post-colonial_translation

Harold ode Campos’ poetics of transcreation 103
the thought of critical devouring of the universal cultural heritage,
formulated not from the insipid, resigned perspective of the ‘noble
savage’ . . . but from the point of view of the ‘bad savage’, devourer
of whites – the cannibal. The latter view does not involve a
submission (an indoctrination), but a transculturation, or, better,
a ‘transvalorization’: a critical view of History as a negative
function (in Nietzsche’s sense of the term), capable of
appropriation and of expropriation, de-hierachization,
deconstruction. Any past which is an ‘other’ for us deserves to be
negated. We could say that it deserves to be eaten, devoured. With
this clarification and specification: the cannibal was a polemicist
(from the Greek polemos, meaning struggle or combat) but he
was also an ‘anthologist’: he devoured only the enemies he
considered strong, to take from them the marrow and protein to
fortify and renew his own natural energies.
(ibid.: 44)
Opposing the view of an ontological nationalism, which seeks to locate
the origin of a national logos, considered as a point, he advances a
counterpoint, a modal, differential nationalism as a dialogical
movement of difference: ‘the dis-character, instead of the character,
the rupture instead of the linear course; historiography as the seismic
graph of fragmentation’, involving the novel notion of tradition as a
counter to the prestigious canon (ibid.: 45). It is worth noting his
‘culinary care’ in pointing out a bilateral flow in the digestive metaphor
while tracing the manifestation of what he calls modal nationalism to
the nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis: ‘The great
and unclassifiable Machado, swallower of Sterne and of innumerable
others (he gives us the metaphor of the head as a ruminator’s stomach,
where . . . all suggestions, after being broken down and mixed, are
prepared for a new remastication, a complicated chemistry in which it
is no longer possible to distinguish the assimilating organism) from these
assimilated material ’(ibid.: 45).
Refusing the essentialist metaphor of a gradual, harmonious natural
evolution associated with the ontological view of nationalism and
questioning logocentric questions of origin, de Campos sees literature
emerging in colonial Brazil as ‘the non-origin’, as an obstacle, as ‘the
non-infancy’. The etymology of infans as one who does not speak
reverberates in his argument: born adults, Brazilians had to speak the
elaborate international rhetorical code of the Baroque, articulated as
difference (ibid.: 47). ‘A partogenesis without an ontological egg’ is his