Manipulação, Tradução Literária e Identidade Nacional

Abstract

The polemic concerning the Lettres portugaises started a literary controversy between Portugal and France which lasted for more than two centuries. Both countries have laid claim to the authorship of those letters, first published in France in 1669 as a translation of five anonymous love letters from a Portuguese nun to a French army officer. For Portugal, the translation of these love letters meant the recovery of a literary heritage essential for the construction of national identity in the so-called “century of Portuguese Nationalism (1870’s-1975)”. This work reflects on the ideological use of translation serving the Nation interests and points out the impoverishment of the national literary production (almost exclusively propagandistic) in a Portugal too lost in thought, nostalgic of its great world empire and consumed with the national reassessment.