post-colonial_translation

Chapter 5
Liberating Calibans
Readings of Antropofagia and
Haroldo de Campos’ poetics of
transcreation
Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira
Creative translation . . . this parricidal dis-memory
(Haroldo de Campos 1981a: 209)
Translation as transfusion. Of blood. Ironically, we could talk of
vampirization, thinking now of the translator’s nourishment.
(Haroldo de Campos 1981a: 208)
As with any rich offering, satisfaction can be accompanied by surfeit
or excess. Such may be the case for the world’s digestion of the Brazilianderived
metaphor of anthropophagy. 1 From its avant-garde emergence
in the 1920s, within the context of several manifestos presenting
alternatives to a still persistent mental colonialism after 100 years of
political independence for Brazil, Antropofagia has developed into a
very specific national experimentalism, a poetics of translation, an
ideological operation as well as a critical discourse theorizing the relation
between Brazil and external influences, increasingly moving away from
essentialist confrontations towards a bilateral appropriation of sources
and the contamination of colonial/hegemonic univocality. Disrupting
dichotomous views of source and target, Antropofagia and its
application to translation entails a double dialectical dimension with
political ingredients; it unsettles the primacy of origin, recast both as
donor and receiver of forms, and advances the role of the receiver as a
giver in its own right, further pluralizing (in)fidelity. Yet, in the last few
years, throughout the world, outside the setting of its own local cuisine,
Antropofagia has become a too quickly swallowed body of thought, a
word devoured literally and not digested as a complex metaphor
undergoing metamorphoses in different contexts and critical