Resumen de Friend and foe: On the role of indirect literary translation in the construction of the conflicting images of communist Poland in para-fascist Portugal
Previous research suggests that in Salazar’s Portugal, Soviet Poland was portrayed as both a friend and a foe. This article argues that these conflicting images are partly due to distinct discourses that reached Portugal through translations of Polish literature. Ultimately, it aims to give insights into the role of literary translation in the construction of a national image abroad. Since all the translations in the corpus are indirect, special attention is paid to the way the mediating texts impacted the image encoded in the target text. The article considers five channels via which texts were imported, presenting the results of a textual analysis of one translation in each of these channels, including its indirect trajectory. The findings confirm the importance of the analysed translations in the construction of the discussed images and show that the mediating texts had a crucial filtering role as regards the transfer of these images.
