Coletânea de contos folclóricos tradicionais da Guiné-Bissau: uma tradução cultural de contos da tradição oral guineense

Abstract

This undergraduate thesis presents a collection of 25 traditional tales from Guinea-Bissau, most of them coming from the oral culture of my country, told and retold at family gatherings, friends and schools. Some of them I met in my first years of study. My personal motivation for doing this work was precisely the desire to gather and immortalize in written language a literature with a strong oral tradition in my country, but with few written records either in books or on the internet. Academically, it was also important to translate stories from sister languages, whose proximity is more apparent than true when we consider words, expressions and syntactic and semantic uses. Cultural translation was also a great challenge and motivation and, for this reason, at the end of each story, I present a glossary with Guinean terms and expressions that are difficult to infer from the context. The collection of short stories began in October 2022 and concluded in November 2023. Translations were made as the short stories were obtained. Most of the sources are from works carried out at the Institute of Humanities and Letters of Malês, University of Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony. São Francisco do Conde, in Bahia. In fact, Malês (from Yoruba, imalê), it is pertinent to explain, was the name with which Muslim slaves were called in the 19th century. I used, among others, the monograph by Aramatu Injai (2019) and Nembali Mané (2021). The result of the research is now presented in Portuguese and opens up several perspectives, one of which is that it be used in Afro-Brazilian history and culture classes, as recommended by the BNCC.