Delectable bodies and their clothes: Plato, Nietzsche, and the translation of Latin America

DELECTABLE BODIES AND THEIR CLOTHES: PLATO, NIETZSCHE, AND THE TRANSLATION OF LATIN AMERICA

BY BENJAMIN PAUL VAN WYKE BA, Calvin College, 1999 MA, Binghamton University, 2005

DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Translation Studies in the Graduate School of Binghamton University State University of New York 2009

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Accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Translation Studies in the Graduate School of Binghamton University State University of New York 2009

May 1, 2009

Rosemary Arrojo, Department of Comparative Literature, Binghamton University Carmen Ferradas, Department of Anthropology, Binghamton University William Haver, Department of Comparative Literature, Binghamton University

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation unfolds around a series of metaphors with which I will illustrate, problematize, and refashion the traditional Western view of translation in a way that is accessible to those who are not familiar with the post-Nietzschean notions of language upon which this study is founded. My first metaphor, translation as redressing, will help illustrate how the most basic notion of translation in the West is explicitly tied to Plato’s view of representation outlined in The Republic, as well as introduce the implications that Nietzsche’s radical critique of Platonism has for our understanding of this practice. The second metaphor, translation as cannibalism, which is often associated with postNietzschean approaches, will not only illustrate the inseparability of the translator from what is being translated, but, also, show that we cannot simply rid ourselves of the Platonic tradition that this metaphor seeks to subvert. In the third chapter, I will use translation as a metaphor to help investigate the process by which national identities are constructed and cross-cultural encounters take place and, in turn, examine what these processes can tell us about the practice of translation. Drawing upon ideas discussed throughout the dissertation, I will focus on the creation of Antes O Mundo Não Existia [“Before the World Didn’t Exist”], written in Desana and translated into Portuguese by two Desana Indians, in order to explore the notion of translation as an encounter in which both sides become entangled and transformed. More than merely providing illustrations, metaphor holds an important place in this study because of its close connection to translation. Translation and metaphor not only share a common etymology, but they have both been designated as secondary forms of representation in the Western, Platonic tradition, and, consequently, have both iv

undergone similar revisions in contemporary, post-Nietzschean philosophy, which has given them positions of primary importance. Thus, both concepts share similar stakes and can aid in rethinking the process through which we constantly construct truth and meaning in a world where the metaphorical and the proper, or a translation and its original, cannot be separated.

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To the memory of Helen Carol Ottenhoff Van Wyke

O Amor é uma companhia. Já não sei andar só pelos caminhos, Porque já não posso andar só. - Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank: in the first place, Rosemary Arrojo, to whom I am forever indebted for providing me with the necessary mix of guidance, encouragement, grammatical beatings, and friendship to embark upon and complete this project; my other advisors, William Haver and Carmen Ferradas for being on my committee; Maria Tymoczko for taking interest in my work and generously accepting to serve as my outside reader; my wife, Ana, who not only came to the US to be with me while I finished this project, but who has been more than tolerant of my dissertating all over the house for these past years; my dad, Paul Van Wyke, who has always been supportive of the endeavors that brought me to my love of translation, and my stepmom, Jane Davis, as well as the whole “Vanavis” clan for doing all those things families do best; Sandra Santana and Mercedes Cebrián, who provided me with poetry and short stories to translate that not only greatly enhanced my studies here at Binghamton, but also taught me more than any textbook could about language and what to do with it in translation; my uncle, William Van Wyke, who has taken as much interest in this project as anyone and spent many hours discussing with me the infinite topics related to it; The Tinker Foundation and the Latin American Caribbean Area Studies Program (LACAS) for awarding me a grant to conduct research in Brazil that led to my second chapter, and to Israel Silva-Merced, who is no longer with us, and who went out of his way to make sure I applied for the grant; and finally, as the cliché goes, “last but not least,” my many friends in Binghamton and elsewhere who endured all the long conversations/monologues into the wee hours of the morning laden with my obsession for translation, and who listened to the many versions of my arguments before they ever made it onto paper.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1 -

Metaphor and Translation………………………………………………...4

-

Dressing and Eating Bodies, and the Encounters that Define Them……...7

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Translation between Foreign and Domestic………………………………9

Chapter I: Addressing Redressing: The Attempt to Strip Down to Naked Truth……………...11 1. The Body/Clothes………………………………………….…………………….11 -

Undressing and Redressing.......................................................................13

-

Keeping Your Eyes on the Clothes……………………...………………..18

-

Back and Forth between Bodies and Clothes……………..……………..21

2. Translation at the Third-Remove……………………………………..………….25 3. The Bible and the Second/Third-Remove Shuffle……………………………….30 4. Removing the Focus on Removes……………………………….……………….39 -

Body/Clothes Refashioned.........................................................................42

Chapter II: Loving Devoration: Haroldo de Campos and his Meticulous Meating………..……50 1. The recipie…………………………………………………………………….…53 2. Sitting Down for Dinner…………………………………………………………59 3. Mother’s Clothes……………………………………………………………...….68 4. Edible and/orOedipal? ..........................................................................................74 5. Cannibalizing a Cannibal………………………………………………………...82 -

The “Origins” of Cannibalism……………………………………….….87 viii

-

Picking up the Pieces………………………………………………….…90

Chapter III: Encounters of Translation: The Case of Latin America……………………………..99 1. Empire/Colony – Original/Translation…………………………………………102 2. Latin America…………………………………………………………………..109 3. Latin America Shaping Europe……………………………………………...….114 4. Before the World Existed…………………………………………………….…121 -

Trying to Save Culture by writing it into a Book……………………….123

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For and By the Desâna?......................................................................... 127

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From Oral Text to Written………………………………………….…..130

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Encounters in Desana Mythology………………………………………135

5. The Origin that a Difference Makes………………………………………..…..140

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..147 Appendix: The Anthropophagic Manifesto………………………………………....162 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………167

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Introduction …there is nothing that does not happen with metaphor and by metaphor. Any statement concerning anything that happens, metaphor included, will be produced not without metaphor. Jacques Derrida, “The Retrait of Metaphor”

Metaphors have been employed throughout the history of translation discourse in an attempt to provide an image for an abstract process that may be hard to picture, and I will continue this trend as this dissertation unfolds through a series of metaphors that will help us identify and deconstruct the Platonic conception of translation. My focus on metaphors is key to this project for several reasons. In the first place, not only can they provide an image of a concept, but, if we analyze the metaphors themselves, they can help us ascertain some of the conceptual presuppositions held by those who employ them. More than merely offering examples or images, however, the concept of metaphor occupies a much more important place in this study because it is so intimately linked to translation not only etymologically, but also because both metaphor and translation have suffered a similar fate in the Western, Platonic tradition in which they have been designated as secondary forms of representation. Consequently, translation and metaphor have undergone similar revisions in contemporary, post-Nietzschean philosophy, which has reinscribed them in positions of primary importance. With this in mind, our handling of the concept of metaphor can help us reinforce the general critique we will be making

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on the structure that has not only determined our understanding of translation, but also, our general conception of truth. Translation has enjoyed a great deal of attention in contemporary philosophy, especially from theorists associated with deconstruction such as Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, 1 and much of the underlying theory that informs my study comes out of this tradition. Many projects in translation studies over the last twenty years or so have greatly benefited from theory inspired by post-Nietzschean thought, such as deconstruction, postcolonial studies, and gender studies, and theorists like Barbara Johnson, Rosemary Arrojo, Lawrence Venuti, Douglas Robinson, Vicente Rafael, Maria Tymoczko, Annie Brisset, and Sherry Simon, among many others, have radically rethought the traditional notion of translation inherited from the Platonic tradition. In vein with these projects I would like to take a step back and illustrate, via metaphor, the extent to which our conception of translation has been fundamentally shaped by Plato’s theory of representation and, in light of this, the radical implications that Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism has for our conception of translation. The problem I am addressing is that, although it greatly problematizes our traditional conception of translation, contemporary philosophy has had only a minor impact on the emerging discipline of translation studies, especially in discourse related to the actual practice, discourse that still depends predominantly on basic Platonic notions of language. Not only has philosophy had little impact on translation studies, its role is often downplayed altogether in most of the discourse that seeks to discuss the translator’s craft in practical terms. Consider, for example, the last paragraph to Anthony Pym’s 1

See, for example, Derrida’s essays “Plato’s Pharmacy,” “Des Tours de Babel,” and “Limited Inc.,” as well as the “Round Table on Translation” in The Ear of the Other. See, also, Spivak’s “Translator’s Preface” to Derrida’s On Grammatology, “Translating into English,” and “The Politics of Translation.”

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chapter “Philosophy and Translation” found in the collection A Companion to Translation Studies: What the philosophical discourses thereby miss, of course, are the logics of the more everyday activities, the many techniques by which translators themselves constantly reduce complexity. Those are operational fictions that we need to grasp. And to do so, we should perhaps learn to think more bottom-up, from the actual practices, rather than top-down, from the great conceptual systems, if ever the ends are to meet. (44)

In other words, according to Pym, we should not get tangled up in philosophical ponderings when it comes to the actual translation of texts, because, even if they expose the fictional nature of the assumed certainties from which we proceed, we must accept these fictions unconditionally for the sake of practicality. One of the fictions Pym embraces (perhaps without realizing it is one) in order to make his case against the usefulness of philosophy, is the clear separation between what he calls “the great conceptual systems” and “actual practices,” as if this separation did not have a philosophical basis (and a quite Platonic one at that). I intend to show throughout this dissertation that even the “logics of the more everyday activities” are saturated with conceptual systems, which embody many elements that have been typically left out of discussions of translation. Unlike Pym, who wants us to hold fast to them, I want to expose some of the fictions that have informed the traditional view of translation in the West for at least two thousand years, fictions that have, indeed, been embraced as part of our “common sense” notions of translation. My overall goal of showing, in very concrete terms, the relevance of Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism for the general practice of translation is an especially pressing matter at present because there is more and more space currently being opened in academic settings that is specifically devoted to the study of translation. Not only is this

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because of the new interest it is receiving in philosophy, but also, and perhaps more so, because of the growing demands from areas like international politics, commerce, and media, since translation is so crucial to the functioning of our increasingly globalized world. At the same time, because of the close relationship between translation and metaphor, the conception of metaphor will, in a sense, serve as a metaphor for thinking about translation, and translation, in turn, can also function as a metaphor for the creation and dissemination of information, cultural identities, and even truth itself.

Metaphor and Translation The word for translation in English, as well as in many other European languages, comes from the Latin translatio, which is a translation of the Greek metaphora, the word from which English derives “metaphor.” 2 In ancient Greek, metaphora was used in the sense that we employ the word metaphor today, as well as for the idea of translation from one language into another (Cheyfitz 35, quoting Lidell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon). Thus, having both descended from metaphora, translation and metaphor contain in them the notion of carrying over or transferring meaning from one word or phrase to another. Aristotle, Plato’s most famous disciple, is credited with one of the earliest definitions of metaphor, which he gives in his Poetics amidst classifications of different words and parts of speech, and which S.H. Butcher translates as: “metaphor is the application of an alien name by transference” from one category to another “by analogy” (XXI). Because metaphors employ words that are alien to what they denote, they are not

2

This connection has been pointed out by many scholars. See, for example, Hermans and Stecconi 4; De Man, 15.

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proper or literal, but figurative or poetic. Aristotle defines “current or proper” words as those “which [are] in general use among a people,” and contrasts them with “strange words,” which are those “in use in another country” (ibid.). Elsewhere he equates “strange” words with “unusual […] (or rare) words, metaphorical, lengthened — anything, in short, that differs from the normal idiom” (Poetics: XXII). The “proper” (which comes from the idea of “one’s own”) is bound to what is considered to be a kind of shared domestic normalcy, while metaphors, together with “strange” and “unusual” words, are marked by their deviation from this norm, a category that includes (or indeed, is defined by) languages spoken in other countries. 3 Translation traffics between the elements of a similar opposition as it attempts to say in a language “in use in another country” something that was originally said in the common language of a different people. Eric Cheyfitz points out that, with Aristotle’s definition, metaphor and translation are both founded on “a kind of territorial imperative, in a division […] between the domestic and the foreign,” since both attempt to transfer “an alien name into a familiar context” (36). In this scenario there is an explicit hierarchy as the proper is considered to be closer to truth than tropes such as metaphor. Aristotle states, “the clearest style is that which uses only current or proper words” (Poetics XXII). Proper words are clearer because they allegedly deal literally with what they denote and present an unequivocal truth. Metaphor is considered an ornament, and, while certainly a useful tool for poetic expression, it is seen as secondary to proper forms of representation. A metaphor cannot provide access to truth on its own because its parts must be substituted with proper ones,

3

Eric Cheyfitz points out that “xenikos,” which Buchner translates as “unusual,” also means “foreign” (36).

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or, as Aristotle says, “if we take a strange (or rare) word, a metaphor, or any similar mode of expression, and replace it by the current or proper term, the truth of our observation will be manifest” (ibid.). In this sense, metaphor is always deemed, to some extent, “improper” because it has to be translated into “proper” terms before its truth is to be seen. Though metaphor is seen as a secondary form of representation, Aristotle still praises it: proper use of metaphor “is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances” (ibid.). This “eye for resemblances” is fundamental for the Platonic model to function, because, as we will see, the very basis for the discovery of truth and essences is founded on the ability to draw similarities. Plato’s is, after all, a philosophy of sameness. Aristotle sees the use of metaphor as a question of style, and style, for him, wavers between “perspicuity,” obtained by using “ordinary” and “common” words, and “distinction,” resulting from uncommon usage (ibid.). To properly use metaphor one must “observe propriety,” avoid being “grotesque,” and always use “moderation” (ibid.). The notion of proper and improper ways of forming metaphors highlights, once again, the hierarchy with which we are dealing. Not only is metaphor, by definition, opposed to “the proper,” but the latter is also the standard for how the (always “improper”) practice of metaphor is to be conducted. Hopefully, as we make our way through the first chapter we can revise this conception of metaphor as part of our discussion of translation. It is my intention that it will become clear that both of these concepts are in no way as secondary as tradition would have us believe.

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Dressing and Eating Bodies, and the Encounters that Define Them With my first metaphor of study I will illustrate the general conception underlying translation in the West that considers it as a process similar to that of redressing a body of meaning in the clothes of another language. This frequent metaphor will allow us to touch upon many of the fundamental concerns that have dominated Western discourse on translation, and, thus, highlight a common thread in our conception that has basically remained unchanged throughout the ages, one that is directly related to Plato’s theory of representation. In this context, we can begin to examine the implications that some of the basic notions of Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism have for our conception of translation, a critique that radically undermines many of the presuppositions that have sustained the traditional view that is exemplified in the metaphor of dress. Nietzsche formulates metaphor very differently from the tradition inherited from Aristotle, and with Nietzsche’s work we can enrich our discussion on two levels. In the first place, as metaphor and translation hold much in common, Nietzsche’s revision of the former will help us begin to rethink the latter. In addition, although we will first see the metaphor of dress as an illustration of Plato’s theory of representation, we can also find it in Nietzsche, but used in a way that clearly illustrates his subversion of the Platonic model. 4 Following Nietzsche, we will begin to recast our conception of translation by focusing on elements that have traditionally been left out of the picture. We will then shift our focus from an old metaphor that presents translators as dressmakers for bodies of meaning to a more recent one that portrays translators as cannibals who feed upon the body of the original. The cannibalism metaphor is often

4

Derrida also mentions the metaphor of dress as he deconstructs the view that writing is the clothing of speech (Of Grammatology 35).

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associated with post-Nietzschean conceptions of language and is usually mentioned in connection with the work of the Brazilian translator, poet, and theorist Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003), whose radical approach to translation has made the word “cannibalism” almost synonymous with “Brazilian translation” on the international scene. The body/clothes metaphor generally relies on a clear separation between subject and object: translators should be able to apprehend the body and preserve it intact in their resulting translations without leaving any traces of their own. The metaphor of cannibalism shows the impossibility of this kind of separation since the body of the original must first pass through the translator, an idea that highlights the ultimately creative role translators play in the work they perform. However, as I will argue, although this metaphor begins from an apparently anti-Platonic stance, upon close examination, it still seems, in many cases, to be governed by some of the same traditional notions it tries to undermine. I will consider both what de Campos says about his work in the long introductions and commentaries that accompany his translations, as well as how his work has been interpreted in contemporary translation discourse. With my third and final metaphor of study I will synthesize some of the aspects from our previous discussions into a coherent vision for translation that is considerably different from the one we found when we first started uncovering the body/clothes metaphor. Here I will use Latin America as an exemplary metaphor for the workings of translation, which will, in this case, be considered in a much broader sense, although I will not lose sight of the actual translation of texts, as both texts and their translations are fundamental in the kind of processes that have translated Latin America into existence. Its rich context, composed of layer upon layer of translations, of cross-cultural fusions

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and assimilations among countless groups that are radically different from each other, makes Latin America an optimal site for examining the impossibility of separating, for example, the body from the clothes, content from form, us from them, Old World from New World, the domestic from the foreign, and, of course, the translation from the original. The focal point of my discussion on Latin America will be a book of mythical texts written by two Desana Indians in Brazil and translated into Portuguese by one of the authors as Antes o Mundo Não Existia (“Before the World Didn’t Exist,” 1980, Livraria Cultura Editora).

Translation between Foreign and Domestic Before delving into these three metaphors, I would like to return to one aspect of a particular opposition that will be under revision throughout the three chapters: the domestic/foreign dichotomy mentioned in connection with Aristotle, and the proper/improper binary it implies. Translators are often seen as mediators between domestic and foreign contexts, and much of the discourse regarding the proper and improper ways of performing this task calls for privileging one of these two contexts. Friedrich Schleiermacher even sums up all approaches to translation using this dichotomy saying that, ultimately, there are just two: “reader-to-author” (which favors the foreign) and “author-to-reader” (favoring the domestic) (229). He proclaims, in Douglas Robinson’s translation, that these are the “only two translation methods with a clearly defined goal; there is no third. In fact no other approach is possible” (ibid.). Schleiermacher is not alone in believing this is the case, and, in a sense, many of the other dichotomies associated with translation — word-for-word/sense-for-sense,

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content/form, and the currently more fashionable domestication/foreignization — can be linked to this opposition. The metaphor of dress will help introduce these oppositions and show how they have assisted translators in dealing with the question of how they are to transport foreign bodies into their own languages. By the time we make it through the last metaphor, the two sides of this opposition will be tangled together to the point that it will be hard to properly designate it as an “opposition.” I am not proposing that we jettison all that traditional language we use regarding translation, nor do I feel that we could. However I do think the discourse could be shifted away from the constant reliance on the aforementioned oppositions that have dominated the understanding of this craft. In this way we can take seriously the position translation occupies not as a secondary activity of transfer, but as a participatory agent in the creation of what the text in question is to be, and, contrary to the age-old opposition of translation/original, as we will see, translation can even participate in the creation of the original itself.

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CHAPTER I

Addressing Redressing: The Attempt to Strip Down to Naked Truth Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. Mark Twain, Wit and Wisdom

1. The Body/Clothes Metaphors that split language into an inside and an outside abound in descriptions of translation, and one of the most common, perhaps because of its enticing promises of nakedness, is that of translation as redressing. In this chapter I will trace a thread through the history of translation discourse by examining remarks that revolve around this metaphor employed by translators, from Cicero to Nida, to describe their craft. Even though these translators may have only used this metaphor in passing, providing quick images to serve some broader argument, I will pause on this common image for a moment and examine what it implies about our general conception of translation. I will call this metaphor the “body/clothes,” and, although it takes on many appearances, in all of them we can see the same underlying assumption, i.e., that language consists of a core of meaning that is contained inside the words used to represent it. This structure is found in many other “container” metaphors, such as vessels or boxcars, 5 but I will focus primarily on those that deal with bodies and the objects that represent them, representations that are generally described as clothes, although they may also take the

5

See, for example, Nida’s famous example in Language, Structure and Translation (190).

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form of other things that are used to present ourselves, such as hairstyles or manners of speaking. As I mentioned in the introduction, the body/clothes highlights a certain conception of translation shared by all the differing views I will examine, and by reflecting upon this conception we can also begin to appreciate translation in its broader relationship to metaphor and truth, a reflection facilitated by the fact that this metaphor is intertwined with countless other metaphors we use to discuss truth, ones that are so ingrained in our language that we probably do not even consider them metaphors. 6 For example, we “unveil” and “unmask” appearances to “discover” and “recover” that which “embodies” the “naked truth.” We can introduce the body/clothes with what may be considered a common sense view of translation. In 1791 Alexander Tytler summarizes some expectations of what translators must do to successfully perform their task. After “thoroughly comprehending the sense” of the author, he says, a translator must “discover the true character of the author’s style,” and “ascertain with precision to what class it belongs” (210). These “characteristic qualities” must then be rendered “equally conspicuous in the translation as in the original,” and if not done properly, the translator “will present [the author] through a distorting medium, or exhibit him in a garb that is unsuitable to his character” (ibid.). The vocation of fashion is very serious business, especially when the bodies these tailors are dressing are some of the greatest celebrities imaginable, such as Homer, Montaigne, and even God.

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See Lakoff and Johnson for an in depth look at how metaphors play an integral, albeit often overlooked, role in shaping our reality.

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Undressing and Redressing In a translation by Harris Rackman, Cicero says that he is “well aware” that his project of translating Greek philosophy, “attempting as it does to present in a Latin dress subjects that the philosophers of consummate ability and profound learning have already handled in Greek, is sure to encounter criticism from different quarters” (10). 7 We have here an early example of the narrative we will follow throughout this section. In the first place, Cicero illustrates the classic belief in a split between content and form in language, allowing one to imagine translation as an act that attempts to keep the same body of meaning while merely changing its representation. While different languages are said to have different ways of expressing the same things, everyone knows, especially the translator, that a translation cannot reproduce the body of the original in its totality. But this is not really Cicero’s concern. Like so many after him, he sees translation as a way of affirming his language, showing that the fabric of Latin is capable of expressing the same kinds of complex subject matter as Greek. Thus, translation allows Cicero to showcase his budding language and, at the same time, it gives him the opportunity to introduce modes of expression previously absent in Latin by coining words and idioms “by analogy […] provided only they [are] appropriate” (7), in a manner reminiscent of Aristotle’s call for the proper formation of metaphors. Several hundred years later, Saint Jerome, defending himself from accusations of practicing improper translation, asks us to consider a comment made by the translator Evagrius in a preface, which we can do via Paul Carroll’s translation: “a literal translation 7

Cicero does not actually use any word that refers to dress in this passage, although the image implied is similar to the one suggested by the body/clothes. A more literal translation of this fragment might be: “I will deliver over into Latin letters that which the philosophers of consummate ability and profound learning have already handled in Greek […].” Rackman’s choice seems to reflect how commonplace this metaphor is in our culture to illustrate the split between content and form.

