Responding to Poetry in the Original and in Translation: How Style Affects Sense

With the objective of checking whether translated poems lead readers from two different cultural settings to sense a text in a range of different ways, the study reported in this presentation builds on a series of largescale experiments in which Brazilian and Ukrainian participants respond to a poem by Poe in the original and in translation. Here, a line by line stylistic comparison between the original in English and the three translated versions (in Portuguese, in Ukrainian and in Russian) is reported. As the results from the previous studies point to statistically significant differences between the groups, this study matches the data obtained earlier with the results from the comparative stylistic analysis. Evidence shows that the translators’ linguistic options may indeed explain the readers’ responses. The findings reinforce the notion that the cultural background of the participants and the singular context enabled by each translation do affect the reading experience. The presentation brings out the pedagogical implications of the intercultural and stylistic implications involved when reading literary texts in original and in translated versions.