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Abstract
Before his death in 2003, Brazilian poet, critic and translator Haroldo de Campos had produced a robust body of work on translation theory, which consistently addressed the problem of subordination of target literatures to their source. His audacious concept of ‘transcreation’ championed that translation should be a creative re-invention instead of a mere reproduction of texts. In this article I demonstrate that De Campos’s translation theory subverts the hierarchical categories and values that have structured the field of world literature. Positioning himself as an intellectual from an ‘ex-centric’ literary culture, situated outside of the centers of global circulation, De Campos critiqued the unequal weight usually assigned to translated and original texts, author and translator, established and ascending traditions. His theory effectively illustrates how power differentials between diverse literary contexts affect the ways in which world literature is conceived. I argue that De Campos’s response to the standing inequality that characterizes translational exchanges involved a literary solution. As a creative act in its own right, imbued with the values of originality and difference, transcreation offered an aesthetic answer to the problems of authenticity, influence and literary dependence.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the following people: Ryan Long, Marcelo Lotufo and Lauren Papalia for their excellent insights.
Notes
1. Marcelo Tapia and Thelma Médici Nóbrega recently collected Campos’s essays and studies in the book ‘Transcriação’ (Campos 2013). It covers publications dating from the 1960s to the 1990s and it is, so far, one of the most comprehensive anthologies of Campos’s translation theory.
2. In the article ‘Da Razão Antropofágia’ [translated as ‘The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under the Sign of Devoration’], and later in his book O Sequestro do Barroco na ‘Formação da Literatura Brasileira’ [The Sequestration of the Baroque in the ‘Formation of Brazilian Literature’], Campos took issue with Antonio Candido’s earlier portrayal of Brazilian literature as a ‘secondary branch’ of the European tradition. For Campos, this perspective was based on a methodological mistake that conceptualized history in a linear, continuous and evolutionary fashion, which occluded the contributions of authors and aesthetic currents, such as the Brazilian Baroque, to the development of world literature.
3. Other examples of the articulation between Latin American literature and world literature may be found in the collection of critical studies, Latin America in Its Literature, sponsored by UNESCO in the 1970s and published in Spanish, Portuguese, English.
4. As Mariano Siskind also noticed, there have been some exceptions in the field of Latin American intellectual production. He cites the book América Latina en La ‘Literatura Mundial’, in which Latin Americanist scholars such as Efraín Kristal, Hugo Achúgar, and Mabel Moraña (among others) bring in a critical perspective to the discussion of Latin America’s place in world literature.
5. For further readings on Concrete Poetry, consult Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry Since Modernism (1996) by Charles A. Perrone, especially chapter 2 and 6; and Poesia Concreta Brasileira: As Vanguardas na Encruzilhada Modernista [Brazilian Concrete Poetry: The Avant-Gardes in the Modernist Crossroad] (2005) by Gonzalo Moisés Aguilar.
6. In the article ‘From Isomorphism to Cannibalism: The Evolution of Haroldo de Campos’s Translation Concepts’ Odile Cisneros discussed the relations between the Concrete Poetry Movement and Campos’s theory of translation, emphasizing how the practice of translation became ‘ their [Concrete Poets] ‘laboratory’ for writing and at the same time their source for theoretical reflection on translation’ (2012, 17).
7. The ‘mode of intention’ is mostly related to the linguistic and structural field rather than to the semantic one.
8. References to Walter Benjamin’s essay abound in Campos’s work, and can be traced back to his article of 1967, ‘A Palavra Vermelha de Holderlin’ [‘Holderlin’s Red Word’], collected in the book A Arte no Horizonte do Provável e Outros Ensaios [The Work of Art in the Horizon of the Probable and Other Essays] (1969). He explored Benjamin’s concepts more directly in his essay ‘Para Além do Princípio da Saudade: A Teoria Benjaminiana da Tradução’ [Beyond the Principle of Longing: Benjamin’s Theory of Translation] (1984), and in ‘O que é Mais Importante: A Escrita ou o Escrito?: A Teoria da Linguagem em Walter Benjamin’ [What is more Important: the Writing or the Written?: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Translation] (1992); he also offers a very didactic review of his own approach to Benjamin in ‘Da Transcriação: Poética e Semiótica da Operação Tradutora’ [Transcreation: Poetics and Semiotics of the Translation Operation] (1985); all three texts are included in Tápia and Nóbrega’s collection.
9. It is important to note that plagiotropy belongs to the group of neologisms (where we also find the idea of isomorphism and ‘paramorphism’ respectively referring to an analogy of forms and parody or parallelism) that Campos creates to define translation as a ‘metalinguistic operation’. Edwin Gentzler affirms that this is a notion which ‘he developed in the 1960s during his work on Oswald de Andrade and expanded upon in 1978 while teaching at Yale’ (88). See also Vieira (Citation1999, 3).