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from one language into another conceals, as with a coat, 8 the original sense, just as an exuberance of grass strangles the crops” (26). Literal, or word-for-word translation, as anyone who has tried their hand can verify, creates awkward phrases because one cannot match up words from two languages that simply do not match. While Cicero remarks that texts can be redressed, Jerome tells us that not all clothes are equal, and some are, unfortunately, fashioned in a way that covers up or even kills the body of the original. Jumping ahead some 1200 years we can introduce two contemporaries, John Denham and John Dryden, who provide us with examples that most explicitly label the pieces of the body/clothes. In the preface to his translation of Virgil’s “Destruction of Troy,” Denham writes, “as speech is the apparel of our thoughts, so are there certain garbs and modes of speaking which vary with the times, the fashion of our clothes being not more subject to alteration than that of our speech […]” (156). Dryden has a similar take on fashion in the preface to his translations of Ovid’s Epistles. He maintains that when languages match gracefully one should certainly translate literally. But this is seldom the case, and “what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another […]” (173). Dryden sees words as “outward ornaments,” and though they sometimes “may be so ill chosen as to make it appear in an unhandsome dress, and to rob it of its native luster” (174), the ultimate duty of the translator-tailor is “to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy the substance” (173) found inside these ornaments.

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Jerome uses a form of the verb “operiō,” which means to “cover,” “conceal,” “bury,” as well as “clothe.” The clarification “as with a coat” in the translation is unnecessary, but Carroll, perhaps for some of the same reasons Rackman decided to clothe Cicero with this metaphor, opted to reference both senses of this word. All of the remaining translations of the quotes related to our metaphor already use literal renderings of the words in the originals that refer to bodies and clothes and I will not, therefore, comment any further on the originals.

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Considering such remarks, how should one dress these foreign bodies to keep their “native luster”? After condemning clothes that strangle the sense, Jerome promotes an equally aggressive stance, praising Hillary the Confessor who “did not bind himself to the drowsiness of literal translation, or allow himself to be chained to the literalism of an inadequate culture, but, like some conqueror, he marched the original text, a captive, into his native language” (26). An inadequate culture would be one that does not have its own (proper) way of dressing foreign ideas, and would thus need to copy the original words literally. More than a millennium later, Thomas Drant describes his redressing of Horace by making a reference to the Bible verse Jerome might have had in mind (Deuteronomy 21:11-14) when he complimented Hilary the Confessor: First I have now done as the people of God were commanded to do with their captive women that were handsome and beautiful: I have shaved off his hair and pared off his nails, that is, I have wiped away all his vanity and superfluity of matter…I have Englished things not according to the vein of the Latin propriety, but of his own vulgar tongue…I have pieced his reason, eked and mended his similitudes, mollified his hardness, prolonged his cortall kind of speeches, changed and much altered his words, but not his sentence […]. (Cited in Chamberlain 318) 9

Not only does Drant redress Horace, but he even chops off his hair and nails. The appearance of the translation does not resemble the original’s since he has “changed and much altered his words,” but, because he sees the body he has captured as separable from its representational elements, he can still leave Horace’s “sentence” untouched. This separation of content and form we have seen at least since Cicero allows translators to commit inappropriate acts against the foreign appearance of the original, while maintaining the belief that they are leaving its body untouched. 9

The gendering of translation can be seen woven into many metaphors used to describe this activity, and the body/clothes is no exception. Especially considering that it is a metaphor that so explicitly deals with handling and taking over naked bodies, it would be easy to draw a parallel study of the gendering process it often involves. For the moment, though, I refer readers to Lori Chamberlain’s essay, from which this quote was taken, for an insightful account of the interface between gender and translation metaphors.

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Not everyone, however, has felt we have to talk about importing foreign bodies in such violent terms. In 1603, John Florio equates his translations of Montaigne’s Essays with children, taken out of the head of the author, then adopted and raised in the setting of the target language. He says, “I yet at least a fondling foster-father, having transported it from France to England; put it in English clothes; taught it to talk our tongue (though many times with a jerk of the French jargon); would set it forth to the best service I might” (131-132). Montaigne’s thoughts are his children, and Florio fosters them by dressing and schooling them like elegant children of his own time. One does not have to look far for examples of others who express the same wish to have a translation read as if it were originally written in that language. Denham, for example, writes, “if Virgil must needs speak English, it were fit he should speak not only as a man of this nation, but as a man of this age” (156). For his part, Dryden, in his “Dedication of the Aeneis” says, “I have endeavored to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age” (174). The now (in)famous expression les belles infidèles often represents an extreme type of domestic redressing. It was originally coined to describe the work of Nicholas Perrot d’Ablancourt who gives us a variation of the body/clothes metaphor when describing his redressing of the Assyrian writer Lucian in French. David Ross translates him as saying: I do not always bind myself either to the words or to the reasoning of this author; and I adjust things to our manner and style with his goal in mind. Different times demand different reasoning as well as different words; and ambassadors are accustomed, for fear of appearing ridiculous to those they strive to please, to dressing themselves according to the fashion of the country where they are sent. (158-159)

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Foreign texts are like visitors, ambassadors who adopt the fashions of their host culture in order to please the target readership. Examples abound of how clothes vary across cultures in the way they relate to the bodies they cover and represent. Much of the wardrobe used by U.S. college students would be seen as inappropriate in, say, Saudi Arabia, and, likewise, a woman wearing a hijab in many parts of the U.S. would stand out rather than blend in like she would in Saudi Arabia. D’Ablancourt gives us several concrete examples of how he tailors words to fit meaning. When translating Lucian he notices that “all similes having to do with love speak of that of boys, which was not strange to Grecian morals, and which is horrifying to our own,” and he decides simply to omit them (158). In addition, Lucian makes constant references to Homer, something that was commonplace to the ancient audience, but “would nowadays be pedantic,” thus producing an impression on the French readership that would be “quite contrary to [Lucian’s] intention; for we are talking here about elegance, and not about erudition” (ibid.). His radical redressing of Lucian is by no means an insult to the author for, in D’Ablancouts’s view, this is the only way to ensure the proper transfer of the body: “It was thus necessary to change all that in order to have a pleasing result; otherwise, it would not be Lucian” (158). As we know, the expression les belles infidèles implies that a translation cannot be both beautiful and faithful. However, because he holds beauty and elegance as the most important qualities of the texts he translates, D’Ablancourt considers that his infidelities towards the appearance of the original are necessary to properly (and faithfully) reproduce its essence. His is a faithful brand of infidelity, not altogether

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different from the impropriety exhibited by Hillary the Confessor and Drant when they enslaved texts for their own good. We have been looking at the body/clothes as a metaphor that shows translation as a process in which some kind of body of meaning is slipped out of its original clothes and redressed in others that are intended to represent the same thing in another language. Although the translators in this section use their tailoring license to varying degrees, they all suggest that adequate translation requires changing the “proper” language of the original for the “proper” language of the target culture (which, unfortunately, will always be, to some degree, “improper” with respect to the original). Fidelity, in this context, involves recovering the body at all costs, often at the expense of the fashion in which it was originally portrayed.

Keeping Your Eyes on the Clothes “You call that fidelity?!” the German Romantics might clamor in at this point. They object to the vision of translation we have been laying out thus far because it obscures what they consider to be one of the most enticing characteristics of the original: its foreignness. This does not imply that the German Romantics subscribe to the kind of literal approaches that the translators in the previous section are always scorning, or that they are in direct opposition to all those we have seen employing the body/clothes from Cicero on (with the exception, perhaps, of D’Ablancourt). However, whereas our metaphor has illustrated an “author-to-reader” approach up to this point, what distinguishes this next group of translators is that they utilize the body/clothes to advocate for a “reader-to-author” view of their craft.

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Around 1766, almost as if addressing our present discussion, Johann Gottfried von Herder uses the body/clothes metaphor in his essay translated by Douglas Robinson as “The Ideal Translator as Morning Star” to ridicule the kind of approach D’Ablancourt exemplifies par excellence: The French, too proud of their national taste, assimilate everything to it rather than accommodating themselves to the taste of another time. Homer must enter France a captive, clad in French fashion, lest he offend their eye; must let them shave of his venerable beard and strip off his simple attire; must learn French customs and, whenever his pleasant dignity still shines through, be ridiculed as a barbarian. We poor Germans, on the other hand – lacking as we do a public, a native country, a tyranny of national taste – just want to see him as he is. (208)

Herder lambastes many ideas we saw surface earlier with the body/clothes, such as those suggested by the captive metaphor put forth by both Hillary the Confessor and Drant. Dryden, Denham, and D’Ablancourt all caution that what may be beautiful in one language can be barbarous in another and should be amended, and D’Ablancourt’s examples of how he eradicated the “barbarous” in his translations make him the epitome of what Herder understands as “the French,” who are too proud to see the author “as he is.” A few decades later, Herder’s contemporary August Wilhelm von Schlegel extends a similar criticism to other Europeans claiming they are “incapable of entering deeply into a uniquely foreign mode of being” (217, trans. Douglas Robinson): The fact that [our fellow Europeans] have among them so many supposed lovers of classical antiquity should not fool us; how many of them must first mentally dress a Greek or Roman up in some modish attire before they can find him attractive? Whereas the German inclination is unquestionably to read the ancients in their own sense. (Ibid.)

These Europeans, according to Schlegel, dress up the foreign authors in disguises that more resemble themselves than the authors they purportedly translate. By merely seeking equivalences in their own language and culture, their readers will only see reflections of

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themselves and will miss the enriching possibilities of the foreign. “As a result,” Schlegel writes, “they are stuck with either domestic poverty or domestic wealth” (217). Although national pride is not always regarded as a good thing, as is evident in Herder’s attack on the French, much of the discourse on translation produced by the German Romantics is underlined by a similar kind of patriotism. Echoing Herder’s comments, Schlegel remarks, “there is in the spirit of our language, as in the character of our nation – if indeed the two are not one and the same thing – a most versatile malleability” (216). This malleability, coupled with the disposition of his countrymen, allows them to truly embrace, reproduce, and read the foreign on its own terms. He is proud of “the German passion to know the foreign truly and deeply; the German willingness to enter into the most exotic thought patterns and the most outlandish customs; [and] the ardor with which Germans embrace authenticity of content, no matter how unusual the garb in which it appears” (217). Herder sees his praise of the German public and language as distinct from the kind of nationalism he claims the French exhibit. The French are “too proud of their national taste” to see beyond themselves. Their customs and literary fashions become the filters through which they see everything, and, thus, they only have access to a very distorted version of the original. His fellow Germans, on the other hand, lack “a public, a native country, a tyranny of national taste,” and are thus more capable of, as Schlegel puts it, “read[ing] the ancients in their own sense” (217). It seems that the German Romantics generally posit a national character that is marked by a shared lack of a dominant tradition that would veil their contact with the foreign. They are proud that their pride is mitigated, though I must point out that the German Romantic tradition that grew

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out of these authors’ work is also a veil or a filter through which the foreign is handled. We will return to this idea shortly, but for the moment, we can end here with one more image that clearly illustrates a difference between how the two approaches of “reader to author” and “author to reader” that we have been examining portray the role of presenting foreign bodies. While D’Ablancourt gives us the image of the diplomat dressing to the tastes of the host country, Herder says that the translator should act as a “tour guide” who brings the readers to the foreign place. Speaking for the German readership he writes, “we will gladly make this journey with the translator, if only he would take us with him to Greece and show us the treasures he has found” (208).

Back and Forth between Bodies and Clothes “Reader-to-author” and “author-to-reader” approaches have no doubt highlighted different aspects of the translation process. On the one hand, we are shown that, in the process of translating a text from one language into another, the “clothes” will always be different, and if there is not a certain degree of conformity to domestic fashions the original may not be understood. On the other hand, those translators who have discussed their craft like the Romantics did make us reconsider our relationship to difference and our search for sameness in translation by reminding us that the original is also defined by its foreign modes of expression. We cannot, however, really separate these two approaches into the neat categories that history has implied. For all the passionate condemnation of “literalism” expressed by the translators in the first section, they still demonstrate that a literal approach is actually the first one they try, and is, in fact, desirable, if they do not find the result awkward.

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Though D’Ablancourt flaunts his radically domesticating approach, he writes that “there are many places that [he] translated word for word,” and he did so whenever possible, “at least as much as can be done in an elegant translation” (159). Jerome, the champion of sense-for-sense translation, even posits that a word-for-word approach should be adhered to when translating the Bible, which, as we know, is his most important translation project. On the other side, Schlegel admits that, while it is desirable to adapt the target language to the original, “every language has certain established bounds […] that cannot be overstepped without [the translator] being quite rightly accused of speaking no true language at all […]” (218). One must always filter the foreign through domestic structures, regardless of how much the domestic culture wants to emulate the foreign. All of the translators we have seen, no matter how dramatically they argue for one approach over another, hint at the fact that translation always involves both bringing readers to authors and vice versa. The opposition of content and form has been implicit in much of our discussion and, appropriately, the body/clothes has been used directly in conjunction with this dichotomy. Eugene Nida notes, in his essay “Principles of Correspondence,” that “the content of a message can never be completely abstracted from the form, and form is nothing apart from content,” but we must give priority to one side or the other, depending on the text (127). For example, with “the Sermon on the Mount […], the importance of the message far exceeds considerations of form. On the other hand, some of the acrostic poems of the Old Testament are obviously designed to fit a very strict formal ‘straight jacket’” (ibid.). Nida, a Bible translator, is generally concerned with transmitting a certain clear “message,” and more often than not he privileges the content, because too much

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“adherence to the letter kills the spirit” (131). Or, saying it again with our metaphor, Nida quotes William Cooper, a translator of Goethe, who writes, “it is better to cling to the spirit of the poem and clothe it in language and figures entirely free from awkwardness of speech and obscurity of picture” (ibid.). Although Nida says that they are ultimately inseparable, he treats content and form as two separate sides of a gradient, suggesting that translators will have to focus more or less on one side or the other. But how do we decide which texts should be placed in a “straight-jacket” of form and which ones are allowed a little more room for the message to move? Is there something inherent in the text that tells us which, or do we decide what side of the dichotomy to lean towards based on our literary tradition (or, in Nida’s case, church doctrine)? Let us put aside the question as to whether one should privilege bodies or clothes, content or form, domestic or foreign elements, and focus on what all the body/clothes users have in common: ultimately their goal is to produce a textual attire that will most fully allow the original body to shine through. In this scenario, we can easily make associations to the classic metaphor of the translator’s (in)visibility, as translators have been expected to fashion a text that appears as if it were not there so that only the truth of the original is seen. The essential core imparted by the author must remain intact. Few would argue, for example, with Schlegel’s vague claim that “truth must be the translator’s highest, indeed virtually his only, mandate” (217, his emphasis). Or that, in order to comply with this mandate, “we are,” as Dryden notes, “bound to the author’s sense” (175), which, “generally speaking, is to be sacred and inviolable” (173). D’Ablancourt, while boasting of his beautifully unfaithful exploits, still claims to have “permitted [Lucian’s] opinions to remain completely intact, because it would not

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otherwise be a translation” (158). For their part, the Romantics wanted simply to “see Homer as he is.” Walter Benjamin, according to Harry Zohn’s translation, believes that “a real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not black its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium to shine upon the original more fully” (21). This is directly related to many of our metaphors of truth. We use “seeing” to mean “knowing,” and must “look” through all those layers of words to what is believed to be inside them. Whatever is found inside, whether it be the author’s “sense,” “opinions,” or “purpose,” it is this truth that translators must simultaneously discover and recover in a way that their work appears as if it were not there. Of course, translation cannot disappear. A translation can never simultaneously copy both the original’s content and form, all its words and sense, or make the foreign into the same, nor can it ever complete the one goal with which it has been charged: total reproduction. Thus, it will always be marked by a difference or deviation from the original. All of the translators we have been examining, no matter how much they praise their translations, or translation itself, affirm the secondary status of the work they do. Schlegel, for example, says the translator “is so greatly at a disadvantage” to the author (218), and that “it goes without saying that in the end even the finest translation is at best an approximation to an indeterminable degree” because it is impossible to achieve “precisely the same results with totally different tools and means” (220). Florio calls his translation “this defective edition […] delivered at second hand” (131). Dryden accepts that “the wretched translator” is the author’s servant, saying that “he who invents is master of his thoughts and words,” and therefore confesses: “slaves we are, and labour on another man’s plantation” (175).

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Denham offers some of the most self-effacing remarks, and flagellates himself with the body/clothes to show he has tried his best to express the true Homer: If this disguise I have put upon him (I wish I could give it a better name) fit not naturally and easily on so grave a person, yet it may become him better than that fool’s-coat wherein the French and Italian have of late presented him; at least, I hope, it will not make him appear deformed, by making any part enormously bigger or less than the life (I having made it my principal care to follow him, […]). Neither have I anywhere offered such violence to his sense as to make it seem mine and not his […]. (156)

Naturally, he also solemnly swears: “I have not the vanity to think my copy equal to the original” (156). When his expression is not as full as the original, he accepts the blame (it is not a defect of the original), and where his translations are fuller, he rejects the credit, saying it is ultimately the author’s doing: “if they are not his own conceptions, they are at least the result of them” (ibid.). The common conception of translation we have unfolded with the body/clothes – as a process of relentless pursuit to recover an essence, although it can never realize this goal – exhibits characteristics that are strikingly similar to what Socrates terms “imitation” in Book X of The Republic. In the next section I will give an overview of Socrates’s view of representation, which will help us situate the body/clothes within this larger conceptual tradition.

2. Translation at the Third-Remove Every imitator “is by nature third from the king and the truth,” G.M.A Grube translates Socrates as saying to his friend Glaucon while the two discuss what and whom to include in their utopian Republic (Republic 597e). According to Plato’s general formulation of truth, everything in this world (objects, concepts, words, etc.) is a representation of an ideal form, which is the perfect and eternal essence that embodies the 25

truth of what is being represented. A carpenter, for example, makes “a bed” but cannot make “the being of a bed” (ibid. 597a), although, since the true Bed 10 was used as its model, it represents enough of the essence to be recognized as a bed. The ideal Bed can only be attained in the realm of ideas, apprehended by rationally examining individual beds in this world. Or, as Socrates says, “we hypothesize a single form in connection with many things to which we apply the same name” (ibid. 596a). Whereas some representations are modeled after their corresponding form, others, which Socrates calls “imitations,” are modeled on other representations, and are thus secondary forms of presenting truth. A carpenter fashions a bed in the image of the ideal Bed, but painters look to physical beds as their models, and thus produce secondary imitations that only reflect the appearance of a bed. “The imitation is far removed from the truth,” Socrates says, “for it touches only a small part of each thing and a part that is itself only an image” (ibid. 598b). Each representation is like another layer over the truth of what it represents, obscuring, each time, a little more of the essence Socrates sees underneath the removes. Poets are similar to painters in that they merely supply us with images of the physical world. 11 Poems are “third remove from that which is and are easily produced without knowledge of the truth (since they are only images, not things that are)” (ibid.: 598e-599). In addition, it is clear to Socrates that poets know nothing of truth: “I suppose that, if [the poet] truly had knowledge of the things he imitates, he’d be much more serious about actions than about imitations of them […]” (ibid.: 599b). Poets are only

10

I will capitalize words that refer to the form. Although I will refer to poets and poetry, the word used in Greek, “poiesis,” does not refer to what we now consider poetry, but, instead, to creation in general, and literary creation in particular. 11

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interested in aesthetic reactions, and Socrates believes that if their verses are stripped of adornments, poems have no substance to show for themselves (ibid : 601b). Imitation is mentioned throughout the Dialogues and Socrates even condemns Plato’s medium to the third remove as the latter writes the former into history. Writing, Socrates contends, is like a painting because neither can answer for itself. When one asks questions of texts “they go on telling you just the same thing forever” (Phaedrus: 275d-e, trans. R. Hackforth). Socrates compares written texts to children, who cannot defend themselves, and often need their creator-parents to come to their aid (ibid.: 275e). Socrates’s interlocutor, Phaedrus, calls writing “dead discourse,” and says that “living speech [is] the original of which the written discourses may fairly be called a kind of image” (ibid.: 276a). Plato, who left us with well over a thousand pages of writing, does not, perhaps, fully agree, and today we certainly do not treat his oeuvre as mere “dead discourse.” For Socrates, the ideal form is the true original to be represented, but today texts written by authors are generally considered original works, and their “essence” is treated with a reverence similar to that which Socrates shows towards forms. The notions of the “original” and authorship have changed throughout the ages, 12 and, although the comparison may not be completely parallel, the traditional view of translation we have seen in the body/clothes follows a pattern that is similar to Socrates’s notion of imitation. The original “essence” of a text is believed to stem from the author’s thoughts, which are comparable to the first remove. These thoughts give rise to the original text (second remove), which is the basis for the translation (third remove imitation). If we were to

12

See, for example, Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” for an interesting discussion on the historically constructed figure we call “the author.”

