post-colonial_translation

Harold ode Campos’ poetics of transcreation 97
offer a vanguardist poetics of translation as textual revitalization while
pointing to the Anthropophagic dimension of feeding on the very text
he is translating to derive his metalanguage. ‘Re’ and ‘trans’ are
recurrent prefixes that locate translation at a remove from
monological truth in the direction of a transformative recreation of
inherited tradition. Translation is further theorized as ‘uma
desmemória parricida’ / ‘a parricidal dis-memory’ (de Campos 1981a:
209). Arguing with Foucault that ‘knowledge is not made for
understanding; it is made for cutting’ (Foucault 1986: 88), my own
anthropophagic hyphenation of ‘dis-memory’, as I rendered
‘desmemória’ into English, highlights the dual positionality of de
Campos’ vanguardist theory of translation in relation to tradition: a
hyphen that both separates and unites inasmuch as ‘dis-memory’
speaks of a translation project which unleashes the epistemological
challenge of discontinuity but reunites threads into a new fabric; a
translation project which murders the father, means in his absence
yet reveres him by creating a continued existence for him in a different
corporeality. Also in the space of ‘trans’ is the notion of ‘translation
as transfusion of blood’ (de Campos 1981 a: 208) – a more
conspicuously anthropophagic metaphor that moves translation
beyond the dichotomy source/target and sites original and translation
in a third dimension, where each is both a donor and a receiver – a
dual trajectory that, again, points to the specificity of the digestive
metaphor in Brazilian culture we shall briefly discuss.
‘TUPI OR NOT TUPI, THAT IS THE
QUESTION’
Tupi, to be. In the famous line from Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto
Antropófago of the 1920s, both ‘Tupi’ and ‘to be’ read the same, except
for a minor phonological change: in ‘to be’ the bilabial consonant is
aspirated and voiced whereas in ‘Tupi’ it is non-aspirated and voiceless.
Such a voicelessness pronounces difference and inscribes a colonial
perspective into the Shakespearean intertext and, for that matter, to
the Western canon. Since the Tupis were a tribe inhabiting Brazil at the
time of the discovery, the colonial dilemma is not one informed by
Christian scruples as to what may come after death, but has to do with
the duality, plurality of the origin and, accordingly, of the cultural
identity of Brazil, both European and Tupi, both civilized and native,
both Christian and magic; a culture that grew out of the juxtaposition
of not two but many civilizations and which carries to this day the