post-colonial_translation

110 Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira
Chorus. Another example he provides is the use of Sousândrade to
translate the German compound words that are alien to Portuguese
and are conventionally given analytical translations. At the same time,
the use of neologisms after Sousândrade brings de Campos close to
Panwitz (a debt he acknowledges) when he Germanizes the Portuguese
language to broaden its creativity potential (ibid.: 194, 202).
Translation, as such, in his terms, is a ‘parallel canto’, a dialogue
not only with the original’s voice, but with other textual voices, or,
as he encapsulates it, ‘Translation: transtextualization’ (ibid.: 191,
200). Translation as transtextualization or transcreation
demythicizes the ideology of fidelity. If translation transtextualizes,
it is no longer a one-way flow, and de Campos concludes his text
with two anthropophagic metaphors. One is ‘transluciferation’,
which closes the text and provides its title; the other brings us back
to the anthropophagic double dialectics of receiving and giving
highlighted in this chapter’s epigraph: ‘Translation as transfusion.
Of Blood’ (ibid.: 208).
Translation that unsettles the single reference, the logocentric tyranny
of the original, translation that has the devilish dimension of usurpation
(de Campos 1997: 33–59); translation that disturbs linear flows and
power hierarchies – daemonic dimensions that coexist with the a priori
gesture of tribute to the other inherent in translating and the giving of
one’s own vitality to the other. Transcreation – the poetics that disrupts
the primacy of the one model – a rupture and a recourse to the one and
the other. Translation can be servitude, translation can also be freedom
– for me, that very liberating transhistoricization of T.S. Eliot’s The
Four Quartets which might sign off but can never close this meditation.
By way of conclusion, however, I must stress that any discussion of
Antropofagia, in the post-theoretical era, would be incomplete without
my drawing attention to the major critique of it, namely that of Roberto
Schwarz. Long-standing ideological binaries are entailed. As soon as
the base–superstructure relationship is deemed to be threatened by
Anthropophagy’s locating translation ‘at a remove from monological
truth’, then corrective responses are both inevitable and predictable.
For readers of English, the easiest access to the counter-position may
be found in ‘Marco Histórico’ (‘A Historic Landmark’), of 1985, in
Misplaced Ideas (Schwarz 1992: 187–96). The translator is John
Gledson and his own, materialist, gloss is as self-explanatorily polarizing
as it is eloquent: ‘One can feel his [Schwarz’s] anger at those who try to
argue . . . that things are better because they are worse: because Brazilians
have always imitated, but now are told that there is no reason to think