10. According to Walter Mignolo, scholarly discourses derive meaning not only from their specific subject matter, their ‘context of description’ and targeted audience, but also from their ‘locus of enunciation’, that is, the geopolitical context in which knowledge is produced and meaning is constructed (2003, 5).
11. Prendergast makes this difference clear when he affirms that, if for central countries promoting foreign literatures may be a path to consolidate cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and the values associated with them, for peripheral authors international exposition may be a matter of ‘sheer survival’ (2001,102).
12. For a further analysis on the problem of universalism in world literature, see the work of Pascale Casanova (2003).
13. Campos takes the idea from Oswald de Andrade, who, in the ‘Manifesto Pau-Brasil’ [‘Brazil Wood Manifesto’], calls for an export poetry defined as ‘a rally cry against import poetry’.
14. For recent perspectives on ‘anthropophagia’ see the 2013 issue of the journal Ipotesi: Revista de Estudos Literários 17(1).
15. Campos’s preoccupation with asserting the value of peripheral literatures vis-à-vis canonical traditions is, in my view, a constitutive element of his literary politics, and, thus, a constant feature of his intellectual and translational project. As a matter of fact, Campos himself reminds his readers in the aforementioned text that: ‘The question of the national and the universal (especially the European) elements in Latin-American culture, a question which involves more specific topics, such as the relationship between a universal cultural heritage and distinctive local elements, or, even more precisely, the possibility of an experimental literature, an avant-garde, in an underdeveloped country, is one I first addressed in an article in 1962’ (42).
16. The term ‘deconstruction’ is a reference to Jacques Derrida’s work, which De Campos read widely and incorporated in his texts starting in the 1980s (an example is the essay ‘Paul Valéry e a Poética da Tradução’ [‘Paul Valéry and the Poetics of Translation’] from 1985. Derrida wrote a brief text about Haroldo de Campos, translated by Else R. P. Vieira as ‘Coasts, Third Banks, Encounters’.
17. Campos’s theory, to some extent, goes in the opposite direction to the current perspective sustained by Casanova, who sees the world of letters as characterized by ‘the opposition between the great national literary spaces, which are also the oldest – and accordingly, the best endowed – and those literary spaces that have more recently appeared and that are poor by comparison’ (83). He does not deny the power of established traditions and, in fact, as discussed above, uses translation as a tool for aesthetic diversification of younger traditions; however, he firmly rejected the notion that peripheral literatures are dependent upon central ones.
18. In the essay ‘Da Tradução como Criação e como Crítica’, Campos cites verbatim Pound’s definition of paideuma: ‘The ordering of knowledge so that the next man (or generation) can most readily find the live part of it, and waste the least possible time among obsolete issues’ (as quoted in Campos [1962] 2013, 6). Pound’s original text, as well as his further conceptualization of paideuma, can be found in Literary Essays by Ezra CitationPound (1954).
19. In ‘Da Tradução como Criação e Como Crítica’, Campos affirms that the construction of the paideuma happened concomitantly with the development of the Concrete Poetry: ‘When the concrete poets of São Paulo put forth a taskforce to reformulate Brazilian poetry […] through their activities of theorization and creation, they dedicated themselves to a continuous task of translation. In doing so, they had in mind the didactics stemming from Pound’s theory and practice of translation’ ([1962] 2013, 13; my translation).
20. He transcreated parts of the Ecclesiastes in his book Qohélet/O que Sabe: Eclesiastes (1991).
21. Haroldo de Campos employed the term ‘dialogic’ and ‘dialogism’, coined by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, to discuss the relationship that Oswald de Andrade’s concept of anthropophagia establishes between the national and the universal: ‘I believe that in Brazil, with Oswald de Andrade’s ‘antropofagia’, we get a strong need to consider the national element in dialogical and dialectic relationship with universal’ ( [1981] 1986, 43–44).
22. In his translation notes, De Campos cites, for example, the combination of the word flâmula [flame] with irrompe [burst], generating the term ‘flâmula-irrompe’, with which he seeks to ‘recuperate in our language, the proliferation of composites on the German text (feuerstrom, siedequalm, hintergrund, flammestadt)’ (1981, 194).
23. Although the book was published in 1981, the letters included in the publication attest that Campos had started the translation earlier in the 1970s.
24. In 1968 Octávio Paz was widely known outside of Mexico, but none of his books had been introduced to the Brazilian public. His work would not be translated until 1972, when Haroldo de Campos published Constelação.
25. Campos used this term in his text ‘Tradition, Translation, Transculturation: the Ex-Centric Point of View’, published originally in 1997. I believe that the term amasses the ideas that he elaborated throughout the years about the place of peripheral literatures in relation to the world canon.