post-colonial_translation

Harold ode Campos’ poetics of transcreation 111
that imitators are inferior to the things they copy, they are always in the
vanguard’ (ibid.: xix).
At the very least, Schwarz might be said to be downplaying the
Paz–de Campos challenge to reductivism regarding the role of
economics in artistic and cultural expression which I have already
discussed. Most recently, Bernard McGuirk, in his Latin American
Literature: Symptoms, Risks and Strategies of Post-Structuralist
Criticism (1997), further interrogates Schwarz regarding the latter’s
claim that ‘the key trick played by the concretists, always concerned
to organize Brazilian and world literature so that it culminates in
them, is a tendency which sets up a confusion between theory and
self-advertisement’ (Schwarz 1992: 191–5). McGuirk asks: ‘Are we
to be locked again into the long familiar tensions of a Nietzche–
Marx binary’ (McGuirk 1997: 8–9). His own proposal is pertinent
not only to his primary purpose of ‘locating inequality’ in critical
appropriations of Latin American literatures and cultures but also
to the very questions of translation raised by Haroldo de Campos:
How, then, is the encounter with the other to be represented . . . Just
as I have made the claim for overlapping (or, to re-use a by now familiar
Brazilian metaphor, mutually feeding) critical discourses, I would argue,
too, that the Levinasian focus I have chosen is but one mode whereby
cultures and societies might be theorized differently. Rather than the
utopian horizontal of materialism, or the religious verticality of
transcendentalism, a trans-jectory of movement both across frontiers
and through the uplifts of self in other, other in self, becomes operative.
Through such translation the writing self is to be located in writing
others – multi-epigraphically, mosaically.
(ibid.: 16–17)
Readers everywhere will expect no definitive answers regarding such
polemics, but it is my contention that the specifically Brazilian
experience demonstrably exemplifies the necessity of the discursive
dislocatability of all translations.
Notes
1 For the present essay, I acknowledge the recent invaluable assistance of
Haroldo de Campos himself. Space constraints do not allow me to do
justice to his work – a lifetime dedicated to literature, criticism, translation
as an art, in a total of forty books. For an extended study of his brother
Augusto de Campos’ specific relation to Antropofagia and increasing
move towards visual translation see Vieira 1997.