post-colonial_translation

104 Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira
playful contradiction of the legend of the egg of Columbus (ibid.). It is
in the Brazilian Baroque, when the ‘rule of anthropophagy’ develops,
deconstructing the logocentrism inherited from the West (ibid.: 49),
that he pinpoints the first practitioner of Anthropophagous translation,
Gregório de Matos, in whose translation of Gôngora, he argues, one
finds a distinctive sign of alterity in the gaps of a universal code (ibid.:
48). But he claims in the essay ‘Translation as Creation and Criticism’
(1992: 38) that the first actual theorist of translation, and more
specifically of creative translation, is the pre-Romantic Manuel Odorico
Mendes. In his translation of the Odyssey, Odorico Mendes synthesized
12,106 lines into 9,302, maybe to accommodate in pentameters
Homer’s hexameters, or to avoid the monotony of transposing the sound
effects typical of a language with declensions to an analytical one. He
further made up compound words in Portuguese to translate Homer’s
metaphors; ‘anthropophagically’, he interpolated lines from other poets
such as Camões into Homer (1992: 38–9).
Haroldo de Campos points out that the anti-normative tradition in
Brazilian contemporary poetry informs the Concretist movement,
which challenges the universal code and appropriates and reclaims the
patrimony of a peripheral literature, criticizing and ‘chewing over’ a
poetics (de Campos 1986: 51). With the attempt of São Paulo’s
Concretist poets of the 1950s (principally the de Campos brothers and
Décio Pignatari) to theorize and create a Brazilian poetics, there emerged
a continuous translation activity of re/ transcreation also linked to Ezra
Pound and his view of translation as criticism; while translating the
Cantos themselves, they nourished on and applied Pound’s own criteria
for creative translation (1992: 42). A series of translations followed –
of e.e. cummings, the German avant-garde, Japanese haikus, Dante,
Joyce – whose ‘fragile and apparently unreachable beauty’ had its
entrails dissected and revitalized into the body of a foreign language
and poetics (1992: 43). The translation of creative texts, de Campos
argues, is always recreation or parallel creation, the opposite of a literal
translation, but always reciprocal; an operation in which it is not only
the meaning that is translated but the sign itself in all its corporeality
(sound properties, visual imagetics, all that makes up the iconicity of
the aesthetic sign) (1992: 35). With Pound, translation is seen as
criticism, insofar as it attempts theoretically to anticipate creation, it
chooses, it eliminates repetitions, it organizes knowledge in such a way
that the next generation may find only the still living part. Pound’s wellknown
‘Make it new’ is thus recast by de Campos as the revitalization
of the past via translation (1992: 36).