post-colonial_translation

106 Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira
daemonization of translation apparent in the ‘bad savage’s’ nourishment
from Goethe in the act of translating him. The interweaving of literatures,
the coexistence of several discourses, a reevaluation of the axiology of
mimesis, a break with the hierarchy between original and translation, and
so on, are elements that are explicitly brought into a synthesis in de Campos’
paratext to his translation of Faustus (Faust) in 1979 (published in 1981).
The title of the work, unlike conventionally translated books, is not Faustus
but Deus e o Diabo no Fausto de Goethe (God and the Devil in Goethe’s
Faust), which asserts the cannibalistic/dialogical principle from the start,
because, for the Brazilian contemporary reader, the nourishment from
Glauber Rocha’s film Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (God and the Devil
in the Land of the Sun) is all too obvious. The intertext in the very title
suggests that the receiving culture will interweave and transform the original
one, which is confirmed later, as we shall see, throughout the exposition of
de Campos’ translational project. Anyway, from the very title we can say
that translation is no longer a one-way flow from the source to the target
culture, but a two-way transcultural enterprise. The cover iconography
further asserts the autonomy of the translator/recreator while
problematizing the question of authorship in translation; the visibility of
de Campos’ signature on the cover contrasts with Goethe’s less conspicuous
signature which only appears on the third page. It is also worth highlighting
that, at the end of the book, the section ‘Works by the Author’ actually lists
de Campos’ work, which suggests the articulation of a space conventionally
deemed marginal or even irrelevant as compared to the original author’s
centrality – that is, stresses the translator’s own production.
Moving from the cover iconography to the main bulk of the
paraMephistophelian Écriture’), de Campos presents his concept of
‘plagiatext, in the first section called ‘A Escritura Mefistofélica’ (‘The tropy’,
developed as early as 1966. His claim is that Goethe’s Faustus, the first
one, relies a good deal on parody in the etymological meaning of ‘parallel
canto’ and, as such, marks a rereading of the Faustian tradition – the
intertexts being various, ranging from the Bible to Shakespeare. Goethe is
quoted verbatim in his defence of the accusation of plagiarism on the
grounds that one can only produce great works by appropriating others’
treasures, as also is Pound with the view that great poets pile up all the
things they can claim, borrow or steal from their forerunners and
contemporaries and light their own light at the top of the mountain (de
Campos 1981a: 74).
Plagiotropy, for de Campos, who stresses the etymology of ‘plagios’
as ‘oblique’, ‘transverse’, means the translation of tradition. Semiotically
speaking, it is an unlimited semiosis as found in Pierce and Eco, and has