Haroldo de Campos: The Ethics and Poetics of Transcreation
Haroldo de Campos: The Ethics and Poetics of TranscreationThis paper discusses the Brazilian theory and practice of translation as transcreation, set in motion in the 1950s by the Neograndes group of concrete poets (namely the late Haroldo de Campos, his brother Augusto and Decio Pignateri), in light of two of the most challenging cultural approaches to translation in the late 1990s: Lawrence Venuti's alignment with an "ethics of difference" in translation (1997), and Henri Meschonnics's call for a "poetics of translating" (1999). Following Venuti's lead that "minority situations redefine what constitutes the 'domestic' and the 'foreign'", the concept of "transcreation" will be anal
Furthermore, both are but parcels of a universal poetical legacy that needs to be expropriated and appropriated through translation in order to bring Brazilian cultural productions to the fore of a poetics of modernity that is basically construed through Western parameters, catapulting Brazilian concretism to its visionary role in the post-industrial technological era. yzed as a forcible junction of a European metaphysics of translation that displaces the original (Benjamin, Derrida) and an indigenous anthropophagic tradition, updated by the modernist Oswald de Andrade as the "absorption of the sacred [Western / colonial] enemy". Keywords: translation ethics; translation poetics; transcreation; literary translation; Brazilian translation theory. The Bible, The Odyssey, Dante's Paradise, Goethe's Faust, Pound's Cantos). The concretist translators draw their sources from a canon that is mainly Western, aiming to revitalize "liminar-texts" - those where "a total systematization of all word levels: semantic, syntactic, rhetoric and sonorous" is to be found, supporting the thesis that "all poetry worthy of such a name is concrete" (e. Further poetical and ethical implications arise if we consider that concretist iconicity is meant to merge Western and Eastern traditions (juxtaposing ideograms with typographical techniques), especially if we examine the Brazilian poets' motivations for claiming the leadership of an international movement in which concrete art would lead to a lingua franca, resulting from collective effort and anonymous production. This correspondence, however, is destabilized if we oppose Meschonnic's concern with historicity to Haroldo de Campos's insistence on a presentness of poetry - a synchronic perspective ensuing from the effacement of linear temporality in favour of iconic spatiality. In Haroldo de Campos's writings, however, the indebtedness to primitive traditions and art forms is matched with the recovery of a creolized Iberian baroque. Mallarme's A Throw of Dice (1897) is seen as the precursor of the "verbi-voco-visual" experiments of the concrete poets, where structural elements such as rhythm and (typographical) spatiality are privileged over verbal referentiality and meaning-based content. The emphasis on "signifying form" can be paralleled with Henri Meschonnic's defense of a poetics no longer centered on language but on discourse, where rhythm plays a central role, organizing and mapping meaning. Haroldo de Campos anchors the poetics of concretism in the avant-garde experiments of authors such as Mallarme, Pound and Joyce.
Common topics in this essay:
Benjamin Derrida,
Henri Meschonnic's,
Throw Dice,
Western Eastern,
Henri Meschonnics's,
Poetics Transcreation,
Decio Pignateri,
Lawrence Venuti's,
Pound's Cantos,
haroldo de,
de campos,
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de campos's,
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poetics transcreation,
concrete poets,
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