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follow what Socrates has said of writers, we would have to say that translation is a fourth-remove form of representation; however, I am focusing here on the common notion that translations only provide us with representations of the original texts authors create to represent their thoughts. The translation is but an image of the original because it is created without a direct link to truth. One might say a translator is, as Glaucon says of the painter, “an imitator of what others make” (Republic: 597d). Many of the clichés related to translators and translation resonate with the comments Socrates makes about imitators. As a reflection, perhaps, of his claim that it is better to “make the thing imitated than its image,” and that anyone who could do both would choose the former (ibid.: 599a-b), translators are often called frustrated writers who would write originals if only they could. In the Platonic tradition we are also continually reminded that something is always “lost in translation,” and more will go missing with each (re)move away from the origin. Imitation is not only considered an inferior form of representation, but it is also seen as potentially dangerous because it easily deceives. When discussing poetry, Socrates declares, “the most serious charge against imitation” is “that with a few rare exceptions it is able to corrupt even decent people” (ibid.: 605c). Poetry corrupts because, instead of appealing to reason, it stirs up the emotions, clouding one’s ability to ascertain truth. Regarding the painter who can only make images, Socrates warns, “if he is a good painter and displays his painting of a carpenter at a distance, he can deceive children and foolish people into thinking that it is truly a carpenter” (ibid: 598c). Socrates tells us we need to recognize imitations for what they are, always remembering their secondary place in relation to that which they imitate. All of the translators we have discussed express,

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implicitly and often explicitly, their subservience to the original, maintaining that it is, in fact, the glorious original that ultimately contains the author’s truth. They seem to be reassuring readers in the Platonic tradition that their work is indeed secondary, and hail the original as their forever-unattainable goal. Socrates acknowledges the usefulness of imitation if it is created and received under the right conditions. Music and poetry, for example, can help produce “a moderate and good character” in the citizens of the Republic by instilling them with a sense of grace and harmony (ibid. 401a). He then selects the kind of poetry and music he would allow in his Republic, permitting only that which mimics and will instill the “rhythms of someone who leads an ordered and courageous life” (ibid. 399e). Luckily for Plato, Socrates also tolerates writing. Even though a text “drifts all over the place,” and runs the risk of falling into the hands of those who will misunderstand it (Phaedrus: 275d-e), Socrates never prohibits writing like he eventually does with poetry. He does, though, provide some guidelines: the author must have full knowledge about what is being written, and write in the clearest manner possible (ibid. 277b-c). In the Western tradition there has been a constant background echo of “traduttore, traditore,” but the “necessary evil” of translation has generally been tolerated provided that it too, above all, seeks to re-present the original truth. Whereas Socrates tolerates poetry in Book III of The Republic, in Book X he sees it as sufficiently dangerous to ban it altogether. Similarly, the history of translation in the West is fraught with cases in which it has been prohibited, especially when the original is seen as too important to risk allowing imitations of it into circulation, amplifying, thus, the chance that their wholly important truth will be misrepresented. We all know from the biographies of Bible translators such as Etienne

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Dolet and William Tyndale that breaking this ban, or circulating what are considered mistranslations of the Word, can have serious consequences. 13

3. The Bible and the Second/Third-Remove Shuffle Although the traditional conception of translation has it firmly rooted in the third remove, when people are not speaking directly about it by name, they often do what Socrates forbids, and consider individual translations as second-remove representations. Texts and authors are consumed all over the world in translation, debated and picked apart word by word with hardly any mention that what is being attributed to the author is often, in fact, a product of its translation. Examples can be found everywhere. We only need to look at the way translations have traditionally been marketed or, as Lawrence Venuti has shown, the way world literature is taught, to see practices that attempt, in a sense, to ignore the presence of translation (see, for example, The Scandals of Translation 89-95). The international news media constantly quotes from world leaders whose words shape our global political discourse, but pays little attention to the fact that the “sound bites” it throws around might not really be what was said. 14 So much of what we call truth is based upon texts that, according to our dominant “philosophy of truth,” are mere images, shadows of the originals we are trying to read and decipher. Through this “thirdremove” practice we have constructed our beliefs on everything from the nature of beds 13

We could also think of the Koran, whose history is both inside and outside the Western tradition. I cannot go into detail concerning the similarities and differences between the Bible and the Koran here. I only want to note that, with respect to the Koran, it is prohibited to call or consider anything a “translation” of this book. It is permitted to make versions that help one understand the original, but they cannot be considered “translations” the way other texts can. This seems to be an attempt to ensure that there is no confusion as to the place of the original language of the original, second-remove text. 14 As an illustration, see Juan Cole's detailed commentary on the often-repeated quote attributed to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which he allegedly threatens to "wipe Israel off the map". Cole, who makes it explicit that he is by no means a supporter of Ahmadinejad, convincingly shows that the quote is not only the result of a mistranslation, but it has also been taken out of its original context to support a certain agenda that is attempting to demonize the Iranian state.

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and souls to our view of the language we use to discuss them. If we are to believe in the ability to attain truth, it is necessary to forget that much of what we “know” comes to us through translation, something that, by its traditional definition, cannot give us the whole truth. We can find an especially pertinent example in the Bible, a book that has had a profound impact not only on Western thought (especially after it was read through the lenses of Platonism), but also, for our purposes, on the common idea of the sacred status of the author, and how to translate “his” original message. Michel Foucault points out: In literary criticism […] the traditional methods for defining the author—or, rather, for determining the configuration of the author from existing texts— derive in large part from those used in the Christian tradition to authenticate (or to reject) the particular texts in its possession. Modern criticism, in its desire to ‘recover’ the author from a work, employs devices strongly reminiscent of Christian exegesis when it wished to prove the value of a text by ascertaining the holiness of its author. (455)

So intertwined with our notions of textuality and authorship, the Bible has exemplified (and helped establish and reinforce) our traditional conception of translation. At the same time, however, its story is also a perfect example that undermines many of the presuppositions we typically take for granted when thinking about this craft. One of the first major undertakings in the translation of God’s word related to what we now know as the Bible occurred long before this book existed. Between 300 and 200 BC (that is, before the date the West chose to count forward, marking the birth of the man who would become inextricably linked with this book), the Jewish scriptures were translated from Hebrew into Greek by a group of seventy to seventy-two translators. When the work, which became known as the Septuagint (for the number of translators), was completed, according to Moses Hadas’s translation of the account written by 31

Aristeas, the leaders declared: “Inasmuch as the translation has been well and piously made and is in every respect accurate, it is right that it should remain in its present form and that no revision of any sort take place” (Aristeas 6). This version, the oldest account we have of this story, states that the translators worked as a team, although other versions began to surface later according to which the translators, each one working in solitude, produced identical translations. One of these versions can be found in a text written about a hundred years after Aristeas’s by Philo Judaeus, whose account reads: Sitting here in seclusion with none present save the elements of nature, earth, water, air, heaven, the genesis of which was to be the first theme of their sacred revelation, for the laws begin with the story of the world’s creation, they became as it were possessed, and under inspiration, wrote, not each several scribe something different, but the same word for word, as though dictated to each by an invisible prompter. (14, trans. F.H. Colson)

Whether this account, which has been scoffed at even by such great Christian translators as Saint Jerome, is true or not, the need for this kind of version of the story comes from the desire to give weight to this translation’s true kinship with the original by having supernatural proof that God the Author had his hand in the translation, thus securing an accurate and complete version of His Word. And once it is deemed perfect and complete, it is only natural that it be decreed that “no revision of any sort take place” to ensure that truth can be passed down to subsequent generations. The Septuagint was not only the basis of the early formulations of some of the foundational theological ideas related to the Old Testament, but it was also the source of God’s Word for some of the authors of the texts that became the New Testament (such as Paul), who quoted from the Septuagint when making reference to the Old Testament. It is also the earliest text to which we have access for some parts of the Bible because the originals from which they came have been lost.

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The next translation of a second-remove caliber that befell the Bible was that of Saint Jerome. Jerome, the patron saint of translators, was the author of the translation into Latin from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, of the texts that, by then, had been selected to compose the books of the Bible. Many were quick to consider his Vulgate as a misleading third-remove version, complaining that certain passages in the Jerome’s Latin did not conform to the standard exegesis based on the Septuagint. Augustine wrote to Jerome about this predicament: “Many problems would arise if your translation began to be read regularly in many churches, because the Latin churches would be out of step with the Greek ones” (Venuti, The Scandals of Transaltion 78, quoting White 92). Venuti quotes an episode reported by Augustine of an uproar over one particular word when a bishop read from Jerome’s version in his church in Oea (present-day Tripoli). Augustine told Jerome: “you had rendered [the word] very differently from the translation with which they were familiar and which, having been read by so many generations, was ingrained in their memories” (ibid. 78-79). Jewish scholars were consulted but they said that “this word did occur in the Hebrew manuscripts in exactly the same form as in the Greek and Latin Versions” (ibid.). The bishop “corrected” Jerome’s version because he felt that the two versions contradicted each other and that both could not be right. Jerome defended himself from many of his critics in a letter to Pammachius and he declared that even the Septuagint, in fact, had been ridiculed by the Jews for containing translation errors (29). Though Jerome was called a falsarius sacrilegus or ‘‘sacrilegious falsifier” by many (Collins 363), history favored him over his critics. The Septuagint is still considered holy, and to this day is used by some Orthodox groups as their Old Testament,

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but it was the Vulgate that became the true second-remove Word of God for around a thousand years. According to Nida, “this translation had an enormous influence on matters of canon, translation principles, and vocabulary employed in the Christian scriptures (Routledge Encyclopedia 23), and, as it was the Bible used by the Holy Roman Empire, it “was viewed for more than 1000 years as the canonical translation, forming the basis for interpretation and for any further translations” (ibid. 25). The Roman Catholic Church has held fast to the Vulgate, and it was not until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) that God’s Word was, in a sense, freed from the dominance of Latin, and it was proclaimed that mass could be performed in other languages (although, still, “the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites” [Collins 361]). Leveling some of the same kinds of criticisms of inaccuracy as Jerome did against the Septuagint, in 1534 Martin Luther dared to defy the Catholic Church by translating the Holy Word into the German vernacular (which, in a sense, did not exist in its modern form until Luther brought about this translation of the Bible into German). At the same time, much to the dismay of those trying to maintain the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, he did not even use the Vulgate as his direct source, but went back to the original source texts, thus undermining the established authority of the Vulgate. 15 The King James Bible similarly became a second-remove version of God’s word for the English-speaking world, and had a tremendous impact not only on Christian theology thereafter, but also on the literary tradition of the English language. Though this Bible bears the name “King James,” the only active part this monarch played was to lift the criminal ban on its translation, punishable by death, and set guidelines for the translation process, such as

15

We should not forget that Luther was surely familiar with the Vulgate, and it probably did have a great impact on how he ultimately read the original texts he was translating.

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prohibiting partisan scholarship and footnotes. 16 In fact, the writing of the King James Bible was heavily indebted to the work of William Tyndale, who was put to death because he broke the ban on translating the Bible. The enormous influence of the King James Version’s and its reconfirmation as a second-remove-like original has been compounded by the fact that it has served as the basis for thousands of translations into countless languages around the world as part of the Anglo-American missionary project (Nida, Routeledge Encyclopedia 23). Perhaps due to the ever-increasing contact between cultures and the everwidening scope and dissemination of media, today there are more ready-available examples of different interpretations of the Bible, evidenced in the existence of so many translations and readings of the same text by different churches and individuals. It seems that around every corner there is somebody saying something about what the Bible means or what its author wanted to say. However, any absolute authority of these claims is complicated by the fact that even the most canonical translations, every one of them, has been accused of containing errors. In other words, the more people study and speak on behalf of this book, the more difficult it is becoming to forget that these translations of the Bible are what our tradition has seen as three removes from truth, given that we have so much evidence of different readings, even of the same translation. The next step, then, is logically to remind readers that all of these are “just” translations, and that not one is an authority by itself, but depends on a text higher up the ladder of removes, which is believed to contain the whole truth. The solution has been to remove these removes 16

Death sentences were not only issued in relation to translations of the Bible (ex. Etienne Dolet and William Tyndale) but also regarding its interpretation (for example, the conflicts between the Catholic Church and the protestant reformers or John Calvin’s condemnation of Servetus). These conflicts highlight the attempt to quell multiple interpretations, or the fact that there may, indeed, be differential readings of the same text, even when fundamental issues are involved.

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carefully with all the modern techniques we have developed for discovering the truth and the meaning of the original. In the preface to the New American Bible, for example, we find: On September 30, 1943, His Holiness Pope Pius XII issued his now famous encyclical on scripture studies, Divino afflante Spiritu. He wrote: “We ought to explain the original text which was written by the inspired author himself and has more authority and greater weight than any, even the very best, translation whether ancient or modern. This can be done all the more easily and fruitfully if to the knowledge of languages be joined a real skill in literary criticism of the same text.”

Answering the call of the Pontiff’s statement, the translators of the New American Bible based their translation (to be used by the Catholic Church in the U.S.) on the original Greek and Hebrew texts, to produce what they felt would be a Bible that, more accurately than Jerome’s, leads readers to the original content. While the specific details of this project make it an interesting one, it overlooks several problems related to interpretation. One problem that they do not consider is that those who translate these original texts, given that nobody natively speaks ancient Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic, are inescapably influenced by preconceived interpretations of the Bible that are no doubt, in large part, products of the two thousand years of theology that has been formulated using these other translations. In a sense, they can only read these originals as translations of the versions they already know. As will be apparent in the next section, the “correct” translation will be the one that confirms the way we read the original, a reading that is now the product of all the other translations and the theology based on them, not all that different from what Jerome must have noticed in the reception of his Vulgate. The creation and the use of all these Bibles illustrate the need people feel to possess some document that will unequivocally lead to truth, the need to feel that the book they hold in their hands can serve as an absolute foundation for absolute meaning, 36

even if this alleged foundation is divorced from the one upon which it was made. Nida tells an interesting anecdote that exemplifies this desire, and it is reminiscent of the proclamation made upon the completion of the Septuagint we have seen in Aristeas’s letter: After completing the translation of the Bible in one of the major trade languages of West Africa, the translator returned home on leave of absence and decided to take some courses in linguistics. He soon realized how many mistakes he had made in his earlier work, and upon returning to the field he asked the responsible committee to let him revise his translation. But he was told that he had no right to “change the word of the Lord!” (Nida 2001: 25)

According to this translator, then, the people for whom he had worked so hard to provide God’s Word possessed only a faulty copy (and he knew, because he was the author of the translation). But those in charge of safeguarding the Word for their people felt the same need as those who wrote the Septuagint to ensure that they possessed some stable object to serve as the foundation for interpretation that would ward off the threat of constant revision, which would undermine the very notion that they could access stable truth. The history of Bible translation, as we have been exploring it, focuses primarily on the idea of presenting the “truth” contained in the original, of recovering its essential core. All of the Bibles we have mentioned here, at one time or another, have been accused of containing errors and deviations. But we must ask the question: what are they deviations from? With each new translation, are we correcting the errors of the previous ones to bring us closer to the original truth, or do translators feel they are adapting some unchanging truth to new circumstances? If we remove for a moment what has been understood as the remove that translation adds to a text we can see that the problem of accurately representing an original does not merely arise with the process of translating it into another language, but is present in the original itself, given that it is impossible to

37

determine, even in this original text, a solid foundation of truth since it is also a multiple and differential site of meaning. In the introduction to the New American Bible, it is assumed that our new methods of literary criticism will bring us closer to the original than those translators who were chronologically (and perhaps even culturally) closer to the original, which seems to be a strange assumption. I am not purporting that historical distance determines our ability to attain truth, nor that people should abandon all attempts to find meaning in ancient texts. I will return to this shortly, but for the moment I would just like to point out that we tend to forget how much we are dependent on translation, or rather, how we are influenced by layers and layers of translations in order to designate something called the “original.” We forget and ignore that what we believe is, perhaps, more a product of translations than something that precedes them. In other words, we forget that much of what we see when we remove the layers of translations is still, to a large extent, a product of the translations we are removing. It is with the notion of forgetfulness that we can begin to introduce the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. According to him, forgetfulness is part and parcel of the Platonic model of truth. In his critique of Plato, Nietzsche attacks some of the most basic notions that sustain the system of truth that usually drives Bible translation, as well as those that underlie the body/clothes metaphor. At first glance it will seem that this attack renders our metaphor an impossible model for a post-Nietzschean conception of translation. However, a fundamental aspect of Nietzsche’s work is the reversal of the relationship between metaphor and truth, and this will allow us to revitalize the metaphor that seems to have been killed by him, and rethink what we call translation.

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4. Removing the Focus on Removes As we saw earlier, Socrates claims, “we hypothesize a single form in connection with many things to which we apply the same name” (Republic 596a), and Nietzsche begins his attack at this basic level. If we “hypothesize” forms based on their particular representations, then not only do we base what are called essences on “imperfect” representations, but, in order to attain them, we must forget all the differences between things of “the same name.” Contrary to how Socrates discusses beds, in his essay translated by Daniel Breazeale as “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” 17 Nietzsche writes: Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as a certain leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf”: the original model according to which all leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model. (83)

There are certainly differences between natural leaves and human-made beds, but Socrates would say that the basic structure is the same regarding the form (Bed or Leaf) and its temporal and imperfect representations (beds and leaves) (see Republic 596c). Plato can only hypothesize forms if he begins with the belief that they exist, and proceeds to “discover” them by noting similarities among individual particulars. He attributes differences to imperfections since nothing in this physical world can be a perfect embodiment of its form. For Nietzsche, however, differences run deep, and when we

17

I will focus on this essay, which was written early in Nietzsche’s career but remained unpublished in his lifetime, because it provides a succinct overview of many of the basic themes he would develop in his later work.

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equate “unequal things,” our “eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see ‘forms’” (80). In a sense, we find what we are looking for, ignoring that which might not confirm our vision of an ideal form. Likewise, we create categories of knowledge and see the world through them. For example, we establish the traits for the category “mammal,” and when we encounter a camel and verify that it exhibits these particular characteristics, we are overjoyed, believing we have discovered something about the essence of the camel (85). Categories of knowledge do not tell us anything about the “thing itself,” but only a certain relation to ourselves and the ways that we have devised to envision the world. “All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them,” Nietzsche writes, and “if we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms” (87). Nietzsche argues that we have no access to forms and essences. 18 What we call truth is not some fixed form or stable core inside the representational removes that orbit (and hopefully point towards) it. Truth is: a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer coins. (84)

Metaphorical expression, here, is not secondary to proper representations of truth, it is the very material with which “proper” truth is constructed. The conceptual is itself metaphorical because it relies on abstraction and comparison. We only need to look at 18

Whereas Nietzsche generally indicates that he believes that there are no essences, he says we have no way of knowing whether they do or not, and in this essay he implies that even if they exist, we could not access them. A scientific category, for example, is a human creation “and does not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond to the essences of things: that would of course be just as indemonstrable as its opposite” (On Truth 83-84).

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“proper” definitions in dictionaries to see that this is the case. Translation cannot be defined without recourse to metaphors of transporting solid objects (and sometimes, literally, transporting bodies) from one place, position or condition to another. 19 We can never describe translation “proper” without recourse to that “improper” form of representation: metaphor. 20 Not only does Nietzsche believe that concepts and thoughts are metaphorical, but also that the language in which they are formulated was born in metaphor. In the beginning “a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor” (82), and from there a “movable host of metaphors” has been built up around these first metaphors, evolving into the languages we speak. At the same time, we expect language to name some “proper” truth outside of itself. Here is where forgetfulness comes to the fore. In order to maintain the traditional notion of truth it is necessary to forget that, deep down, everything we know is constructed with material that has historically been deemed “improper,” given that it is foreign to what it represents. These insights have several important implications for our study. In the first place, Nietzsche’s attack on Platonism shakes the foundations upon which we have seen the body/clothes constructed. This metaphor has exemplified and reinforced certain Platonic notions, and, if we cannot talk of discovering a solid body that is re-represented in

19

According to Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary (1965), “to translate” means, among other things, “to change from one place, position, or condition to another; to transfer; specifically; to convey to heaven, originally without death; to transfer (a bishop) from one see to another; to move (a saint’s body, relics, etc.) from one place of interment to another.” 20 Although we cannot avoid metaphor, in the Platonic tradition there has been a constant attempt to repress metaphorical representation in favor of proper forms, especially in philosophy. See, for example, Paul de Man’s “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Jacques Derrida’s “White Mythology, or Sara Kofman’s Nietzsche and Metaphor, who all show that, despite the efforts of many philosophers to repress metaphor, they cannot help but make recourse to this trope in their condemnation of it.

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removes, then it may seem that this metaphor is inadequate for describing translation in the post-Nietzschean context. However, the body/clothes has participated, along with a host of other metaphors, in creating what we consider to be translation (and truth), and because our traditional conceptions are so intertwined with many of the Platonic notions that have surfaced with our metaphor of study, to rid ourselves of it would be to lose the vocabulary with which our thoughts have been fashioned. We cannot create a new conception out of nothing. Nietzsche writes that “the only way in which the possibility of subsequently constructing a new conceptual edifice from metaphors themselves can be explained is by the firm persistence of these original forms” (90). For the present study this means we must persist with the body/clothes, revisiting the relationship between the bodies we all have and the ways in which we represent them (us?).

