post-colonial_translation

108 Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira
allegory and the principle of synchrony that reconstitutes the tradition
of the oppressed, in contradistinction to the official historiography of
the winners (1981a: 127). Yet, de Campos claims, Benjamin’s
theorization of allegoric discourse comes close to Bakhtin’s polyphony
(de Campos 1981a: 132) as well as to carnivalization, in that all of them
break with the paradigm of purity, of the absolute. There is no more
place for tranquillizing interpretations: ‘We are in an era that has already
been called postmodern but that could be better defined as post-utopian.
The non-place of u-topia . . . . To a poly-topia of power corresponds, in
each case . . . a tropology of monological discourse, of the monolithic
creed: of the only word and of the final word’ (ibid.: 176–7). And he
concludes his section on the analyses of Faust by emphasizing that the
Bakhtinian logos is an important tool of analysis insofar as it opposed
the utopia of monological truth to the dialogical truth of utopia, whereby
utopia loses its claim to totality and manifests itself in its ambivalence
and ambiguity (ibid.: 177).
Cannibalism, understood as a break with monological truth as well
as a form of nourishment, is to inform the third main section of the
paratext, in fact a postscriptum, wherein de Campos actually theorizes
translation. What the two first sections have in common with the third
is that they present reverse or non-conventional readings of Goethe
and of translation. For the reverse reading of translation, he relies both
on Antropofagia and on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’.
His theorization presented in the third part of the paratext is called
‘Transluciferação Mefistofáustica’ (‘Mephistofaustic
Transluciferation’), a transformation of Faust’s Lucifer, a title that
connects both to cannibalism and to the work of Benjamin.
‘Transluciferação Mefistofáustica’, he explains, is what translation sets
out to do: as a ‘parricidal dis-memory’ it ‘intends to erase the origin, to
obliterate the original’ (ibid.: 209); yet, recalling my initial remarks on
the use of the hyphen that separates and unites, the very thrust of
translating implies a gesture of acknowledgement. It is further apparent
that the metaphors for his title are drawn from the very title he is
translating. The use of the text one is translating as a source of
nourishment for one’s theorization gives a further cannibalistic
dimension to de Campos’ work, a point that de Souza has made, while
also calling attention to the number of expressions used throughout
the text to exemplify the satanic feature of the translator’s task:
‘luciferian translation’, ‘a satanic enterprise’ (de Souza 1986: 183).
The irony of the metaphor is that de Campos had been describing
Benjamin’s ‘angelical’ theory of translation, emphasizing its effect of