The article analyzes the dichotomy between translator/translation and author/"original", considering the stance of the traditional critique, represented here by the Mauricio Santana Dias´ appreciation to the translation of Dante Alighieri´s Divina Comedia, done by Italo Eugenio Mauro; Carlos Heitor Cony´s appreciation to the translation of Edgar Allan Poe´s "The raven", done by Milton Amado; some exemplary cases where the translation and "original" get confused, like the translations did by Charles Baudelaire for Poe´s stories, highlighting "Morella", and Daniel Gagnon´s works Une fille a marie and The daughter to marriage; the question of copyrights and Jacques Derrida´s argument about translation and "original" contained in "Des Tours de Babel", text that retakes the classic "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers", by Walter Benjamin. Based on the discourse analysis, the deconstruction and post-colonial concepts of translation, our objective was to show that the translated works can not be found, necessarily, on a lower level in terms of literary quality in relation to the "original" in many cases, when what we call "formal elements of distinction" are not present, it is not possible to distinguish "original" and translation. Therefore we conclude from the presumption that literary inferiority would be a characteristic of translation premise that the traditional critique has been supported to justify its negative evaluations of the translation does not make any sense.
literary translation; deconstruction; post-colonialism