Body/Clothes Refashioned We can begin by looking at Nietzsche’s own recourse to the body/clothes, which illustrates his reversal of the Platonic conception of truth and representation that we have been associating with this metaphor. In The Gay Science he summarizes much of our earlier discussion of his work by saying (in Walter Kaufmann’s translation): What things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for—originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin—all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body. What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such. (122, author’s emphasis)

If we do not have access to the essence of things, and if the language we use to denote truths is foreign to their being, then there is no possibility of the kind of objectivity 42

assumed by many who claim to espouse unveiled truths, free from dissimulation and “spin,” or free from the histories that have named them. We cannot discover what things “are” with language, we can only inquire into what they are called, and by whom. If language is “wrong and arbitrary” with respect to essences, it is anything but a neutral representation of “truth,” and is, consequently, often not at all arbitrary in regards to a certain “truth” one wants to convey. This is very pertinent to translation because, in this scenario, not only will a translation act as another veil, but it will be based, in part, on the many other veils that participate in naming the original. As we have seen, the Bible provides a good illustration because it has such a long history of interpretations and translations that highlights the impossibility of determining some ahistorical truth. Jerome’s Vulgate was first accused of being inaccurate, but was later named as the authentic Word of God, not only as the source text for many subsequent translations, but also as the ultimate authority for the foundation of much of the early church doctrine. It is now impossible to separate this translation of the Bible (and all the other ones) from the way in which we read the original, even if we do so in the original languages. The history of Bible translation shows how these versions, “thrown over” the Bible like dresses, have accumulated over the generations, turning “into its very body.” If we follow tradition with its incessant search for essences, or, in this case, the unmitigated Word, then translation is problematic because each version adds another layer over what we are trying to see. But translation is not necessarily problematic. If we do not concede that words are veils over some original meaning we are seeking, then translation does not add yet another veil that separates us further from naked truth. The truth is in the veils. “We no longer believe that truth

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remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have lived too much to believe this,” Nietzsche writes, and almost prudishly continues, “today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked” (1974: 38). Since it is impossible to attain naked truth, Nietzsche believes our time would be better spent deciphering how and by whom these veils are named truth. Regardless of whether this unattainable naked Truth exists or not, we do have literal bodies that are associated with an identity we clothe to present ourselves to the world. The metaphors are many to describe where identity resides inside us: in the blood, heart, gut, brain, or more out of reach places such as the soul or the unconscious. But even if one of these “places” is designated as the location of our true identity, this identity is never sufficiently stuffed away inside to be kept safe from its external representations. We have all heard the cliché “the clothes make the man” (which has also been used since the time of Cicero), and along these lines, Virginia Woolf observes in Orlando that “there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking” (188). All of our clothes are costumes, and as we put them on, we tend to become what we think they mean. This is more obvious in cases where there are official uniforms, like in the military or in a court of law, but I would say that it is not very different from the many cases when the codes are not so explicitly formulated, such as when one adopts the dress of a hippie, punk, or business executive on vacation. Do we, then, choose our clothes and follow them around? And where do these clothes that wear us, or we them, begin and end?

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When we take the fabric off our skin and stand there naked we are still confronted with something that we often try shaping and sculpting to present ourselves to the world. Though we may spend a lot of money and time to do so, we generally feel that our bodies are still reflections of something more profound that resides within them. However, this core cannot always determine the appearance of our bodies, which age and malfunction against our will, and much of what is associated with our bodies’ exteriority no doubt shapes the identity said to be inside them. These outward appearances can even come to dominate people’s entire conception of themselves. Alma Grund, a character in Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions, for example, has a birthmark across one side of her face, and she explains to the protagonist how it has shaped her identity. Inspired as a young girl by another character with a similar mark from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Birthmark,” 21 Alma has come to realize: Other people carried their humanity inside them, but I wore mine on my face. This was the difference between me and everyone else. I wasn’t allowed to hide who I was. Every time people looked at me, they were looking right into my soul. […I] knew that I would be defined by that purple blotch on my face. (121)

How we identify with our bodies certainly varies from person to person and culture to culture, but we can concede that our identity is not established completely from “within” ourselves, reducible to something that exists free from all the changing things we use to present (but that also seem to get in the way of) our “true” identities. It is impossible to draw a line between identity and its many representations. Formulating an identity is always a changing process, but, nevertheless, we still generally look inward for that “true

21

In this story, the protagonist, Georgiana, is so marked by her birthmark that when her scientist-husband is finally able to rid her of what he considers to be the only blemish on her otherwise unbounded beauty, she dies at the instant it disappears.

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self” at the core of all these things that cannot quite represent us correctly, a core that seems to continually elude a final designation. A good illustration of the difficulty of arriving at a “true self” can be found in a fragment from the poem “The Tobacco Shop” by Alvaro de Campos, one of the many heteronyms used by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. In the middle of the poem, the “poetic I” (“Alvaro,” for the sake of simplicity) wrestles with his clothes in the interminable quest for discovering his identity: I made myself into something I did not know, And what I could have made of myself I did not. The carnival costume I was wearing was all wrong. Soon they took me for someone I wasn’t and I didn’t disown it, and I lost myself. When I tried taking off the mask, It was stuck to my face. When I finally peeled it off and took a look in the mirror, I’d grown older. I was drunk and I didn’t know how to wear the costume I hadn’t taken off. I threw the mask away and went to sleep in the dressing room Like a stray dog the management tolerates Because he’s harmless And I’m going to tell this story to show I’m sublime. (Pessoa 365, my translation)

Alvaro becomes something unexpected, out of line with whom he thought he should be. His appearance does not adequately express him, but before he can change it, others come to know him through this faulty dress. What is more, Alvaro cannot get the mask off at first because it has grown to be part of his face. When he finally manages, he sees he is no longer who he was before. What Alvaro experiences is the process we all go through as we develop the fashions with which we present ourselves to the world. A child is dressed by its parents according to the way they think it should look to the world (both in the sense of looking at the world, and being seen by it), and this first relationship with clothes will have an 46

impact on how the child views fashion in the future. Thinking once again of clothes as language, we can relate the enculturation we receive from fashion to the role language plays in the construction of our identity as seen by psychoanalysis. One of Jacques Lacan’s translators, Bruce Fink, summarizes a basic Lacanian notion of language: We are born into a world of discourse, a discourse or language that precedes our birth and that will live on after our death. Long before a child is born, a place is prepared in its parents linguistic universe: the parents speak of the child yet to be born, try to select the perfect name for it, prepare a room for it, and begin imagining what their lives will be like with an additional member of the household. The words they use to talk about the child have been used for decades, if not centuries, and the parents have generally neither defined nor redefined them despite many years of use. (5)

Children are taught how to use the language and clothes that will define them in accordance with long established traditions that are external to them, although, I would also argue that we are constantly participating, to some extent, in redefining what different clothes and words mean. Our language, like our dress, is a collection of signifiers that are read with the end of discovering the identity presumably inside them. We are born into and raised in a particular heritage of representation, but just like texts we go out into the world, where we will be read in many different ways and acquire new meanings beyond the scope of our parents’ control. The readings others make of us certainly have a profound impact on how we end up viewing ourselves as our “internal” identities must contend with how others view our “external” appearances. The child is in constant negotiation both with itself and with others to establish its identity. Just as we struggle to establish our identity and represent it, a text’s identity is constantly being formed by its interaction with the world, which includes the new forms it acquires through translation. Socrates would say that a key difference between texts and human children is that the former do not have a life inside them in the sense that our 47

bodies do. In other words, they do not have a life inside that can explain what they mean. Of course, we often designate the voice behind the text as the father-author’s, but common sense tells us that parents are not always the best authorities when it comes to the identity of their children. Just as there are infinite varieties of relationships established and developed between children and parents, there are infinite relationships between texts and authors that have differing impacts on the resulting identities of the children-texts. Likewise, texts are separate entities from their “parents” and will go out and circulate in the world where authors cannot control the identities others create for them, and, in some cases, these other influences may play a more influential role than that of the parents. 22 In the context of post-Nietzschean philosophy, texts can only have life insofar as they are read and discussed. They need people constantly explaining them “in other words” than the ones they say literally, and, in a sense, they depend on the possibility of being translated because they can only be meaningful when we relate them somehow to ourselves and our language. If texts forever said the same thing regardless of context or history, there would be, for example, no quarreling over which word or words in the Bible do or do not warrant designations of second-class citizenship. Just as a child dressed a certain way will look very different to one adult than another, the original will be read differently across its diverse readership. We cannot discover and recover essences, but, instead, add veils that, depending on how they are received, may grow into part of the body we are simultaneously trying to unveil.

22

We have seen this is the case with the Bible and we could consider translations, such as, for example, The One Thousand and One Nights, which had a fundamental role in the creation of what this text has become (Cf. Borges 2000). Or, we could think of how much of the “standard” terminology used in psychoanalysis is more a product of the English “Standard Edition” than Freud’s original words (Cf. Kirsner).

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What we have learned from Nietzsche is that interpretation is an act of appropriation, although not an appropriation of some naked truth that is subsequently veiled and obscured. Nietzsche’s work has great implications for translation studies because, in the absence of neutral and objective truth, translators are endowed with a responsibility that goes beyond the traditional expectations that they could simply repeat what the original says, and we cannot ignore their agency as co-creators of the texts whose identities they are helping to name.

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CHAPTER II

Loving Devoration: Haroldo de Campos and his Meticulous Meating A minha maneira de amá-los é traduzi-los. Ou degluti-los, segundo a Lei Antropofágica de Oswald de Andrade: só me interessa o que não é meu. [My way of loving them is translating them. Or devouring them, according to the Anthropophagic Law of Oswald de Andrade: I’m only interested in what’s not mine] Augusto de Campos, Verso, reverso, controverso

When it comes to metaphors that describe translation, the body has not been solely considered as an object of redressing, and in this chapter we will move from the idea of dressing and undressing bodies to that of eating them. The metaphor of cannibalism begins from an entirely different set of presuppositions from those with which we have become familiar in our examination of the traditional use of the body/clothes metaphor. Quite obviously, contrary to the incessant desire to maintain the body intact (even in those cases in which translators admit that it could never be entirely attained or apprehended), the metaphor of cannibalism implies the death of the original at the hands of the translator. 23 Serge Gavronsky, in his essay “The Translator: From Piety to Cannibalism,” contrasts the cannibalistic translator with the kind of traditional views examined in Chapter I. Addressing one of the distinctions we saw when dealing with the 23

This idea is not entirely limited to that of cannibalism, and we can think, for example, of Roland Barthes’s famous essay “The Death of the Author,” in which he proclaims that the reader/interpreter kills the author and supplants him or her, thus bringing about the “the birth of the reader” (Barthes, trans. Stephen Heath). This image is perhaps one of the reasons why the metaphor of cannibalism has been linked to contemporary.

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body/clothes, Gavronsky writes, “whether one adhered to the fundamentalist reading and insisted on a word-by-word operation, or whether one sided with Saint Jerome’s dictum: non verbum e verbo, sed sensum exprimere de sensu, both underscored the submissive nature of the translator” (54). The cannibal, on the other hand, is one who “seizes possession of the ‘original,’ who savors the text, that is, who truly feeds upon the words, who ingurgitates them, and who, thereafter, enunciates them in his own tongue, thereby having explicitly rid himself of the ‘original’ creator” (60). But what does this mean exactly? It is hard to imagine that something could properly be called a “translation” if there is such a radical break with the original text. One may wonder if this sounds more like other categories that are used to, perhaps, free texts from certain obligations associated with translation, words such as “adaptations” or “versions.” Nevertheless, Gavronsky maintains that this is a type of translation, and while a cannibalistic approach attempts a “total absorption of the original” (60), the stress is on the rejection of the supposedly inherent inferiority of the translation. He writes that in the cannibalistic scenario: […] the translation is no longer a presentation of a second degree exercise, feebly trying to reach an adequation with the original, but a primary text, producing equal sentences of stressed and unstressed passages, adhering, in this corps accord, to the shape and the fullest meaning of the ‘original’ while proposing itself as a thing-in-itself. (60)

This still seems to be a bit confusing, considering that, besides asserting that the translation is a primary text, there remains an attempt to maintain “the shape and the fullest meaning of the ‘original.’” Clearly we need to chew over this metaphor of cannibalizing translation and investigate its digestive dynamic.

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Without a doubt, the translator most associated with the metaphor of cannibalism is the Brazilian translator, poet, and literary critic, Haroldo de Campos. 24 De Campos incorporated

Oswald

de

Andrade’s 25

seminal

“Manifesto

Antropófago”

[“Anthropophagic Manifesto”] 26 to his practice of translation. According to Heloisa Gonçalves Barbosa and Lia Wyler, “the theoretical reflections of the brothers Augusto de Campos and Haroldo de Campos on their translation practice are the closest thing to a theory of translation in Brazil,” and their “cannibalist metaphor […] is one of the very few Brazilian contributions to be acknowledged outside Brazil” (332). This metaphor, no doubt, allows us to think of translation in a very different light than the one that the body/clothes metaphor has historically cast, and it can help us imagine translation in a way that seems to overcome some of the binary oppositions that have marked our thinking of translation. However, upon close scrutiny, we will also see that the metaphor of cannibalism in many ways still exemplifies some of the same Platonic presuppositions and structures that it purports to subvert. In order to examine this issue more closely, I will first outline De Campos’s formulation of the metaphor of cannibalism found in some of his theoretical writings and explore how it has guided his practice. With the end of contrasting his work to some of 24 Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) is often mentioned in conjunction with his brother Augusto de Campos (1931-), with whom he undertook many translation and literary projects. Both of them were key figures in the literary movement known as “Concretismo” [“Concretism”], which began in the 1950’s. Although both are associated with cannibalistic translation (and were responsible for popularizing it), I will be focusing on Haroldo de Campos because he became more of a pop icon and achieved the kind of success and notoriety that few translators have enjoyed. It should be noted that Haroldo de Campos was a prolific translator, having published translations of works by major authors from French, Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, English, Chinese, Japanese, and Italian (not to mention his original poetry and literary commentary). It is not my intention to undertake an exhaustive study of his work here. Instead, I will be focusing on a few selections from his general translation theory and his commentary regarding his own translations to explore the theory and practice of cannibalistic translation. 25 Oswald De Andrade (1890-1954), poet, playwright and novelist was one of the key figures of the Brazilian modernist movement, which was emblematically marked by the Semana de Arte Moderna [“Week of Modern Art”]. It took place in São Paulo in February 1922. 26 See the Appendix for my translation of the “Manifesto.”

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the examples in the previous chapter, I will focus primarily on the three books containing his translations of selections from the Bible, which can be found in Bere’Shith: A Cena da Origem [“Bere’Shith: The Scene of the Origin”] 27, Qohélet/O Que Sabe: Eclesiastes [“Qohelet/He-Who-Knows: Ecclesiastes”], and Eden: Um Tríptico Bíblico [“Eden: A Biblical Tryptic”]. These books contain ample commentary by De Campos on his practice, and will aid us in complicating the radically subversive claims he sets forth in his theoretical pronouncements on what textual cannibalism entails. I will also touch upon some of the ways in which his work has been discussed, or, rather, cannibalized, by mainstream translation discourse. This will open up the possibility to extend my analysis of cannibalism beyond De Campos’s work, giving us a perfect point of departure to investigate some of the implications and problems associated with the metaphor as it is typically used.

1. The Recipe As mentioned previously, Haroldo De Campos uses Oswald de Andrade’s 1929 “Anthropophagic Manifesto” as his point of departure in the formulation of translation as cannibalism. In De Campos’s essay “Uma Poética da Radicalidade” [“A Radical Poetics”], which serves as an introduction to the 5th edition of De Andrade’s Pau Brasil [“Brazil Wood”], he writes that the “Manifesto” opposes the idea of the “good savages” exemplified by Rousseau and Romanticism, that is, the natives who would fit nicely into the European conception of the natural evolution of cultures, and who accepted the supposed civilizing gifts of European language, religion, and enlightened rationality.

27

For all the works that are unpublished in English, I will give a translation of the title the first time it is mentioned and thereafter refer to it by its Portuguese name.

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According to this view, the natives were always, of course, on the receiving end of the cultural “exchange.” This is the palatable version of the indigenous peoples, the kind of “good Indians” De Andrade says we see on “postcards and cookie jars” (De Campos, “Uma Poetica” 44, quoting De Andrade, my translation), a tame version that is ready and willing to be, in a sense, domesticated and consumed. Instead, De Andrade advocates for an “inverted indianism,” more along the lines of Montaigne in On Cannibals, a “bad savage” who, according to De Campos, “exercises his unrestrained critique (devouring) against the impositions of civilization” (ibid.). In his essay translated by Maria Tai Wolff as “The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe Under the Sign of Devouring,” De Campos continues along the same lines saying that De Andrade’s “anthropophagy” formulates the idea of cultural influence “from the point of view of the ‘bad savage,’ devourer of whites – the cannibal,” and thus, he says, it “does not involve a submission (an indoctrination)” (44). Instead of simply accepting the influx of cultural influences as ready-made objects, thus passively adopting European dominance, De Campos, following De Andrade, says that “any past which is an ‘other’ for us deserves to be negated. We could say it deserves to be eaten, devoured” (ibid.). Far from the Western understanding of cannibalism that focuses on the destruction and death of those they devour, the act is seen as a form of nourishment, it serves to “take from them marrow and protein to fortify and renew [the cannibal’s] own natural energies.” In this way, the spirit can be assimilated, though not necessarily conforming to the norms of the Europeans, but according to the manners of the indigenous peoples. This disallows the vision that the New World must follow the same “natural” linear path of the Old, a view that always privileges the dominant cultures, or, in De Campos’s translated words, it is “a refusal of the essentialist metaphor

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of gradual, harmonious natural evolution. A new idea of tradition (anti-tradition) to be made operative as a counter-revolution, as a countercurrent opposed to the glorious, prestigious canon” (ibid. 45). This allows his Brazilian culture to affirm itself, and, as De Campos says in “Uma Poética da Radicalidade,” “to assimilate foreign experience into the Brazilian character, and reinvent it on our terms with unmistakably local qualities, giving the resulting product an autonomous character that endows it with the possibility of becoming, in an international confrontation, a product for exportation” (27, my translation). 28 The emphasis here is that there can be a differential reading of history, and that the European view of the indigenous Americans, and even the one the Europeans have of themselves, does not tell the whole story. Instead of simply trying to recover what these things mean in the original contexts, the agency of those who are assimilating foreign texts and ideas is highlighted. This is not merely a reversal of the power structure that dominated the colonies. According to De Campos: It is an anti-tradition which passes through the gaps of traditional historiography, which filters through its breaks, which edges through its fissures. This is not based on a directly derived anti-tradition – for this would be the substitution of one linearity for another – but on the recognition of certain marginal paths or patterns alongside the preferred course of normative historiography. (“The Rule of Anthpophagy” 50) 29

28

In his essay “The Alexandrian Barbarians: Planetary Redevouring,” de Campos gives the example of the “Boom,” in which writers such as Borges, Paz, De Andrade, Lezama Lima, Carpentier, and Cabrera Infante “cannibalize” European canonical writers and create something new from them. For example, “Lezama ‘creolizes’ Proust and interconnects Mallarmé with Góngora: his quotations are truncated and approximate, like the leftovers of a diluvial digestion” (174, trans. Odile Cisneros). In the end, the work of these writers, “all these digestive rumbles, all this hodgepodge, ancestral rumination, already lost in the mysteries of time, could not remain indefinitely ignored in Europe” (ibid.: 176). 29 A good example of this alternative historiography can be found in de Campos’s essay translated by A.S. Bessa as “Disappearance of the Baroque in Brazilian Literature: The Case of Gregório de Matos,” in which he proposes that the supposedly “minor” (or, in fact, marginal or previously ignored) writer Matos who, for many, does not fit into the Brazilian literary canon, can be reconsidered and re-posited as an author of major importance.

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We can say that De Andrade makes an explicit gesture towards this notion of forging “marginal paths” against traditional historiography in the way he dates his “Anthropophagic Manifesto.” Instead of following the Christian calendar, indicating the year 1929, he marks the date as 374, counting from the year when the Caeté Indians devoured the first bishop of Brazil, Pêro Fernandes Sardinha. Not only does his last name the word for “sardine” in Portuguese, but this bishop was a crusader for a very forceful Europeanization of the indigenous populations, and, thus, his death at the hands of the natives is a perfect moment for De Andrade to establish as the genesis of the era of cultural resistance, ritual digestion and assimilation. Though De Andrade’s “anthropophagy” deals primarily with questions related to the broader dissemination of literary and artistic forms, quite clearly it has much to offer for a particular understanding of the practice of translation, and Haroldo and Augusto de Campos have always kept a flavor of this metaphor in the pronouncements they made on their own practices. In the next chapter we will examine in more detail the relationship between the broader metaphorical and metaphysical hierarchies involved in the colonial project, as well as the traditional view of originals and translations they entail, but for the moment we can note one fundamental difference between dressing bodies and eating them. Regarding the translation of canonical texts into Latin America, beginning with the Bible, at least in European understandings of translation (and I will argue later, the very colonial project), the focus has always been on the preservation of the body, as we saw in Chapter I. These great texts were to be revered (especially with the case of the Bible), and those who determined what constituted the body, or, in other words, what things meant, saw themselves as the ultimate possessors of the truth to be transported and established in

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the colony. 30 This implies following certain norms, standards, and traditions of interpretation that, in the minds of those who felt they already possessed the truth, would lead others to apprehend the body of meaning as it should be. The cannibal, on the other hand, does not maintain the body at all costs; he devours it, digests it, sacrifices it to a new life, reformulated on a foundation differing from the one that tradition has tried to shove down his throat. What can be assimilated finds new expression, and what cannot, well, this metaphor implies that it is not worth keeping. At times it may seem that the anthropophagous approach to translation recalls that of the belle infidels, or the violence implied by Hillary the Confessor and Thomas Drant as they marched the captive text into their cultures. But even with their expressed violence and radical redressing, they always claimed the body was left intact. The German Romantics, for their part, continually reiterated that they were only interested in seeing their authors “as they really were.” The difference is that the metaphysical superiority of the original is radically questioned in the cannibalist scenario as authors are devoured with no illusion that the body will remain the same after passing through the digestive process of translation. Here, the demand that translators remain as neutral as possible (refraining from touching the body) is discarded at the first bite. In addition, the idea of the inherent superiority of the original with respect to the translation is put into question, as the translation is not purporting to re-present the original itself, but present a creative transformation of the text, made possible by distinctive elements from the target culture and language. Rather than exemplifying the classic laments of translators “who

30

There have been many fascinating studies regarding how the colonial powers sought to control the interpretations not only of how they were to be seen by the colonial subjects, but also how these subjects were to view themselves. See, for example, Rafael, Niranjana, and Cheyfitz, who wrote on the colonialization projects in the Philippines, India, and North America respectively.

