full meaning of what is translated. Translation gives rise to subjective power from an objective act, because something new can be said of its content void.