post-colonial_translation

Harold ode Campos’ poetics of transcreation 105
Having contextualized the discourse on Antropofagia associated with
Haroldo de Campos himself, as well as his subscription to Pound’s view of
translation as criticism and recreation, it remains to be seen how he combines
these two sources of nourishment to advance his poetics of transcreation
and more specifically his view of translation as transtextualization. In the
trajectory, Goethe, one who ‘carnivalizes Hell and carnalizes Heaven’ (de
Campos 1997: 29), and Benjamin will be seen to be further presences he
anthropophagically absorbs and transforms.
ON ‘TRANSPARADISATIONS’ AND
‘TRANSLUCIFERATIONS’
Heavenly and daemonic. Transculturating the sacred and the diabolic.
Irreverent and reverent. Moving beyond essentialist binarisms, Haroldo
de Campos aportuguesa the Hebrew language and hebraiza the
Portuguese language. These bilateral movements in his translation of
the Hebrew Bible point to the double dialectics that informs
Antropofagia inasmuch as they highlight the ontological nationalism
he had advanced, one that homologizes and, at the same time, inscribes
difference in tradition. The Hebrew Bible, he explains, presents a
proverbial and aphorismatic style where the solemn and the colloquial
intermingle in a markedly poetic form. Subscribing to Benjamin’s view
that fidelity relates to the signifying form beyond the transmission of a
communicative content, he further stresses the resources he used
specifically from Brazilian Portuguese. Focusing on the fact that the
literary emergence of Brazilian Portuguese occurred during the Baroque,
he argues that the transposed language counteracted the constraints of
a European and long-standing rationalist tradition, despite all the efforts
of the purists; the language was shaken by the subversion of speech, of
orality in its several registers, not to mention several lexical inventions;
it is a plastic idiom that opens its sounds and its syntax to the fertilizing
impact of the foreign language. In order to render the original’s interplay
of the oracular and the familiar/colloquial whereby the voice of God
partakes with that of man, he transtextualizes the Hebrew text into the
corresponding existing tradition of the Brazilian writer Guimarães
Rosa, as in Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands,)
or João Cabral de Melo Neto, Autos (Plays), who have, in their turn,
fed on the popular oral tradition together with innovation and
revitalization of the arcane in popular speech (1981b: 31–5).
Transilluminations of Dante’s Paradise and transorchestrations of the
Hebrew Bible coexist with a movement towards a countersublime, the