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are at such a great disadvantage” (Schlegel), and who call their work a “defective edition” (Florio), or say of themselves, “slaves we are, and labour on another man’s plantation” (Dryden), a cannibalistic translator like De Campos celebrates the fact that the translation is not just an attempted copy of the original, but something new that he has created. It is not difficult to draw a connection to the view of translation we have been fleshing out through the metaphor of cannibalism with the work of Nietzsche. In “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Nietzsche claims that our concepts are not fixed, absolute entities; they are not the “truth” we often contend. Instead: That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and a toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuition rather than by concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition. (90, trans. Breazeale)

These “conceptual barriers” can take on many forms, one of which, in our present case, would be the idea of the superiority of the original, or the ways in which history has claimed certain texts must be read. The process of digestion can be understood as precisely this process of throwing the text into confusion and following a certain intuition, which would include making use of elements that could never have been imagined in the original, such as autochthonous elements of the target culture and language. In fact, the idea of putting “it back together in an ironic fashion,” and “paring the most alien things” could even be considered as the very hallmark of translation. One of the reasons this practice has been met with such scorn and suspicion is that it naturally places something into a context where many feel it does not properly belong. These are 58

feelings that are only augmented when dealing with cultures that are considered inferior, such as the translation of material from dominant into subaltern languages. In the “Manifesto,” in line with Nietzsche’s insistence on “shattering and mocking the old conceptual boundaries,” De Andrade writes that, contrary to the colonizer’s view of the New World, he is “against stories of man that begin at Cape Finisterra,” in other words, against the history of Latin America that begins from the point of view of European history and Europe’s “discovery.” As if making a gesture towards Nietzsche’s call for ironic and creative interaction with this “planking of concepts,” De Andrade writes that “we made Christ be born in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará.” 31

2. Sitting Down for Dinner When it comes to Haroldo de Campos’s practice, we can already perceive traces of cannibalistic nibblings in the very titles of some of his translations, establishing from the outset that they are not ordinary translations. For example, his translation of Goethe’s Faust becomes Deus e O Diabo no Fausto de Goethe [“God and the Devil in Goethe’s Faust”] 32, which, apart from diverting the usual expectations that come from the countless translations that have been done of this work, makes a reference to the 1964 movie Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol [“God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun”] by the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, thus contextualizing his version within

31

The capital of the state of Bahia on Brazil’s eastern coast is Salvador, which means “savior,” referring to Jesus Christ. Belém do Pará is the capital of Pará, a state in northern Brazil. Belém is the translation of the same word from which “Bethlehem” comes in English. Curiously, we could interpret this verse (“we made Christ be born in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará”) as saying that the Brazilians made the origins of Christianity be born in translation. 32 The English translation given to this film was Black God, White Devil.

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contemporary Brazilian culture. 33 Both Gavronsky and De Campos imply that a cannibalistic translation is to be seen as a text in itself without necessarily depending on a comparison with the original, although De Campos does not try to cover up the fact that his version is a translation. Instead, it is highlighted, and, by drawing attention to this fact, De Campos shatters the illusion of sameness that most translations attempt to maintain by minimizing references to the process the original has undergone, and he directly calls attention to the text’s difference from the original. Consider another example: Octavio Paz’s Blanco becomes Transblanco, almost as if the translator were promising something more than the original. 34 Not only in the titles did he counteract the traditional attempt to reproduce the whole text and nothing but the text, but De Campos frequently offered abridged versions of the texts he translated, or rather, only the parts that interested him, as in the case of Panorama do Finnegan’s Wake [“Panorama of Finnegan’s Wake”], or his selections from the Bible, which we will be examining shortly. Perhaps one of the most apparent cannibalistic moves is the fact that, in many cases, the name “Haroldo de Campos” figures more prominently on the covers of the books than the authors he is translating. Instead of striving for the kind of invisibility history has usually demanded, De Campos asserts himself as an active participant (or the most active one) in the creation of the text, as if affirming: “this is my version, this is my selection, my digestion.”

33

For a detailed account of De Campos’s translation of Faust, including the manner in which it attempts to subvert the metaphysical Christian tradition inherent in the original, see Edwin Gentzler’s chapter “Cannibalism in Brazil” in his book Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory. 34 It is worthy of note that Paz writes to de Campos in a letter regarding his translation: “Not only is it very faithful but, what’s more, the Portuguese text is much better and more concise than the Spanish” (Transblanco 119, my translation).

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In addition to these clear marks of visibility, De Campos also claims to subvert the traditional (European?) modes of interpretation in a manner reminiscent of the “Manifesto.” Perhaps the most poignant examples would be his translations of the Bible. To begin with, de Campos makes a point of distancing himself from what might be possible attacks based on unorthodox semantics. “My approximation to the biblical texts – it should be noted – is secular. I am principally interested in poetry,” he writes in the introduction to the fragments from Genesis he translated to comprise Bere’Shith: A Cena da Origem (19). 35 Not only is he steering clear from exigencies related to specific theological readings of the Bible, but he also distances himself from much of what has historically underlined the goal of translation. In the introduction to Qohélet / O-QueSabe: Eclesiastes he writes (and later repeats in Bere’Shith) that his translations “in no way have the immense ambition of recovering a supposed ‘authenticity’ of the original language, not from a philological point of view, nor from a hermeneutical point of view. There is no aspiration to restore some textual ‘truth.’ They are not nourished by some ‘purist’ illusion” (11). This is, of course, radically different from the vast majority of the intentions professed by those who have translated biblical texts, and he repeats claims of this sort throughout the lengthy introductions and studies that accompany his translations of Bible passages. A good example of the deviation from standard biblical exegesis is De Campos’s explanation of his translation of the word shamáyim, found in Genesis 1:1, which is traditionally translated as “céu” in Portuguese (“heaven” in English). He notes that the French rabbi of the Middle Ages, Rashi, renowned for his commentaries on sacred Hebrew texts, “mentions the creation of heaven (shamáyim) by way of ‘fire’ and ‘water’, 35

All quotes from Bere’Shith and Qohélet are my translations.

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or of a mixture of both,” and that “within the Hebrew word, we can catch a glimpse of a composite of ‘esh (‘fire’) and máyim (‘water’)” (Bere’Shith 27). De Campos opts, then, for the composite fogoágua (“firewater”), which, in his “secular” approach, evokes the image of magma, thus avoiding the “already conceptualized” and “abstract” vision of heaven that tradition has handed down. 36

In another example, commenting on his

translation of Genesis 1:2, he says, “I translated thóhu vavóhu as ‘lodo torvo’, attempting to redesign the phonosemantic play of the original” (ibid.). 37 He quotes other versions from translations into several languages and justifies his choice semantically, but his main focus is clearly a recreation of certain sounds found in the original. At the same time, although De Campos does not mention this, we can add that his choice here creates a poetic connection to the image of the magma-like “fogoágua.” He uses similar tactics when translating the second creation story in his book Eden: Um Tríptico Bíblico. In the first place, he mentions the word-play between the word for “man” (‘adam) and the earth from which he was created (‘adamá), so he opts for “humus” (soil), instead of simply using the more common “terra,” which would have no oral connection with “homem” (43). He calls it “terra-húmus,” and later refers to “man,” who was created from the dust of the earth, as “homem-húmus.” In addition, he says that there is a “sonorous-semantic word-play between ‘ish (‘man’) and ‘ishshá (‘woman’)” (44). The connection in Portuguese is not as strong, so he uses the word “mulher” (“woman”), but capitalizes the letters that are common between the “homemhÚMUs” and “MUlher,” to highlight the sounds he wants readers to hear (ibid.). 36

Secular or not, I will discuss this “firewater” in the next chapter when we consider alternative readings of the creation of the world, and thus, the mythologies that surround the origins of meaning. 37 Thóhu vavóhu is translated as “formless and empty” in the NIV, and “without form and void” in the King James Version. Lodo is mud or slime, and torvo is something that is dark and terrifying (Dicionário Houaiss da Lingua Portuguesa).

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De Campos’s practice often bears a hint of the kind of foreignization exemplified by the Romantics, and he pays his debt to this tradition in the introduction to Qohélet, making a brief reference to Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (32). 38 The whole passage to which he makes reference, in Harry Zohn’s translation, reads: “it is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work” (82). Taking a hint from this, De Campos says that he is attempting to “Hebraicize” Portuguese, and, perhaps, counter to Benjamin’s messianic view of “pure language,” he reiterates that he is not seeking what traditional views of translation demand: Hebraicization, in my case, is not confined by the immense ambition of recovering the lost ‘authenticity’ of the original text. It only implies the operational project of rescuing, when possible, its poeticity, expanding the horizons of my language and exploring within it the virtuality of the influx of the Hebrew text. (Qohélet 32-33)

Instead of recovering the authentic original, he is interested in the possibilities that are opened up when his language is forced into contact with the ancient structures of the Hebrew language, something that explains the almost primitive nature of his translated, poetic verses, instead of the free-flowing sentences one is accustomed to seeing in a translated Bible. While this may bear some similarity (and owe some debt) to the German tradition, I have already remarked that the images evoked by the metaphor of cannibalism and its digestive process, in a sense, also seem to recall some of the traits of the translation approach exemplified by D’Ablancourt, given De Campos’s propensity to draw heavily from the domestic context and its poetic and linguistic tradition. This is not a 38

Although it cannot be said that Benjamin is one of the “German Romantics,” his vision of translation is very much within this tradition.

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contradiction. I mentioned in the previous chapter that, although they have been typically seen as the two opposite ends of a gradient, these two sides coexist in all views of translation. De Campos is not interested in articulating a point on this gradient from which a translator should work, privileging domestic over foreign or vice versa, but he simultaneously tries to exploit both of those “sides.” The translation scholar Else Vieira says that the coexistence of opposites such as the “heavenly and daemonic” or “irreverent and reverent” is a sign that De Campos is distancing himself from this type of binary gradient. “Moving beyond essentialist binarisms,” she writes, “Haroldo de Campos aportuguesa the Hebrew language and hebraiza the Portuguese language,” and points out that De Campos “stresses the resources he used specifically from Brazilian Portuguese” precisely because he subscribes to “Benjamin’s view that fidelity relates to the signifying form beyond the transmission of a communicative content” (“Liberating Calibans” 105). At the same time, while he is no doubt a truly unique translator, let us avoid the kind of romanticization that often accompanies praise of his subversive cannibalistic translation practices. While De Campos does make a motion towards, as Vieira says, “moving beyond essentialist binarisms,” it is often assumed that the shock value of the violence involved in this metaphor is enough to free translators from the essentialist hierarchies involved in their activity, and, thus, from the ambivalent feelings often associated with the translation process. De Campos, as we remember, praises the “bad savage,” who is not indoctrinated (“The Rule of Anthropophagy” 44), who goes against the “prestigious canon,” and alongside this cannibal he proclaims “any past which is an ‘other’ for us deserves to be negated” (ibid.). His practice, however, seems far from any idea of negating. For example, his six-page translation of a selection from Genesis is

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accompanied by nineteen pages of explanations and justifications of his choices based on the authority of the foremost Biblical scholars as well as major canonical translations in various languages. He may not be chasing after the same kind of semantic truth readers and translators normally associate with God’s Word, but the relentless pursuit of “getting it right” still remains; he may be digesting the body, but we are nonetheless still dealing with an attempt at transporting or reconstituting a body. After it is digested, De Campos still wants to deliver to his readers as many of the original morsels as possible. His commentary is, indeed, very informative, but we cannot ignore the fact that he has, for the most part, built up his study of the Bible on the back of a tradition he is supposedly negating. The claims he makes can be likened to the many translators who have defended their seemingly “subversive” methods by alledging that their translations, are, in fact, more true to the original than other ways of translating (we can think, for example, of Jerome, or D’Ablancourt). In fact, on occasion, De Campos has said that he is not exactly faithful, but operates on the level of “hyperfidelity” (“Paul Valéry e a poética da tradução” 4). He purports that he pays closer attention to details, beyond simple semantics, and combines them all into a poetic expression in his own language, thus freeing his work from the shackles of normal “translation,” moving into the realm of what he coined to describe his work: “transcreation.” 39 In a sense, this move can be seen

39

In her doctoral dissertation Ecos e Reflexos: A Construção do Cânone de Augusto e Haroldo de Campos a Partir de suas Concepções de Tradução [“Echoes and Reflections: Haroldo and Augusto De Campos’s Construction of the Canon via their Conceptions of Translation”], Silene Moreno discusses the relationship of transcreation with “hyperfidelity.” She quotes from an interview with de Campos: “What I call transcreation is not a translation that is unconcerned with the original, a free creation parallel to the original. I consider transcreation as hyperfaithful to the original, because it is not only faithful to the content of the original, but to the formal treatment of the microstructure of this content, to everything that is semanticized.” (Moreno 137, quoting an interview with José Guilherme Rodrigues and Manuel da Costa Pinto in Cult-Revista Brasileira de Literatura, n. 13, 1998, my translation). In the section “A tradução ‘criativa’ como busca da fidelidade” [“Creative translation as the search for fidelity”], she concludes that

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as one that, at the same time that it highlights this idea of creative hyperfidelity, also protects his work from the kind of attacks often leveled against texts that are burdened with all the baggage that normally accompanies the still-secondary conception of “translation.” It is in the introduction to Qohélet / O-Que-Sabe: Eclesiastes that De Campos makes a reference to Benjamin’s notion of “hyperfidelity,” and the commentary of his translation process can give us some examples of what this may entail. Commenting on the title, he writes: “Qohelet, a polysemic word that means: the one who speaks before an assembly (ekklesía, in Greek, hence Ekklesiastés), or preacher, or Collector of Proverbs, or, even, the Wiseman; a name I preferred translating as O-Que-Sabe (‘He-WhoKnows’)” (Qohélet 19). He opts against biblical translation conventions and tries to free us from the tradition inherited from the Greek title, in order to, as it were, bring us closer to the original. It is his intention that we can “return, thus, to something of the original phonetic form and condense, in a current expression in our own language, its most outstanding semantic content” (ibid.). Concerning a different part of the same translation he mentions, “I tried, whenever possible, to observe the principal of equivalence on the lexical level” (31). Apparently, therefore, devouring and negating origins is not simply an attempt to move away from them, as De Campos tries to repeat, on many levels, all the particular aspects of the most original version to which he has access. We see similar attempts at hyperfidelity in the story of creation found in Bereshith. As mentioned earlier with regard to “fogoágua” and “lodo torvo,” De Campos says he is trying to recapture the “phonosemantic play of the original” (Bere-shith 27).

even the ideas of “creative” and “abusive” translation are based on the traditional notion of fidelity (215216).

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Attempting to preserve all the minute details, he contemplates the simple forms of the original and says, “my goal was to bring to life this primeval (and at the same time highly elaborated) poetry in our language, shaking it creatively with the violence of its breath, keeping this fundamental wind from becoming lost or sweetened” (ibid. 19-20). He also had recordings made of the verses being recited in the original language, which “aided in capturing the sonorous image of the original” (ibid. 12). Apart from the Bible, his comments on his “transcreations” of the many canonical writers he translated carry some of the same undercurrents. With Homer, for example, he says he was able to “reorchestrate the melopoeia, on the phono-rhythmic-prosodic level, of the original Greek” (Illíada de Homero 111). He prefaces the translation he did with his brother Augusto and Decio Pignatari of Mallarmé’s “Coup de Dés” with twenty-five pages of glosses, explaining, almost word for word, how he arrived at his translation, which he feels recapture the fundamental elements of the original (Mallarmé 119-144). Are we then simply dealing with the same kind of “faithful infidelity” that we discovered when working through the fabric of the body/clothes metaphor? We have to wonder if this approach is all that different from that of the translators we saw in Chapter I, who admit translation is violent because it can never produce an exact copy of the original, but still keep this as their ideal goal. Like them, De Campos then proceeds to recreate (transcreate?) in every minute detail—after assimilating the flesh, transfusing the blood, and parasitically sucking up its vital force—as much of the original as possible.

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3. Mother’s Clothes At the beginning of this chapter, I made a reference to the essay “The Translator: From Piety to Cannibalism” by Serge Gavronsky, who, in drawing his distinction between the traditional and the cannibalistic conceptions of translation, introduces Freud’s Oedipal triangle into the discussion. Gavronsky never mentions Haroldo de Campos, and, to my knowledge, De Campos never discusses Freud or psychoanalysis at any length, especially in connection to translation (although Freud was most certainly eaten and excreted throughout Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto”). Here we can draw on Gavronsky in order to explore in more detail the distinction between what we have been calling the traditional Western view of translation and that of the cannibal, and, in this way, address the questions posed regarding the seeming inconsistencies in De Campos’s practice of loving devoration. Gavronsky contrasts the sentiments of the cannibal-translator to those of translators he calls “the monastic, the courtly, and the Freudian, the latter incorporating the two former ones” (59). Those he calls the monastic translators—after the Benedictine monks that translated the Holy Scriptures who took “vows of chastity, poverty and obedience”— strove for a strict “word-for-word” translation (54). These monks helped constitute the tradition exemplified in the body/clothes metaphor, and we can easily imagine that translators, believing in the sanctity of what is contained in the holy texts, shy away from the idea of touching or meddling with the body. Gavronsky proposes that Freud’s Oedipal triangle is at the heart of this dynamic and provides an image that mirrors the body/clothes, that of spirit/flesh: “[the monastic translators] are strictly circumscribed by clearly indicated interdictions that prohibit them from entertaining any

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but the most formal relationships with the mother text. In this Platonic coupling, the emphasis has solely been placed on the signified (the spirit); the signifier (the flesh) has been totally avoided” (ibid.). Translators are not to take possession of what is not theirs, and, especially when dealing with God’s word, must refrain from tasks that are only proper to the author, such as the act of endowing the texts they translate with meaning. In this sense, the translator is a kind of slave at the service of the master-author. As I have pointed out before, the translation and interpretation of the Bible has had a great impact on how we handle texts in the West, and Gavronsky also notes, regarding the Oedipal mark in our conception of translation, that “such cultural-ideological conditions in the West have stressed the slave-master argument which, apart from the Biblical analogy, is reinforced by the sacredness of the author, incorporated into our own understanding of literature itself” (55). The early Bible translators helped create a sort of “translator’s catechism, a veritable code of conduct. That many of these early translators were men of the church explains the theological transference located in what is now considered a lay operation” (54). Again and again we have seen references, over the course of this investigation, to the fundamental role played by Christianity and the translation of the Bible in forming our idea of “books” and “authors,” and Gavronsky reinforces this notion by saying that our most general or “lay” conception of translation has been constructed around the idea that the translator is ultimately at the service of the authorial source of signification, a sacred figure who supposedly engenders the text and bestows it with life. This master/slave dynamic has been woven throughout the fabric of the body/clothes metaphor. We even saw Dryden mention it by name: “slaves we are, and labour on another man’s plantation […] He who invents is master of his thoughts and

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words: he can turn and vary them as he pleases, till he renders them harmonious; but the wretched translator has no such privilege” (175). Hand in hand with the master/slave, there is also the intermingling of parallel metaphors from the family dynamic: fatherauthors, possessors of female texts, and translators, who, while recognizing that they will never become true fathers, aspire to be good sons or, as we saw with Florio, benevolent stepfathers. 40 Again, in Gavronsky’s words: “the slave is a willing one (a hyperbolic servant, a faithful): the translator considers himself as the child of the father-creator, his rival, while the text becomes the object of desire” (55). What is most proper to the original text will forever be property of the author-father, and translators are always reassuring us that they have not been bold enough to call it their own (“I have not the vanity to think of my copy equal to the original,” says Denham [156], among so many others), at the same time that they harbor aspirations of taking the place of the author. In fact, they are considered most successful when they can render themselves invisible, eclipsed in the father’s shadow, so that only the creator’s words are present, untouched, in their fullest form. The promise not to appropriate this object of desire is the promise not to leave any fingerprints, no traces that they have been there. As Freud says in Totem

40

Here I am going to focus primarily on the relationship of the father to the translator-son. The gendering of this metaphor here is undeniable, and it is not without serious implications and inconsistencies. I am concerned with how we have traditionally constructed it, and will “play along” with some of the assumptions of the hierarchy with which I do not agree. Once we see how our conception has been constructed, we can then begin to rework it, something that might include, for example, reading the invisible space women occupy in these metaphors, and compare it to the fundamental, and often invisible, role they play in our society, such as their role in maintaining the family-line. I am thinking of the role women have had in the rearing of children and keeping families together, from the inner city to suburbia, here and across the Middle East, Africa and Asia. In some of these places women are more or less legal property of men though their role for maintaining the status quo cannot be underestimated. Although women have traditionally played a much greater role than men in the rearing of children in the United States, for example, it is the name of the father that is appended to the children’s names, while the mothers’ names simply disappear. Now is not the time for this inquiry, but it would be interesting to reread these metaphors from the point of view of women, who, like translators, have played an immense role in history but have, nevertheless, been relegated to a position of invisibility. For more on this topic, once again, I refer readers to Lori Chamberlain’s essay “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation.”

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and Taboo, “to touch is the beginning of every act of possession, of every attempt to make use of a person or thing” (29), and translators, at least from the chaste monks to the present, seem to inherently swear an oath that they will refrain from touching as much as possible. Wrapped in the metaphors of touching bodies of naked truth, in this familial scenario, the translator’s restraint is akin to the observation of the prohibition of incest. Unfortunately for the author (but much to the translator’s delight), this is impossible, and the prohibition must be violated “just a little bit.” The desires are kept at bay, the oath is to touch as little as possible, and much of what is written by translators about their work has been an attempt to describe how the author shines through in the translation. Condensing many of the ideas we are working around, Gavronsky writes: Traditions (taboos) impose upon the translator a highly restricted, ritual role. He is forced to curtail himself (strictly speaking) in order to respect the interdictions on incest. To tamper with the text would be tantamount to eliminating, in part or totally, the father-author(ity), the dominant presence. And yet, touching the mother text (sic) is an unavoidable trial, and passing through it, the translator experiences a series of pleasures of a sexual nature which are veiled as acts of good works that will assure him a reputation, or perhaps even posthumous salvation. As the son is made in the image of the father, so, on a similar plane, the translator forms himself in the light of the first creator, consecrated now not only by a cultural tradition, but also by a universal biological drive. Given this, the pious translator should no longer be characterized as a modest achiever […], but rather as an example of a successful repression of incest, all the while allowing the translator to express his sublimated desires in a product to which he appends his proper name. (55)

The body/clothes metaphor helps us understand the joys of translation as the expression of these “sublimated desires.” If one is to change the clothes on some body of meaning, then surely the translator feels that, at one point, even if for a fleeting second, he will see or handle the naked body even though he cannot fully possess it. In fact, history also demands that a translator get close to the text; it gives him the duty (or opportunity) to

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examine it closely, measuring all its intimate parts, 41 and, in the end, “append his proper name” next to the author-father’s. Translation is still considered indecent, however, because translators assume roles they can never fulfill, taking the place of the true father, and they must, in fact, transgress the father’s law by touching what is only proper to him. But, at the same time, transgression will never make the translator-son the author, for, as Gavronsky says, “the text in the mother tongue always remain[s] perfectly unreachable” (57). There will always be, then, at least some degree of transgression in the act of translation, which, as Gavronsky points out, is evident in the age-old axiom “traduttore, traditore” (56), though, he says, this transgression has been enacted to varying degrees (57). In fact, we could say that most discourse related to translation, a task that is seen as only able to provide an approximation, revolves precisely around these degrees. That there are degrees of difference from the original implies treason, which, as we saw with D’Ablancourt, is sometimes considered necessary to “keep it the same.” As we have clearly witnessed in the body/clothes metaphor, many successful translators are “those who have transgressed the word-for-word rules, those who have seen through the semantical, syntactical and grammatical levels to the underlying order of sense-rhythm that constitutes the text,” and have become “co-creators, enunciators of a message in their own mother tongues” (ibid.). Gavronsky gives the examples of Baudelaire’s translations of Poe and Rilke’s of Labé. He calls them “strong hands,” seemingly because they are willing to touch the original more than just a little bit, bold enough to transgress, although, in all cases, still admitting that it will never be theirs, and that they are

41

Gayatri Spivak, in the “Politics of Translation,” even says that “translation is the most intimate act of reading” (398).

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ultimately at the service of the original. Translators are forbidden to touch, and required to touch (and sometimes celebrated for it); they must change everything, but at the same time, keep it identical. Naturally, in this scenario, the craft of translation is fraught with ambivalence. Gavronsky’s discussion could offer a possible reading of the ambivalence Jerome exhibited when he claimed: “now I not only admit but freely announce that in translating from the Greek – except of course in the case of Holy Scripture, where even the syntax contains a mystery – I render, not word for word, but sense for sense” (25). Jerome literally lived part of his life as a monastic translator, living an ascetic life in the Syrian desert after his famous dream, 42 in part, to free himself from his earlier pagan influences (Kelly 41-44). Cicero’s work had had a profound influence on Jerome and perhaps the comments, in which he claims word-for-word translation should be used with the Bible, are a reminder to himself that he must minimize his dependence on pagan authors. In other words, maybe Jerome was trying to reassure himself and others that, when it comes to the Holy Word, he was not transgressing the text and the author in an Ciceronian fashion.

42

Jerome was fraught with internal strife as an adult. As a young student he had been very influenced by pagan literature, especially that of Cicero, something he would later come to regret, and for which he would repent (Kelly 43). Around 374 (although the date is disputed), Jerome had a dream that he would recount years later in a letter. According to Jerome’s biographer, J.N.D. Kelly, the dream came at a time in which Jerome wanted to break away from the world, but was having difficulties giving up his collection of classical books (42). One night during Lent, and during an episode of high fever, he dreamt he stood before a judge who asked him what he was. Jerome replied that he was a Christian and the judge called him a liar, adding: “You are a disciple of Cicero, not of Christ; for your heart is where your treasure is” (42). Afterwards he swore that he would give up all of his worldly books that were so dear to him.

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4. Edible and/or Oedipal? As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, Gavronsky contrasts the Freudian translator to the cannibal who does not respect the prohibitions of touching the body of the mother-text, the object of desire. “The original has been captured, raped, and incest performed. Here, once again, the son is father of the man” (60). It should be pointed out, however, that although it seems that the Freudian translator is positioned in opposition to the cannibalistic one, the evocation of cannibalism is, in a sense, Freudian as well, since Gavronsky draws from Freud’s definition of this act in Totem and Taboo. He quotes Freud as saying, “by absorbing part of the body of a person through the act of eating we also come to possess the properties which belonged to that person” (Gavronsky, footnote 21, quoting Totem and Taboo 70). In his text, Freud offers an account of a primal scene of civilization, in which he posits the Oedipal complex at the very heart of an act of cannibalism. This narrative offers one particular scenario with which we can explore the manner in which Haroldo de Campos both attempts to sever ties with, as well as reconstruct, the origin. Describing

his

“Transluciferação

Mefistofáustica”

[“Mephistofaustic

Transluciferation”] of Goethe’s Faust, De Campos writes that his translation is “a ‘parricidal dis-memory’, it ‘intends to erase the origin, to obliterate the original’” (Vieira 109, quoting De Campos Deus e o Diabo 209). Earlier I identified the father-son dynamic that has been prevalent in the general conception of translation in the West, and here we can examine De Campos’s “parricidal” cannibalism in the context of Freud’s narration, which, in addition to involving parricide and the subsequent eating of the father, also

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deals with the prohibition of incest, something we saw Gavronsky liken to the prohibitions translators face when dealing with a mother text that is not theirs. Freud’s narrative involves a tribal clan consisting of sons, a father, and a group of women over whom the father has complete control. The sons, jealous of their father, ban together, kill him, and feast upon his body to literally absorb his power, or as Freud tells it in A. A. Brill’s translation, “this violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired part of his strength” (122). But this assumption of power was not without a kind of ambivalence similar to what we have seen in relation to translation. Freud continues, “they hated the father who stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands and their desire for power, but they loved and admired him. After they had satisfied their hate by his removal and had carried out their wish for identification with him, the suppressed tender impulses had to assert themselves” (122-3), and their remorse led them to reinstate the father’s law. In addition to the guilt, when the father is gone, the rivalry for the women continued among the brothers: sexual desire does not unite men, it separates them. Though the brothers had joined forces in order to overcome the father, each was the other’s rival among the women. Each one wanted to have them all to himself like the father, and in the fight of each against the other the new organization would have perished. (123)

The all-powerful father was replaced by several sons who vied for his position. Only one person could be in control; ultimately, there can be only one who has definitive control, the source of the law that governs the family, and the one who will produce the heirs to the family line.

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The idea of a single origin of power has been repeated throughout the history of Western thought, and we have already seen it in Plato. While explicating his theory of representation with beds and carpenters that we saw in Chapter I, Socrates claims that everything can only have one true form, which, he says, is created by God. When questioned by Glaucon how he knows this is the case, Socrates replies: “if He made only two, then again one would come to light whose form they in turn would both possess, and that would be the one that is the being of a bed and not the other two” (X 597c). In other words, Socrates cannot comprehend any system that is not ordered this way; the entire Platonic structure depends upon there being only one true form, one source of signification. Similarly, Christianity is a monotheistic religion, which, by definition places the absolute origin of all meaning in one being. The Bible, then, tells a story of the genealogy of God’s people in which, beginning with the sons of the first man, there is a battle between brothers for the birthright, the right to succeed the father in all of his glory, to be the carrier of the family name. 43 In Freud’s narrative, the absence of a father, we

43

The family line is an important motif in the Bible. At the very beginning of Genesis, the first murder of Abel by Cain is committed precisely over questions related to winning their father Adam’s favor. This is followed by great drama regarding who would carry the birthright in subsequent generations. For example, Abraham is challenged by God to sacrifice his long-awaited son Isaac, thus threatening the continuation of Abraham’s family line. When he passes the test, God tells him, “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore” (Gen. 22:17), thus reaffirming the promise that his family will become a great nation (Gen. 12: 1-3). In the next generation, Isaac’s son, Jacob, hatches a successful ploy to steal the birthright from his older brother Esau. Next, Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son, is sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, an act that ultimately lands their descendants in Egypt. Generations later, Moses frees the people from Egypt and takes them (along with their forefather Joseph’s bones) to the Promise Land where, after many generations, King David would continue the line that was ultimately to engender Jesus Christ. Here I should also mention Freud’s book Moses and Monotheism, in which he continues to develop some of the concepts he began years earlier in Totem and Taboo, but this time in relation to the founding myth of the people of Israel. Freud rereads this history with a special emphasis on the patriarch Moses in a way that challenges the traditional manner it has been read by both Jews and Christians. At the same time, he highlights the connection between the father figure and the creation of the image of God.

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could say, created a power void and there was a confusion regarding the one who would be the origin and enforcer of the law. After killing the father, Freud says, the remorse that the sons felt made the father’s power even greater, and “the dead now became stronger than the living had been […].What the father’s presence had formerly prevented they themselves now prohibited in the psychic situation of ‘subsequent obedience’ which we know so well from psychoanalysis” (123). The desire the sons had to kill and feast upon the father was then redirected to an animal, which was both revered and feared, and could not customarily be touched. “They undid their deed by declaring that the killing of the father substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and renounced the fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated women,” Freud writes (123). This ancient act has remained within our psyche and Freud maintains that “the ambivalent emotional attitude which to-day still marks the father complex in our children and so often continues into adult life also extended to the father substitute of the totem animal” (121). Freud believes we play out our repressed desires related to the original prohibition of taking possession of what is only the father’s property through totemic sacrifices, which can be found in many indigenous cultures around the world. He gives the examples of different tribes from around the world that sacrifice and eat camels, bears, buzzards, or turtles in totemic ceremonies. (Totem and Taboo 119-120). Together with the sacrifice of a totemic animal, Freud places Christianity’s ceremony of Holy Communion, in which the flesh of God the son/father is consumed to expiate the original crime (ibid. 132), and quoting from the anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, he agrees that “the Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than Christianity” (ibid. 133, quoting

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Frazier 51). Although an assault against God is something that is not permitted, in the case of the partaking of the Eucharist, the killing of God’s son (who is also God) is something that is celebrated. It is prohibited to kill the totem animal, we could say, precisely so that it can mean something in the event that it is killed. Even though the members of tribes that have totemic celebrations are prohibited from killing the totem animal in normal, daily activity, its sacrifice is required of them at certain times as part of a ritual ceremony. Freud writes: Thus we have a clan, which on a solemn occasion kills its totem in a cruel manner and eats it raw, blood, flesh, and bones. At the same time the members of the clan, disguised in imitation of the totem, mimic it in sound and movement as if they wanted to emphasize their common identity. There is also the conscious realization that an action is being carried out which is forbidden to each individual and which can only be justified through the participation of all, so that no one is allowed to exclude himself from the killing and the feast. (120)

Could it be that the ambivalence associated with translation—of its impossible requirement to destroy the father’s text, but yet reinstate it, recreate it, or revive it, as much as possible in another language—is rooted in this same story? Given the recurrence of the metaphor of the father with respect to authors and translators, and the place this metaphor has had in creating our understanding of God, 44 which has, in turn, been fundamental in shaping our notion of the author, I think it would be quite proper to view the act of translation as a totemic celebration. Translation is despised and ridiculed for its inherent treason against the father, but it is also seen as a necessary sacrifice so that the father can live on.

44

Freud claims that in all of his “psychoanalytic investigation[s] of the individual […] god was always found to be modeled after the father and that our personal relation to god is dependent upon our relation to our physical father, fluctuating and changing with him” (Totem and Taboo 126).

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We should not downplay that part of the totemic ceremony is, indeed, a celebration, and many translators do not always view their work in the negative light usually cast upon it by history. Amidst the countless laments from, for example, D’Ablancourt, Herder and Schlegel, hidden amongst self designations as “wretched translators” or slaves, translators cannot help but express their love of their craft, and celebrate what we could view as the ceremonial act of sacrificing the father, although they would not generally discuss it in these explicit terms. 45 One only needs to attend conferences of the American Translators Association (ATA), the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), or the American Translation and Interpretation Studies Association (ATISA) to see the craft of translation celebrated for all the things it accomplishes both artistically and commercially. Or, one only needs to teach a translation workshop to encounter students who translate for pure enjoyment, and are truly fascinated by the role they play as re-writers of the originals they are changing. Personal gratification of this sort is perhaps what most comes across in De Campos’s writing on his practice. His long notes that occupy more pages than the translations that they accompany exemplify his fascination with words and the possibilities that arise from the encounter between two (or more) languages. There is also a lack of apology and an absence of the kind of lamentations translators constantly offer to excuse their work, which can never completely replicate the original. His positive view of translation could be likened to the festive spirit of the ceremonies that follow the 45

An outright sacrifice of the father is generally not expressed because our tradition is still completely saturated with the notion that the translator is at the service of the author and has no right touching or changing the author’s text. Translators might not view their work in terms of killing the author, but they do often take pleasure in how they have been able to participate in creating a new text. At the same time, their pleasure is usually expressed in pride related to having been able to devise ways to make the translation as similar to the original as possible. Gavronsky would say this is an expression of “sublimated desires” (55), suppressed because the prohibition to really take over the text is still in place.

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sacrifice of the totem animal. Freud writes that, after the killing, there is first a solemn period of mourning to lament the lost animal (Totem and Taboo 120). A great celebration ensues, marked by “the unchaining of every impulse and the permission of every gratification,” a time in which, due to “a prescribed excess,” the citizens are allowed to violate prohibitions (ibid. 120-121). We can read Haroldo de Campos’s view of translation against this scenario. What might be considered excess in traditional notions of translation is the manner in which he flaunts his role as creator of the new text, or simply the fact that his name generally appears much larger on the book cover than the author’s, if the author’s name even appears. Consider, for example, Deus e o Diabo no Fausto de Goethe. Although it is a translation of Faust, De Campos is listed as the author, and, apart from De Campos’s title, Goethe is not mentioned until the second cover page inside the book (Gentzler Translation and Identity 91). At the same time, we cannot forget the fact that the author is really not forgotten; he is not really “obliterat[ing] the original” or “eras[ing] the origin,” as I quoted him earlier as saying with respect to Faust. De Campos’s main focus is still firmly fixed on how he has managed to recreate essential characteristics of the author’s original. We can explore the seeming inconsistency of killing and subsequently recreating the author by bringing to this discussion Michel Foucault’s notion of the “authorfunction” found in his essay translated by Josué Harari as “What is an Author?” In the wake of the popular “death of the author,” Foucault explores “the space left by the author’s disappearance,” and proposes to “follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers” (145). Although the person of the author, living or dead in the normal terrestrial sense, is not present in the text, and

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cannot give us complete guidance as we interpret, Foucault explains that we have historically constructed a system of interpretation that depends upon an “author function,” the idea of an author who serves as a basis for how we are to read the text. We can remember that the sons in Freud’s narrative felt it necessary to reinstate their father’s law in order to ensure the unity required for the continuation of the family line, and, in a similar vein, Foucault says that the author “provides the basis for explaining not only the presence of certain events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications […]. The author is also the principle of a certain unity in writing” (151). The author-function provides a degree of coherence by situating the text in a certain biography, historical period, culture and language, all of which provide a framework for approaching the text in order to decide what it means. The author does not endow a text with meaning: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. (159)

Foucault continues by saying, “the author is an ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (ibid.). In other words, there is a certain terror we feel when faced with the idea of what we think would be unbounded meaning, or with the absence of one sole unshaken source from which to begin our interpretations. We have witnessed in this present study that, from the very first books of the Bible, and down through a long history that has considered authors as gods-the-father of their works, a text’s connection to its author has been imperative for determining an origin, the individual from which all meaning emanates.

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Haroldo de Campos, in theory, claims to break away from the father/author, and to act as a “bad savage” or, in the terms of our current discussion, as a disobedient son. Perhaps one thing that sets Haroldo de Campos apart from other translators is his acknowledgement that he is not “really” attempting the recreation of the original; in other words, as I alluded to earlier, transcreation is not about loss because the focus is not on the degree to which the original has been repeated in its entirety. But, at the same time, as we have seen, De Campos cannot escape the ambivalence that stems from the desire to fulfill the father’s wishes as he continually justifies his choices based on the original text and author. Perhaps what we have seen in De Campos’s cannibalism is an open admission that the father has been killed and the former is recreating the latter, affirming the fact that this is his, the translator’s reading of the original. De Campos still does the kind of exhaustive research tradition demands to extract as much marrow from all the possible pieces, licking his chops with the opportunity to recreate the father in his own language. We cannot claim, then, that he does away with the author as he would sometimes have us believe, and we must admit that, in the end, the metaphor of cannibalism is still dealing with the idea of recovering, reinstating, or recreating a body, and cannot entirely be divorced from many of the notions of translation touched upon in Chapter I.

5. Cannibalizing a Cannibal In this study of Haroldo de Campos we have seen that, while the celebration of his agency as a co-creator of the texts he translates is perhaps more unabashed than that of most translators, and while his views on his task have definitely led to some very unique

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results, he cannot simply escape many of the same concerns that have traditionally confronted translators. Much of the discourse that addresses his work, however, seems to imply that this is indeed what he does. For example, in his book Contemporary Translation Theories, Edwin Gentzler says of Haroldo de Campos and his brother Augusto that “by avoiding traditional notions of faithful/free, the De Campos brothers’ theory of translation does away with a sense of loss to participate in a positive act of affirmation, of pleasure, and of joy” (197). We can agree that De Campos participates in a “positive act of affirmation, of pleasure, and of joy” when he translates, and that he does not dwell on the notion of translation as loss, but, as we have seen in the previous section, he cannot simply avoid “traditional notions of faithful/free.” 46 He may feel free to deviate from traditional approaches to the texts he translates, but he still exhibits a strong sense that what he is doing is faithful, or rather, “hyper-faithful” to these originals. Mary Snell-Hornby also discusses De Campos’s work in a section of her book The Turns of Translation Studies entitled “Deconstruction, or the ‘cannibalistic’ approach.” 47 She writes that, in Brazil, “translation was understood as a means of shaking 46

In all fairness, when Gentzler addresses the work of De Campos in his book Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory, he does indicate that his view may not be as simple as I am portraying it here. Nevertheless, Gentzler examines De Campos’s translation of Faust and, far from moving away from traditional notions of fidelity, he says: “The translation itself is remarkably true to the original. In fact, if anything can be said about the translation, it is that De Campos is more faithful to the original than many of the previous translators: he works hard to capture the meaning, the rhyme, the alliterations, the tone, the puns, and the neologisms” (Translation and Identity in the Americas 91). If we were really to move beyond “traditional notions of faithful/free,” as Gentzler says in Contemporary Translation Theories, why would we then revert to these notions to assess De Campos’s work? 47 Snell-Hornby equates cannibalism with deconstruction, which she, in turn, connects to Hans Vermeer’s Skopos theory. The connection she finds with deconstruction is via the work of the Brazilian translation theorist Rosemary Arrojo, and seems to be largely based on the nationality the latter shares with De Campos. Arrojo has written on the interface between translation studies and deconstruction, including a brief “deconstruction” of De Campos in which she says that the literary analyses preceding his translations are still founded on things that the discourse of deconstruction has shown to be problematic, such as the “spirit” and the “letter” of the original (Tradução, Desconstrução e Psicanálise 86). Certainly some parallels can be drawn between anthropophagic translation and deconstruction and, indeed, Derrida praised De Campos’s work, and the latter often made reference to the former’s writings (see, for example, De Campos Eden 76-77; Derrida “Cada Vez. Quer Dizer. E No Entanto. Haroldo”; and Diseminario: La

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off the fetters of the past, including the domination of European cultural values” (60). She characterizes the literary movement of “Anthropophagy” of the 1920’s in Brazil as a “form of political resistance with the aim of rediscovering the indigenous roots that had been repressed by the European influence: the cultural values of the industrialized countries were to be ‘devoured’ and absorbed into the indigenous culture” (ibid.). Echoing the sentiments of many European translation theorists, Snell-Hornby writes that Haroldo and Augusto de Campos developed a “Third World translation model”, using the “cannibalistic” metaphor, not in the sense of negating or ignoring the Other, but in the sense of absorbing it and then reproducing it, enriched with indigenous elements. Thus from a political resistance movement, “cannibalism” turned into a metaphor for reaction against cultural domination and then into a “translation philosophy” that was to gain a new meaning in postmodern translation theory. (Ibid.) 48

There are several problems with this view of “cannibalistic translation.” In the first place one may wonder how De Campos shakes “off the fetters of the past” by absorbing “the cultural values of the industrialized countries.” At first glance the answer could be, as Snell-Hornby claims, that the foreign text being absorbed is “enriched with indigenous

desconstrucción, otro descubrimiento de América, a collection of essays, edited by Lisa Block de Behar, from a conference in Montevideo, Uruguay [1985], in which both participated), but it is a rash oversimplification to use the two as synonyms. Perhaps a bit more confusing is that Snell-Hornby then proceeds to say that this deconstructive/cannibalistic “thinking clearly corresponds with that of Vermeer” (62). She bases this simply on the fact that Vermeer, whose Skopos theory focuses on the target audience, does not hold the original as a sacred, unchangeable document. 48 For her part, Snell-Hornby does not particularly like this metaphor because, “as a term for translation it might however, at least in English, evoke unfortunate associations: whereas the Hard Word anthropophagic is clinical and opaque, the metaphorical English frame ‘cannibalistic’ has an element of brutality and finality that may not express the creative potential inherent in the act of translation. […] Similarly the deconstructionist metaphor “death” of the author, though long since common currency, is in my opinion unfortunate when applied to literary works, particularly in the context of translation. The frame ‘death’ is now not necessarily understood as a preliminary to Resurrection, but all too often implies annihilation” (63, her emphasis). It is not clear where Snell-Hornby gets this assessment of the “death of the author,” certainly not from any of the postmodern scholars who have theorized it. Nevertheless, it seems that she wants to avoid any recognition that translation and interpretation are violent acts, fearing, perhaps, as the sons in Freud’s story, that once the father is dead, there would be lawlessness. She would probably prefer the image of Florio’s “fondling foster father” over that of the cannibal. She does not like the metaphor of cannibalism precisely because it negates the fantastical goal that has defined translation: the quest for total reproduction of a stable meaning.

