Agnes Blake Poor and the Pan-American Poems

Abstract The considerations and arguments of this article were developed based on the information printed in Diário de Notícias, a newspaper from Salvador, Bahia, in Brazil, which states that Agnes Blake Poor was the first North-American woman to translate Brazilian literature into English. Poor edited the anthology Pan-American Poems (1918) that brought a collection of Latin-American poems in English translation. Brazil is represented by Gonçalves Dias, Bruno Seabra, the Portuguese Francisco Manuel de Nascimento, and a gypsy folk-song. Using the theoretical and methodological tools from Descriptive Translation Studies, the objective of this article is to analyse the political and literary dimensions in which the anthology was published in the United States and compare the source and target poems to pinpoint the translational norms. The results show that the governmental translation project was aimed to foster Pan-Americanism and to unite the Americas during war time, which was key to determine the choice of the poems and the translation norms.