Harvesting new realities in Portugal: literary retranslation and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

Retranslation – in this case literary – is a practice that, despite existing for centuries, only started to be discussed in Translation Studies in the 1990s. Indeed, its very definition has proved problematic. With the purpose of contributing to the debate on this subject, this article aims to explore the reasons behind the retranslation of literary works, showing at the same time how it can be observed in practice. To achieve this, a comparison will be made of two Portuguese translations of J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951a): one of them by João Palma Ferreira (1962), written during the Estado Novo regime, and the other by José Lima (2005), produced in more recent democratic Portugal. The differences found illustrate the idea that when a country goes through several transformations at the sociopolitical and cultural level, translations are susceptible to change too.