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elements,” but can one really think of an act of translation in which this is not the case? By virtue of rewriting a text in another language it will necessarily be enriched with “indigenous elements” of the target culture and language. Perhaps, then, it is simply a matter of degree, and translators slide back and forth on a seesaw of domestication and foreignization depending on how weighted down the translation is with “indigenous elements.” This would imply, though, that we are back in the same dichotomy discussed in Chapter I, a dichotomy that is supposedly what this metaphor has been formulated against. It might then be said that foreign influences are not only enriched with domestic elements, but, as we saw De Andrade claim at the beginning of this chapter, they are devoured on the terms of the indigenous peoples. This is a charming, idealistic thought, although we must remember that both De Andrade and De Campos depended heavily upon Western writers for the manner in which they were to cannibalize the West. De Andrade spent a great deal of his life traipsing around Europe mingling with the cultural elite. In Brazil he was much more part of the class associated with the conquering colonial culture than the indigenous groups from which he took (cannibalized) his metaphor. In fact, according to Carlos A. Jáuregui, in his book Canibalia: Canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina [“Canibalia: Cannibalism, Calibanism, Cultural Antropophagy and Consumption in Latin America”], the modernism movement De Andrade was a part of was trying to “‘synchronize the watch’ of the national literature” (38, my translation). 49 Jáuregui then claims that the modernist movement in Brazil “resorted to the technological and futurist signs of

49

Jáuregui attributes the phrase “synchronize the watch” to De Andrade, but does not give a reference.

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progress,” and this focus on “technology” and “progress,” we could say, is one of the hallmarks of European culture (ibid.). 50 De Campos’s work, too, is steeped in the influences he is supposedly subverting, and he frequently makes explicit references regarding those who informed his poetics. For example (one among many), he begins his essay translated by Jon Tolman as “The Open Work of Art” by saying that “the works of Mallarmé, Joyce, Pound, and Cummings” are “the radial axes that generate the vectorial field of contemporary poetry” (220), a sentiment he continually reiterates throughout his career, especially with respect to Mallarmé and Pound. It seems that De Campos subverts the West in the footsteps of Western writers who did the same, something that might lead us to wonder if this is subversion or assimilation. Near the end of his chapter on Haroldo de Campos in Translation and Identity in the Americas, Edwin Gentzler says that using the type of strategy implied by cannibalism, “Brazilians may be better suited to adapt to the new world order than other cultures caught up in a more traditional North-South divide” (107). In other words, similar to De Andrade’s idea that cannibalism can facilitate Brazil’s synchronization with the rest of the world, Gentzler feels it can help the country adapt to the world order all around it. Moreover, Gentzler says that “Brazilian anthropophagists use the European ideas in an emancipatory fashion in the creation of new cultural identities, ones not separated from but embedded in multiple cultural 50

Jáuregui goes on to point out the capitalist nature of this movement whose focus is on the exportation of Brazilian culture as a commodity. In fact, Jáuregui sees the title of De Andrade’s book Pau Brasil, which is normally considered an affirmation of autochthonous Brazil, as a mark of De Andrade’s participation in the ideological commodities market, given that Pau Brasil, or “Brazil wood,” was a very expensive product destined for upper-class European consumption (39), especially for the red dye made from it. We can also remember that, at the beginning of this chapter, when discussing De Andrade’s work, De Campos says that an anthropophagic approach “endows [a text] with the possibility of becoming, in an international confrontation, a product for exportation (“Uma Poética” 27), reinforcing the idea of the work of art as commodity. It is also worth pointing out that Brazil was actually named for this wood that became so precious to the Europeans.

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traditions” (ibid. 106). Gentzler seems to be saying that it is the European ideas that will free the Brazilians and guide them in forming their new identities, which, although they come from multiple sources, are dominated by these ideas. This seems to have little to do with resistance and is far away from the world of the Caeté Indians who ate Bishop Sardinha in 1556. They literally ate Bishop Sardinha and probably other Europeans, and De Campos eats them metaphorically; however, unlike them, he draws his table manners and chewing tactics from those he is devouring. Is De Campos, then, just a European in cannibal’s clothes? And, if so, what would it mean for De Campos to truly identify with the cannibal?

The “Origins” of Cannibalism The cannibal was the epitome of “the savage” in the imaginations of the Europeans at the beginning of their encounter with the New World at the end of the fifteenth century. We will deal with this idea in more detail in the following chapter, though, for the moment, we can point out that the notion the Europeans formulated of the savage also helped shape what they considered to be the “human” (see Cheyfitz 42), and, subsequently, the distinction between “us” and “them.” The question of the savage was crucial because the savage was an entity that was at the threshold of a great distinction between the world of the animals and that of the humans, and, by distinguishing themselves from the savages, the Europeans, in a sense, invented a common identity for themselves. The Europeans (who were, at the same time, at war with one another) found common ground in a series of traits that exemplified to them “civilization” and “humanity” (ibid.). As De Andrade claims in the “Manifesto,” “without us Europe

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wouldn’t even have its poor declaration of the rights of man,” pointing out that it was this contact with the new world and its radically different others that led Europe to create its “rights of man.” The “declaration” is “poor,” we could say, because it was still written from the perspective of European values. These values were then, in turn, used to measure the distinction between the savages and barbarians on one hand, and the proper humans on the other. Do the barbarians have a proper language? Do they have writing? Are they organized in cities? Do they believe in a god or gods and have an organized religion? Do they have souls that can be saved by Christ? Are they capable of rationality? 51 But can we really know them on their terms? And what do we really know about these cannibals whose practice has served as the basis for our second metaphor? The words “cannibal” and “anthropophagi” are considered synonyms in English. “Anthropophagi” comes from Greek (eaters of human beings) and referred to a whole nation on the other side of the Black Sea (Hulme 16). Similarly, “cannibal” was used by the Spaniards to designate a group of people in the New World, but the word itself seems to have come from the deformation of the name of an indigenous group or of a word used in the Antilles, perhaps from “Caribs” or “Caribes” (ibid.). In Colonial Encounters, Peter Hulme says that the Spanish word “canibales” (from which we get “cannibals”) was first recorded in a European text by Columbus in his Journal when reporting what the Arawark Indians had told him regarding other indigenous groups in the area (ibid. 16). Columbus said that they reported one tribe whose people had one eye in the middle of

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As I said, in my third chapter, we will be examining in more detail the process by which identities are formed on the basis of oppositions such as “savage/civilized” or “us/them,” but here I can direct readers to Bartolomé de las Casas’s In Defense of the Indians for a clear example of thinking along these lines. Although he was far more sympathetic to the indigenous peoples than most of the Spaniards, one only needs to look at the table of contents of this book to see how Las Casas formulated the idea of the “barbarian” solely in opposition to the Spanish conception of humanity.

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their foreheads, and another, the “canibales,” who ate human flesh (ibid. 16-17). Hulme points out that this account has a shadow of doubt cast over it, considering that Columbus “heard” all of this from a people whose language was totally unknown to him. Eric Cheyfitz also points out that Columbus constantly contradicts himself and that “his journal fluctuates wildly between assertions that he understands the Indians and admissions that they are speaking a language completely foreign to him and his company” (109). In his book The Poetics of Imperialism, Eric Cheyfitz, when discussing Hulme’s Colonial Encounters, notes that, given Columbus’s reference to the Cyclopes, it seems that his account relies more on Greek mythology than on actual empirical evidence of the practices of the indigenous peoples he encountered, and, thus, his own fantasies may be responsible for the fusion of the “cannibals” with the “anthropophagi.” Given the lack of evidence that cannibalism actually took place in that area, coupled with the probability that “cannibal” is a deformation of an unknown word, it seems that the “cannibal” actually came into existence in Columbus’s Journal. Cheyfitz writes: Caliban translates cannibal, which translates an unknown Native American term through the European term anthropophagi. And in this case the translation is a pure translation, or translatio, for it has lost its place in its proper, or domestic, meaning. It is wholly alienated in a foreign tongue. (Cheyfitz 43)

In other words, the word “cannibal” will forever be cut off from any relationship with the indigenous peoples, as it was coined at an instance in which it lacked a referent apart from the imagination of the Italian explorer. Even if there were groups in the New World that did eat human flesh, the word, and its significance to the Europeans, was invented in the context of classical Greek mythology.

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Picking up the Pieces How can we, then, claim to be reclaiming any indigenous reality by using a metaphor whose name, (mis)designated by the conqueror, has its origins at the beginning of the colonial encounter and is really part of the European construction of the people they were to subjugate. We, of course, cannot, but this does not stymie the attempt to find alternative readings of history or differential modes of interpretation, although we should be wary of arguments that claim to be leading us to some kind of native origin. However, the desire to arrive at a pure native understanding stems from the same kind of binary thinking that we saw with the body/clothes and speaks to the belief that we could actually arrive at a stable essence or origin. The translation scholar Else Vieira, who has probably been the theorist most responsible for popularizing Haroldo de Campos’s work in translation studies and placing it within the context of postcolonial studies, emphasizes that the theorization of anthropophagy is precisely the rejection of the obsessive search for one unequivocal origin. In “Liberating Calibans: Readings of Antropofagia and Haroldo de Campos’ Poetics of Transcreation,” she discusses the third stanza in De Andrade’s “Manifesto” – “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question” – which mixes Hamlet’s famous question with the name of an indigenous group in Brazil. Contrary to the European notion of a simple origin, Vieira claims that, in the case of Brazil, the origin is already multiple: Since the Tupis were a tribe inhabiting Brazil at the time of the discovery, the colonial dilemma is not one informed by Christian scruples as to what may come after death, but has to do with duality, plurality of the origin and, accordingly, of the cultural identity of Brazil, both European and Tupi, both civilized and native, both Christian and magic; a culture that grew out of the juxtaposition of not two but many civilizations and which carries to this day the paradox of origin. Tupi, to be: the attempt in the 1920s to discontinue mental colonialism through the desanctifying devouring of the Western legacy. (98)

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In Vieira’s view, De Campos’s cannibalism does not try to speak from a purely indigenous point of view, but, instead, finds its strength in a space in between opposites, in the dual origin that comes from the encounter between Europe and indigenous Brazil. Vieira’s reading of Haroldo de Campos in the context of postcolonial theory has surely helped give us an image that highlights some of the power dynamics involved in both the process of colonization and of translation, and it has also helped promote certain aspects of De Campos’s practice as strategies of resistance against dominant modes of expression. However, we should be careful about jumping to conclusions regarding De Campos’s alleged postcolonial intentions. 52 As I mentioned earlier, although De Campos attempts to, as Vieira states, desanctify the “Western legacy,” he also emulates Western artists in the process. Was not the “desanctifying devouring of the Western legacy” also the project of many European avant garde and surrealist artists? Additionally, De Campos seems much more interested in poetic aesthetics than making any kind of political statement that would be in line with much of the postcolonial discourse that calls for an active agenda against the oppressions of colonialism. We could say of De Campos what Jáuregui says of De Andrade. He claims that, for De Andrade, “anthropophagy certainly alludes to a colonial past; but, in general, this retrospection only looks to the past as a rhetorical resource. De Andrade does not put forth an agenda of emancipation like, for example, [Franz] Fanon” (38, my translation). Inside Brazil, there has also been some criticism directed towards De Campos’s work. Perhaps the most vocal critic of Haroldo de Campos and his brother is the Marxist theorist Roberto Schwarz, and he has frequently expressed his contempt for Concretismo

52

See, for example, Bassnett and Trivedi who write that “De Campos’ translation practice […] derives from the deliberate intention to define a post-colonial poetics of translation” (15).

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[“Concretism”], the poetic movement the De Campos brothers helped found. In a series of articles in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo dating from January 1985 until November 1986, Schwarz sparred with Augusto de Campos over a poem the latter had written, and the former took advantage of the moment to criticize the whole Concretist movement. He alleged that the Concretists were only interested in making the history of Western and Brazilian literature culminate in them, and that all their talk of change was no more than a collection of aesthetic tropes (Schwarz 7). He goes on to point out that “change for the sake of change is essential for the functioning of the market” (ibid.), something, we could say, aligns Augusto and Haroldo de Campos with one of the most fundamental Western values, market capitalism. In her dissertation on the De Campos brothers, Silene Moreno comes to a conclusion that is similar to Schwarz’s allegation that the Concretists tried to make themselves the culmination of literature, although in a far less scathing tone than the one Schwarz always adopts when discussing the De Campos brothers. She believes that De Campos’s translation projects are guided by the attempt to create a canon in Brazil that legitimates the Concretist literary movement, and, thus, that Haroldo and Augusto de Campos translated the authors that they wanted as their precursors (196-197, for example). 53 When discussing Schwarz’s criticism of De Campos, Gentzler writes that “Schwarz sees the goal of modernizing via a cannibalist process of blending the rural Brazilian with the urban European as largely unattainable, as another kind of utopian, elitist desire out of step with the realities of the situation” (Translation and Identity 103). 53

Moreno mentions the example that we have been using, De Campos’s translations of the Bible. She says that by discussing the poetic aspects of the Bible, he “makes possible an encounter between the proposals of Concretism and this text that is considered sacred” (197).

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This accusation is definitely relevant to our discussion. On one hand, De Campos romanticizes the indigenous people, using them to add an “indigenous element” to his pronouncements on translation, while, on the other, his main focus is clearly on the Europeans and their texts. Besides the metaphor of cannibalism, there is little or no indication that Haroldo de Campos actually had anything to do with the indigenous peoples of Brazil or their plight. I am not alleging that there is really one true kind of postcolonial activism, and that De Campos fails in a specific set of standards that would, as it were, get him into the club. I also do not want to fault De Campos for pursuing the kind of art and translation strategy he desired (instead of, say, what Roberto Schwarz would have liked him to do). It is true that the metaphor of cannibalism has successfully been used to draw attention to certain power dynamics, and that it has helped to propose strategies that attempt to combat some of the common and dominant approaches to translation. However, I only want to highlight the problematic nature of romanticizing these kinds of stances, of implying that one could simply break away from certain traditional notions that have defined the practice of translation, even in cases where there may be a concerted effort on the part of a translator to free him or herself from tradition and create something that is radically new. Apart from the frequent romanticization of cannibalism, there seems to be an inconsistency commonly implied by those who employ this metaphor. There is frequently great praise for the aggressive strategies of a strong, cannibalist translator who exercises his or her agency on one side of the colonial line, while the same kind of practices are condemned on the other for participating in the kind of aggressive appropriation that is associated with colonialism.

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We can take an example from Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, edited by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, published in 1999. In their introduction, they laud and glorify De Campos for being “an all-powerful reader and a free agent as a writer” (5). The editors say that the metaphor of cannibalism, which “has come to be used to demonstrate to translators what they can do with a text [..,] may be likened to a blood transfusion, where the emphasis is on the health and nourishment of the translator” (ibid.). 54 They claim that this is “a far cry from the notion of faithfulness to an original, of the translator as servant of the source text,” and that it is also “a vastly different view of translation from that described by George Steiner as involving the ‘penetration’ of the source text” (ibid.). 55 Obviously, penetrating and devouring are different activities, though one may wonder why the violence implied in one is not as bad as that of the other. Bassnett and Trivedi might argue that it is because cannibalistic “devouring could be perceived as both a violation of European codes and an act of homage” (ibid). In other words, it is both a violent act, as well as an act of love. But how is this different from penetration, which does not always imply a violation and can also be seen as an act of love? It seems to be simply a matter of who is carrying out the violent acts. Cannibalism is romanticized when espoused from the mouth of someone in a subaltern culture, and shunned when declared by someone in a dominant culture. After rightly pointing out the negative role translation has played in facilitating processes such as colonization, Bassnett and Trivedi mention that “translation is often a form of violence” (5, my emphasis). To say that it is “often” a form of violence is to

54

The metaphor of translation as a blood transfusion is also found in De Campos (Deus e o Diabo 208). Steiner has been criticized by feminist translation theorists for his use of what they consider to be aggressive, masculine metaphors, especially those that deal with sexual conquest in his book After Babel. See, for example, Simon 144; and Chamberlain 211. 55

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imply that sometimes it is not. We would, of course, have to define what is meant by “violence,” something that might be hard to do if we use Bassnett and Trivedi’s criteria, given that they previously imply that De Campos, who cannibalizes the original, does not act in a violent manner. The editors link violence to the “shameful history of translation,” in which “texts [have been] translated into European languages for European consumption, rather than as part of a reciprocal process of exchange” (5). They also point out that “European norms have dominated literary production,” something that has led only to translations of texts that “will not prove alien to the receiving culture” (ibid.). There is no doubt that the norms of the powerful have “dominated literary production,” but, when one reads this, it might seem that, for Bassnett and Trivedi, the direction of translation alone is the standard for determining if it is violent or not. In fact, if we consider the current status of literary production in the US, for example, we could say that the phrase “shameful history of translation” could be applied to the opposite scenario from the one mentioned by Bassnett and Trivedi. Lawrence Venuti says that “English is the most translated language worldwide, but one of the least translated into (The Scandals of Translation 10). Elsewhere he claims that there are serious consequences to “this trade imbalance,” namely, that it has helped spread US hegemony throughout the world, and has produced “cultures in the United Kingdom and the United States that are aggressively monolingual [and] unreceptive to the foreign,” providing “readers with the narcissistic experience of recognizing their own culture in a cultural other” (The Translator’s Invisibility 15). It cannot, then, be simply a matter of direction that makes a translation violent.

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It seems that for Bassnett and Trivedi, as well as for many other postcolonial theorists, what determines the violence of translation has much more to do with questions of power than simply a question of direction. Violence is something that is only attributed to a powerful entity that appropriates a less powerful one, but not vice versa, as evidenced in Bassnett and Trivedi’s comparison of De Campos’s and Steiner’s metaphors. Those we have seen theorizing De Campos’s work all seem to agree with this, and would probably also consider cannibalistic tactics as violent if De Campos were a European translating Brazilian authors. Just because he is translating into Brazilian Potugeuese, however, the violent act is seen as an expression of creativity. Gentzler says cannibalism is the “process of selecting the best of another culture, adapting it and consuming it, and then making it one’s own” (Translation and Identity 106). In other words, cannibalist translators choose what they like in another culture and adapt it how they see fit to their own context. This is not the case, of course, if we look at the scenario from the other side. Bassnett and Trivedi mention the English translation practice in the nineteenth century, “in which texts from Arabic or Indian languages were cut, edited and published with extensive anthropological footnotes” (6). They go on to mention the translators Edward Lane and Edward Fitzgerald who, we could say, cannibalized Middle East texts to produce The Thousand and One Nights and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam respectively. This kind of practice, here, is viewed as a form of imperialism through which the British imposed their tastes on the cultures they translated. I agree with Bassnett and Trivedi’s assessment of these practices, and we most certainly should not forget, as they point out, that these translators had a very explicit belief that their culture was far superior to those they translated; however, it is hard to make sense of such

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differing prescriptions and expectations for translators on the opposing sides of the colonial divide. Theorization of this sort helps to reinforce binary oppositions such as “first world/third world,” oppositions that this metaphor should supposedly helps us overcome. A kind of “bad colonizer”/”good colonial subject” binary is implied in what we have been witnessing in an attempt to squeeze large groups of people into two neat categories. These categories, however, cannot be divided so easily. If we could clearly separate the dominant from the subaltern, the foreign from the domestic, the other from ourselves, or those who do violence from those who foster love and peace, then it might, indeed, be possible to set differing standards for each of the two sides. In the next chapter I will explore the kinds of lines we generally draw to separate the opposing sides of binaries, and we can foreshadow the discussion by returning to Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto” and reconsidering our view of anthropophagy. Throughout this chapter we have seen cannibalism theorized as one particular type of translation strategy, one that can be used by certain translators to counteract the colonial power dynamic. However, we can infer something different by considering the first two stanzas of the “Manifesto,” which De Andrade begins by saying: “Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. / The only law of the world. The masked expression of all individualism, of all collectives. / Of all religions. Of all peace treaties” (“Manifesto” 267). The world is united through anthropophagy because all attempts of individual expression or, we may add, interpretation, necessarily involve a kind of digestive metamorphosis. In other words, we can never reproduce a concept, identity, or text in its original entirety; we can only pass it through ourselves, cannibalizing it. We cannot faithfully translate something foreign,

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whether it be from (or into) Europe, Brazil, Africa, or the United States – we can only cannibalize it, digest it, and express it in a way that differs from the original.

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Chapter III:

Encounters of Translation: The Case of Latin America [O]ur imperialism historically has functioned (and continues to function) by substituting for the difficult politics of translation another politics of translation that represses these difficulties. Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism

In the previous chapters I have examined translation by employing two metaphors that are commonly used to describe the practice, and in this chapter I will, to some extent, reverse the order I have been following and explore the use of translation as a metaphor, specifically as a trope for cultural exchange and dissemination. The word “translation” has been used as a metaphor for countless activities, but I will be focusing on one particular use that has been developed in a handful of books published in the area of postcolonial translation studies. These books deal with the relationship between colonization and translation, both the trope of translation, as well as the actual practice. Books such as Vicente Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism, Tejaswini Niranjana’s Siting Translation, and Eric Cheyfitz’s The Poetics of Imperialism, apart from framing colonialism as a process that bears resemblance to translation, have shown how the conceptions that fuel the interface between translation and colonization have a great bearing on how texts are actually translated. Conversely, translations are, in turn, integral to the process of colonialism through which the colonizers attempt to translate themselves. Although the various colonial projects of individual European countries

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differ from one another in many ways, they are all grounded in a common view that the “discoverers” had of themselves in relation to those they “discovered” and later subjugated, a belief that is constructed much in the same way in which the relationship between original and translation has generally been formed. In this scenario the colonial power sees itself as a kind of original and it then attempts to turn its colonial subjects into copies or translations of itself. With the first metaphor in this dissertation, the body/clothes, we saw a clear depiction of the structure that underlies the traditional Western notion of translation, and it is this same conception that we will see at the root of the traditional Western notion of cultural exchange: the belief that there is an essence within a culture that can be transferred to or fully understood by others. In my second chapter, the metaphor of cannibalism illustrated the inseparability of a particular representation from the one who is doing the representing, a notion that will also be implicit here as we look, not at the way subaltern cultures represent and cannibalize the West as I did in Chapter II, but at how the colonial powers, in a sense, tend to cannibalize and represent their subjects. The result of Europe’s attempt to transform its many colonies into copies of itself is that much of the world has been “mistranslated,” and cultures all over the world bear the marks of Europe’s interpretation of them that is often radically divorced from the reality that existed before. My focus will be on Latin America, where it is not hard to find examples of how the identities of the indigenous peoples were transformed and consolidated according to the models the Spanish and Portuguese brought with them. Noticing the tremendous role Spain and the other colonial powers played in defining Latin America, it is tempting to think that, if we try to look beyond the colonial impact, it

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might be possible to apprehend the true nature of the Indians, rather than the one created for them by their colonizers. It is also tempting to think that we could mitigate the effects of colonialism by giving a voice to, or restoring the voice of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and truly listen to them as they write their own identities. In order to problematize the impossibility of arriving at this kind of pure, unadulterated selfexpression, I will examine the circumstances that created Antes O Mundo Não Existia, 56 a book authored by two Desana Amerindians from the northwest corner of Brazil, and which documents the mythological history of their people. It was begun in 1968, but was not published until 1980. In Chapter II, I showed that, although Haroldo de Campos is often hailed as a translator who undertakes the task in a way that circumvents the traditional, Platonic assumptions associated with translating, he ultimately cannot escape them. Similarly, by exploring the process by which Antes O Mundo came into being, I will show that, even in the cases when the indigenous people record their own story, the way in which they tell it cannot escape the discourse of those from whom they are trying to protect their culture by writing this book in the first place. Although anything we might call Latin American identity is tied to European colonialism, accepting the idea that Latin America is simply a translation of Europe would be to conform to a traditional notion of translation – Europe possesses a certain “identity” or “essence” that it then imposes on its colonies, however imperfectly the latter adopts it. There has been a lot of scholarship written that indicates, however, that this is far from the case, and that, in fact, Latin America actually participated in the formation of the culture that was so actively being forced upon them. Latin America and Europe were, in a sense, translated into existence at the same time, as a result of their encounter with 56

“Before the World Didn’t Exist,” hereafter, Antes O Mundo.

