post-colonial_translation

Harold ode Campos’ poetics of transcreation 109
liberating the translator from servitude. But while subscribing to
Benjamin’s theory, in itself liberating, he also subverts and departs from
it. If Benjamin casts the translator’s task in an angelical light, that of
liberating the pure language, de Campos highlights the satanic import
of it, for ‘every translation that refuses submissively to serve a content,
which refuses the tyranny of a pre-ordered Logos, breaks with the
metaphysical closure of presence (as Derrida would say)’, is ‘a satanic
enterprise’ (de Campos 1981a: 180). The transformation of an angelic
into a satanic theory can also be understood by recalling de Campos’
remarks on the ‘critical devouring of the universal critical 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’ (de Campos 1986: 44). There is a further point in
which he departs from Benjamin’s angelical theory: teleogy for Benjamin
is related to the recovery of the pre-Babelic harmony of the pure
language; teleology for de Campos has to do with the turbulence of
asserting the difference. Anyway, if translation is a form, and that is
where he subscribes to Benjamin’s liberating views on translation, there
is nothing more alien to it than submission, for translation implies fidelity
not so much to the original, but to another form. The pragmatics of
translation, he claims, is to translate a form, the Art des Meinens,
‘rewriting it . . . in the translator’s language in order to get to the
transcreated poem as an isomorphic re-project of the originating poem’
(de Campos 1981a: 181).
The question of mimesis in translation is also taken up. Translation
does not copy or reproduce, but ‘virtualizes the notion of mimesis not
as a theory of copy . . . but as the production of difference in sameness’
(ibid.: 183). ‘Transcreation’, de Campos claims, is a radical translation
praxis. To transcreate is not to try to reproduce the original’s form
understood as a sound pattern, but to appropriate the translator’s
contemporaries’ best poetry, to use the local existing tradition (ibid.:
185). As such, one could infer that for him, to transcreate means also
nourishment from local sources, nourishment that, at the same time,
limits the universality of the original and inscribes the difference.
Translation is a reading of the universal tradition, he claims, but, at the
same time, of the local literary production, because if the translator
does not have a stock of the best poetry of his time, he cannot reshape
synchronically and diachronically the best poetry of the past (ibid.: 185).
De Campos’ own examples of appropriation of the local tradition are
many. We have already mentioned his appropriation of João Cabral de
Melo Neto’s diction in Morte e Vida Severina to translate the Burial