post-colonial_translation

102 Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira
between moral artist and immortal star is, for Santiago, the
conventional role of the Latin American artist; a new critical discourse
stresses difference, not debt and imitation, as the only critical value.
And he concludes that, while submission may be a form of behaviour,
transgression becomes the form of expression (ibid.: 20–7).
HAROLDO DE CAMPOS ON ANTHROPOPHAGY
In this climate of re-evaluation and rereading of the digestive metaphor,
Haroldo de Campos himself emerges, from the 1960s, as the creator of a
discourse around Antropofagia with the publication of Oswald de Andrade
– Trechos escolhidos (Oswald de Andrade – Selected Passages) (1967) and,
in the 1970s, of Morfologia do Macunaíma (Morphology of Macunaíma)
(1973), writing that moves away from economic dependence as a referent
towards a view of Antropofagia as a critical, poetic and ideological
operation. This section, specifically regarding his critical discourse and his
views of translation as criticism associable with Antropofagia, focuses on
‘Da Tradução como Criação e como Crítica’ (‘On Translation as Creation
and Criticism’) (first published in 1963). 3
In the early 1960s de Campos had started meditating on the
possibility of an experimental and avant-garde literature in an
underdeveloped culture as a discussion not dissociable from the
tension in Latin America between the world’s cultural legacy and local
specificities (de Campos 1986: 42). The timing, of course, was not
accidental. For it was precisely at this juncture that the term ‘Third
World’ was spawned with increasing regularity but decreasing
recognition of crucial differentialities. As Cold War tensions climaxed,
binary conceptions dominated more than ever, paradoxically
highlighting the space between West and East but homogenizing the
many cultures not incorporable into such easy schemata so that ‘Third
World’ became reified as one. Plurality, as a political and cultural
possibility, virtually receded in Latin America, for instance, after the
Cuba missile crisis of 1962. And the impact of such reductivities was
also felt culturally and artistically.
Tracing the meanders of this path, it is in Octavio Paz that de Campos
initially finds an illuminating contention, namely, that the notion of
underdevelopment is an offshoot of the culturally reductionist idea of
economic progress not readily associable with artistic experience. He
thus advances the need to consider the national element in a dialogical
relationship with the universal (ibid.: 43–4). Hence his reading of
Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagy as follows: