post-colonial_translation

96 Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira
perspectives. Antropofagia, which, in Haroldo de Campos’ view, is a
sign of the polyphonic identity of Brazil, rings not a note of furious
aggression but rather one of irreverently amorous devouring. Deriving
from a non-Eurocentric way of conceiving spiritual force as inseparable
from matter, related to the local natives’ animism, it ultimately entails
a tribute to the other’s strength that one wishes to have combined with
one’s own for greater vitality. While undercutting the plenitude of any
origin as the only source of strength, it makes an incision and a conjoining
to unite the blood and marrow of the one with the other.
Proceeding with culinary care, this essay follows de Campos’ poetics
of transcreation from the 1960s to the present, with specific reference
to the digestive metaphor in Brazil. We shall discuss the critical discourse
on Antropofagia, created by de Campos himself and seen to operate in
various segments of Brazilian culture which, in different ways, have
appropriated and exploited the digestive metaphor. As I contextualize
the anthropophagous play of permanence through discontinuity and
difference, both in critical discourse and in translation metalanguage,
two different moments of enunciation of subaltern subjectivities (à la
Spivak) will be considered: first in the 1920s with Oswald de Andrade
and again from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Referring to the tension
between the national identity of a peripheral post-colonial culture and
incoming contributions from hegemonic ones, I argue with Johnson
that cannibalism, initially an irreverent verbal weapon and a form of
resistance in the Manifesto Antropófago (Anthropophagous Manifesto)
of the 1920s, re-emerges in the 1960s and 1970s as both a metaphor
and a philosophy of culture (Johnson 1987: 42). The political dimension
of Antropofagia will be seen to have been broached by de Campos,
among others, in his view of nationalism ‘as a dialogical movement of
difference . . . the rupture instead of the linear course; historiography
as the seismic graph of fragmentation, rather than the tautological
homologation of the homogeneous’ (de Campos 1981b English version
1986: 45). 2
Translation as ‘verse making’, ‘reinvention’, a ‘project of recreation’
(in the 1960s), ‘translumination’ and ‘transparadisation’ (stemming
from his translation of Dante), as ‘transtextualization’, as
‘transcreation’, as ‘transluciferation’ (stemming from his translation
of Goethe’s Faust), as ‘transhelenization’ (as from his translation of
the Iliad of Homer), as ‘poetic reorchestration’ (from his rendering
of the Hebrew Bible into Brazilian Portuguese), as ‘reimagination’
(from his transcreation of classical Chinese poetry into Portuguese)
are but some of the neologisms coined by Haroldo de Campos that