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each other. If we apply this broader metaphorical use of translation back to the actual practice, we can say that, as is the case of Europe and Latin America, both the original and the translation are dependent on each other and they are constantly in the process of redefining one another. By turning, once again, to Antes O Mundo, I will further explore the notion that an original text and a translation are co-dependent on each other with this translation that, in a sense, has become an original. Shifting back and forth between translation as a metaphor and translation “proper,” as I do in this chapter, we will easily see that there is not such a clear-cut distinction between what we consider to be the “metaphorical” and the “proper.” As I mentioned in the first chapter, all uses of the word “translation” imply a metaphorical conception, and there is not really anything we can call “translation proper” because the idea of translating a text from one language into another cannot be separated from all the other conceptions stemming from the many ways in which we use the word “translation.” 57 Furthermore, the interdependent relationship between translation as a metaphor and what is generally called “translation proper” will become more apparent in this chapter as we mix the two together and observe how one informs the other.

1. Empire/Colony – Original/Translation In the preface to his book Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule, Vicente Rafael lays out the semantic relationship in the Spanish language between “conquest,” “conversion,” and

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For a more detailed problematization of the notion of “translation proper,” see Derrida’s “Des Tours de Babel,” in which he discusses, among other things, Roman Jakobson’s characterization of “interlingual” translation, or, as Jakobson defines it, “translation proper” (173-174).

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“translation” (conquista, conversión, and traducción, respectively) (xvii), and it is clear that the same applies to English. “Conquest,” he says, is “the forceful occupation of a territory,” as well as “the act of winning someone’s voluntary submission and consequently attaining his or her love and affection” (ibid.). “Conversion” is the changing of something into something else, and is also commonly used to mean “bringing someone over to a religion or practice” (ibid.). Both, then, he claims, denote “a process of crossing over into the domain […] of someone else and claiming it as one’s own” (ibid.). Rafael goes on to note that conversion also means “the substitution of a word or proposition for another of equal significance,” that is to say, it can be synonymous with “translation” (ibid.). In other words, translation can be connected not only to the idea of changing one thing into another, but also, to make somebody like oneself. In Chapter I of this dissertation, several of the passages I examined that employed the body/clothes also used the language of conquest – capturing the original and binding it in the shackles of a new language. As we will see, translation is not only described in terms of conquest at times, but its concept and its practice have actively participated in the literal process of conquest. Apart from the occasional use of the metaphor of conquest in relation to the body/clothes, we can draw a stronger connection between our first metaphor of study and the act of conquest by establishing a parallel between the conception of translation embodied in the body/clothes and the view the imperial powers held of themselves that justified the pursuit of their colonial ambitions. I will give some examples briefly, but for the moment we can construct the metaphor in this manner: the European colonial powers held an understanding of themselves that can be compared to the way original texts are

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typically seen. They felt that they possessed a certain truth, which subsequently needed to be translated to their colonial subjects. Their truths (which were not seen as “theirs” but instead as universals) consisted in all the things that, in their eyes, made their cultures superior to the “uncivilized” natives who were so badly in need of their assistance (translation). The natives lacked Christianity, reason, European political and economic systems, technology, sophisticated languages, and the list goes on. However, since the indigenous peoples were considered naturally inferior, they could only, just as is typically the way translations are viewed, become imperfect copies, embodying only some degree of the truth the Europeans were trying so hard to transfer to them. Translators often feel frustrated when the target language cannot do the things allowed by the language of the original and, similarly, the colonial powers were often frustrated at the manner in which the natives assimilated and expressed the truths they were trying to instill. In the book mentioned above, Vicente Rafael examines the process by which the Spanish attempted to convert, or translate, the indigenous populations in the Philippines. He begins by explaining that the Latin language, from which Castilian Spanish came, was viewed as a superior language because it was seen as closer to God’s Word, and was, thus, considered the most apt for expressing the truths of Christianity. What this meant in the context of the colonization and conversion of the Philippines was that the Tagalog language needed to be endowed with a Latin-like grammar, and it was transformed into “a derivative of Latin and Castilian” (Rafael 29). 58 “That Tagalog should be organized around the matrix of Latin is a function of the Spanish belief in the proximity of Latin to

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It should be pointed out that the idea of “Tagalog” “as a distinct ethnolinguistic group among others in the archipelago” came about only after the arrival of the Spanish (Rafael 16). It was the Spanish who designated the diversity of indigenous peoples as one homogenous group speaking this one language that became the people of the Philippines.

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the spirit of God’s Word, a proximity that lent Latin its authority to preside over the vernacular languages,” writes Rafael (28). In this way, Tagalog was translated into a language that would be more adequate to produce translations of the Word. Beyond the grammar, the Tagalog writing system had to be replaced because the Spanish felt that the existing system was “‘inadequate’ to the demands of an unequivocal translation of Christian doctrines” (ibid. 44). Naturally, “in their place the Spaniards attempted to institute the phonetic script characteristic of Latin and Castilian” (ibid.). However, even with its newly endowed grammar and Latinized script, Tagalog was still not considered as capable as the original after which it was modeled, and certain key words such as Dios (God), Virgen (Virgin), Espíritu Santo (Holy Spirit), Cruz (Cross), and Doctrina Cristiana (Christian Doctrine) were left untranslated so that they could maintain their “purity” (29). According to Rafael, “this notion of untranslatability [standing] guard over the movement of translation is once again indicative of the belief in the intrinsic superiority of some languages – in this case Latin and Castilian – over others in the communication of God’s Word” (ibid.). In this way Castilian would hold the position as the “indispensible mediator of linguistic transfers analogous to the Spanish priest as the exalted broker in the transactions between God and his converts” (35). In the end, this is very similar to the idea that, in order for one to attain the authentic truth of a text, one must consult the original, not some translation, which can only provide an incomplete copy. At the same time, although the Spanish missionaries went to great lengths to turn the indigenous language into an adequate vehicle for conversion, the natives were not exactly good translations of the Spaniards. It was not the case that it was difficult to get

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the Tagalogs to convert, on the contrary, they did so quickly and in great numbers, but, according to the Spanish, this was because the Tagalog people did not understand what they were doing (87).

While the missionaries saw the spread of Christianity as a

confirmation of the truth they were transporting to these islands, “they regarded the natives’ apparent lack of doctrinal comprehension as a result of their ‘lack of intelligence,’ their ‘childish impressionability,’ and their constant eagerness to be awed by the appearance rather than the substance of things” (ibid.). The indigenous peoples of the lands translated into the “Philippine Islands,” similar to the conception of how the West has viewed translated texts, could not possess the full truth of the original. With their idea of the Tagalogs constructed in this way, the colonizers maintained their privileged position from which they could speak “of and for the subordinate natives” (ibid.). This account of the Spanish in the Philippines shows the former attempting to translate their own civilization to their colonial subjects. But what about the other direction? If elements from the colonized peoples’ culture were to be translated into the Empire, would the former be seen as possessing the truth of the “original” to be translated? In her book Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context, Tejaswini Niranjana provides us with an example in which this was not the case at all; the British felt that it was only through translation that the Indian texts and customs could reach their full potential. Like the Spanish in relation to their colonies, the British felt superior to the Indian natives in every respect and attempted to bring their culture to those people they considered “dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess which

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surpasses even the usual measure of uncivilized society.” 59 In addition to educating natives with their own “civilized” society, though, the British would be the creators of the Indian “original,” that is, the official version of India and its inhabitants, not only for the rest of Europe, but for the natives of India themselves. Sir William Jones, renowned Orientalist, translator, and Supreme Court judge in India, for example, believed that the “Indians should be governed by their own laws,” but thought that these laws needed to be “purified” by the British and their language (Niranjana 17). “Since [the Indians] certainly could not rule themselves or administer their own laws, these laws had first to be taken away from them and ‘translated’ before they could benefit from them” (ibid.). In addition to the laws, translations of Indian literature into English were seen as superior to the originals and, “because of the symbolic power conveyed by English,” native Indians often preferred to read them in that language, and thus “gain[ed] access to [their] own past through the translations and histories circulating through colonial discourse” (Niranjana 31). And, as the English educational system began replacing the indigenous one, Indian students began looking to these translations as the key to their own history (ibid. 43). Eric Cheyfitz’s book, The Poetics of Imperialism: from The Tempest to Tarzan, also deals with the interface between the metaphor of translation and colonization, and his focus is on the Americas, particularly on the British colonization of North America. For Cheyfitz, “translation was, and still is, the central act of European colonization and imperialism in the Americas” (104), an argument he lays out by detailing a theory of

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These are the words of James Mill, who wrote the History of British India (1817), a three-volume work that is still in use in Indian history classes, and that has also been the model for most of the history books written about India (Niranjana 21; ibid. n39).

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metaphor that he believes underlies the entire ideology that brought about the colonial project. Integral to the project is the idea that the “proper” is inextricably intertwined with the notion of “property,” whose ownership was, for the Europeans, the only kind of relationship imaginable with respect to land (59). Because the Amerindians lacked the idea of private property, it was necessary that they first be converted into landowners so that they could then be dispossessed of the land. Cheyfitz discusses a passage from The True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia, written in 1610, which makes a legal justification for colonization and claims that one of the Algonquian kings, Paspehay, willfully and fully aware of all the circumstances, sold his people’s land to the colonizers so that they could inhabit it (ibid.). Cheyfitz says: In the first instance the English translate Paspehay into English property relations (and into English political relations as well, with his nomination as a “king,” a typical English translation of the Algonquian weroance) so that the English can recognize him as having “sold” “his” land to the English, who following the “legal” logic of their language can thus claim “title” to his land. The English convert the land that Paspehay and his people use and that nobody “owns” (at least not in Algonquian languages) into Paspehay’s “property” so that the English can alienate the land from these people […]. (59-60)

In the eyes of the colonizers, when they translated whatever tribal makeup the Algonquian had into the British political system by naming the indigenous leader a “king” (and later “emperor”), Paspehay was effectively converted into “a power subject to the English crown” (60). The translation of these words involves the translation of entire systems, which would be imposed upon the indigenous peoples, and Cheyfitz notes that, while we can understand colonization as translation “both in the sense of conversion from one language into another and in a metaphorical or transferred sense,” translation here in no way implies understanding between the two peoples (105). In fact, here “translation means precisely not to understand others who are the original (inhabitants) or to understand those others all too easily—as if there were no questions of translation— 108

solely in terms of one’s own language, where those others become a usable fiction: the fiction of the Other” (ibid.). The colonial powers in the three examples we have seen all dwell on a “usable fiction of the Other,” and, in all three instances it is the colonial power that determines, for the most part, the terms of the exchange that creates this other. The imperialists have the power to create the other in their own image and do so because, as I said earlier, they are convinced that in most respects they are the possessors of some truth that everyone else needs. “The imperialist believes that, literally, everything can be translated into his terms; indeed that everything always already exists in these terms and is only waiting to be liberated […],” Cheyfitz writes, and says that this conception is still implicit, for example, in the foreign policy of the United States, which dwells on the belief in the universal application of the “‘free’ market, a freedom that capitalist power solipsistically equates with the democracy of a ‘free’ society” (195). Similarly, Rafael, drawing on the postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty, says that the West reduces all “empirical differences” between cultures “to the terms of Western historiography as ‘societies’ or ‘states’ which are ‘developing,’ ‘democratic,’ ‘authoritarian,’ ‘socialist,’ and so forth” (x). What is taken for granted is that these terms are universal, and that all societies should and will naturally embrace the opportunity to be translated into something that resembles the dominant powers.

2. Latin America In a similar way to how the Philippines, India and North America were translated by Europe, Latin America was also converted by Europe into a reflection of itself, albeit

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seen as an inferior one. In the previous chapter, I touched upon the creation of the image of the savage cannibal that had little to do with the actual identity of the people to whom it was applied. Beyond this one term that captured the imagination of the Europeans, however, we have many more that were applied to the Amerindians that have replaced a great many of the autochthonous terms of self-ascription. In Colonial Encounters, Peter Hulme traces the terms “Carib” and “Arawak,” which designated for the Europeans the two major groups of Amerindians, and which were fundamental in fomenting the notions of the good and bad savages. Any Indians perceived as hostile were denoted “Carib,” while “Arawak” was used for those who were peaceful and likely to conduct trade with the European settlers (Hulme 65). Though the Carib and Arawak natives were seen as belonging to two distinct groups, Hulme shows that there is great difficulty when one attempts to separate them from each other, both linguistically and ethnically. Nevertheless, the stereotype persisted and kept these two terms as binary opposites. 60 Like the term “cannibal,” it is not clear where “Arawak” comes from. It is possible that “aruac” was an insulting word applied to one group of Indians in Guiana by their neighbors (Hulme 60), but “Arawak” was never used by any Amerindians to refer to themselves prior to their encounter with Europeans (ibid. 59). “Carib” seems to have come from one group who called themselves “Karina,” but was certainly not used to cover such a large group of people as it did for the colonial powers (ibid. 61). These two classifications have embedded themselves into the identity of the Amerindians, and, to this day, according to Hulme, “it would be impossible not only for an anthropologist to give an account of Amerindian society but even for Amerindians to make sense of their

60

See Hulme’s lengthy discussion of these two terms in the chapter “Caribs and Arawaks” in Colonial Encounters (45-87).

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own lives without using the terms,” making the ethnic identity of the natives of the Caribbean dependent, to a large extent, on the descriptions given by the European powers rather than on their own self-ascription (66). The distinction between the Carib and Arawak did not create the distinction between good and bad savages, but instead, both oppositions are an expression of a preexisting European ideology. Hulme writes: Indeed the radical dualism of the European response to the native Caribbean – the fierce cannibal and the noble savage – has such obvious continuities with the classical Mediterranean paradigm that it is tempting to see the whole intricate web of colonial discourse as weaving itself in its own separate space entirely unaffected by any observation of or interchange with native Caribbean cultures. (47)

The colonizers were unable to see anything in the natives but a projection of themselves and their mythology, and they constantly “discovered” in the indigenous peoples what they wanted to find, much in the way we saw Columbus “find” cannibals in Chapter II. We could also take the example of the notion of “natural slavery” held by the Spanish who maintained that the inhabitants of the New World, by nature, needed to be slaves; they needed masters because they did not possess sufficient reason to make decisions for themselves (Pagden 42-43). Anthony Pagden, in The Fall of Natural Man, dedicates a chapter to the theory of natural slavery and he claims that this principle was derived from a category in Aristotle’s Politics that provided “rational” justification, deduced by “the Philosopher” himself, for the enslavement of the Indians, even though the circumstances of Aristotle’s time and the hypothetical situation he was writing about was considerably different from the actual context of the Americas more than a millennium later (39). Furthermore, when Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote his defense of the Indians, he attempted to show that “the preconquest Indian communities fulfilled all of Aristotle’s requirements for a true civil society” (Pagden 121). In other words, the standards that 111

would be used to determine the legitimacy of the Amerindians’ societies would be those from the Europeans who, “naturally,” possessed objective knowledge regarding what did and did not count as civil and civilization. In addition to the notion that identities are greatly influenced, or, in some cases, completely created by the view the Europeans held of the Amerindians about whom they knew very little, we can see that the names we use now to refer to the entire hemisphere, the names to which we attach many notions of identity, reflect the appropriative nature of the colonial project. “America,” of course, comes from the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci who, according to the popular account, first mapped the land and gave it a (European) name. 61 The name was then appended to reflect legal ownership: “América Española” and “Hispanoamérica” refer to the region as property of Spain; “Iberamérica” to include Portugal’s claims to part of the land; “Latin America” was invented by the French (Amérique latine) in the 1860’s so that they, too, could lay claim to part of the New World (Corominas and Ribas 68). Perhaps most telling and pertinent to our discussion of translation are the terms “New World” and “Old World.” We have here a simple dichotomy that mirrors the common belief that the Amerindians had a civilization in infancy. 62 It was a “New World,” in need of growing up, a blank world with no history. The “Old World,” because of its years of logical maturation, was precisely the source that could provide the “New” one with much-needed development. And, just as is 61

There is some controversy regarding Vespucci’s actual role in naming the Americas. See the essays “The Naming of America,” by Edward Gaylord Bourne, and another by the same title written by Franz Laubenberger and Steven Rowan, for details on the politics of the time and speculations about how the “new” continent came to be known as “America.” 62 Throughout his Defense, Las Casas claimed that the Indians were capable of being educated and could thus become civilized like the Europeans (cf. 28-29). According to Pagden, Las Casas believed that all the Amerindians were human and on the same historical scale as the rest of humanity (143). Those at the bottom of the scale were simply younger than those at the top and “[j]ust as the child is taught by his elders to understand the physical and moral world in which he is to live, so too entire races of men can be taught by those who have reached a higher level of civility than they” (ibid.).

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the case with the relationship between originals and their translations, there is a temporal difference between the two that establishes a hierarchy, establishing the chronologically first original and the “Old World” as superior to the later translation and the “New World.” The individual nation states that now make up Latin America, and which are quite frequently used as the basis of a collective identity, are also products of the colonial project. What became the South American republics after independence from Spain had previously been colonial administrative units, which were organized around particular military conquests (Anderson 52). For their part, the independence movements were not organized by indigenous Latin Americans who were seeking to free themselves from Spanish rule, but were brought about by settlers of European descent (ibid.). It was, then, an independence movement of European Americans to free themselves from Europe. What we now call Latin America is a land that was born out of its European translation. It is a land that was “cannibalized” by the Europeans, interpreted and assimilated on their terms often with little regard to or understanding of the identities of those who had been living there for at least a thousand years. The people there were translated into something that reflected the European view of the world, and, because of the magnitude of the colonial endeavor in Latin America, any discussion of this region, and of the identity of those who live there, will be, to a large extent, framed by the language and ideology of colonial discourse. As soon as we utter the words “Latin America” we are already in the realm of European colonial discourse, and it is impossible to return to or recover some pre-1492 identity. We can say of all Latin America what Hulme says of the Caribbean. He notes that we cannot talk about a native Caribbean

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culture, but instead, we can only access the “native Caribbean societies in contact with European colonialism,” because the line drawn at 1492 is an impenetrable one and does not allow us to see beyond it (67). If colonization has played such an immense role in formulating Latin America, then, from the point of view of the Europeans, its translation of itself can, to a great extent, be considered a successful one. Just as textual translations are usually considered incomplete, it could be said that Latin America, to this day, reflects certain fundamental aspects of its “discoverers”: it bears their religion, languages, idea of nation states, and many other aspects of their vision of the world. The fact that Latin America still exhibits these traits might mean, to some, that Europe effectively transferred them to the New World. However, this particular assessment also bears the structure that underlies the traditional notion of translation, which understands it as an activity of unidirectional transfer of some essence from one place to another. In other words, it takes for granted that the Europeans already had these firmly developed characteristics that they then attempted to transfer. It is precisely this notion I want to problematize here, both in the context of the colonial endeavor, as well as in the process of translation, because both have depended upon a similar notion of meaning.

3. Latin America Shaping Europe To assume that Latin America is merely the result of its translation by its colonizers is to embrace the same fictions held by the colonial powers about themselves – that they possessed a universal, unchanging truth that could be transported to the indigenous peoples. Although we cannot speak of Latin America without taking into

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account its history of contact with Europe, the opposite is also true. Instead of simply relying on the fact that Latin America was translated into existence by Europe, we can also see how the side that is analogous with “the original” also came into existence through its attempt to translate itself to the other. This is not a new idea and many scholars have pointed out the fact that Europe’s identity was greatly shaped by its many colonial exploits. Edward Said, for example, says in his well-known book Orientalism that the Orient served as Europe’s “contrasting image, idea, personality, experience,” and was thus able to create its identity “by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3). Contrary to the popular notion that identity is something that comes from within, internal to a culture, identity is, in large part, constructed from a comparison with an “other,” which Europe found in the lands it conquered. “Modernity” is one of the fundamental characteristics of European identity today, and, although it is “a European phenomenon,” Enrique Dussel affirms that it is “one constituted in a dialectical relation with a nonEuropean alterity that is its ultimate content” (65). He continues by saying that “modernity” begins when Europe affirms itself as the ‘center’ of a World History that it inaugurates; the ‘periphery’ that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition. […M]odernity as such was ‘born’ when Europe was in a position to pose itself against an other, when, in other words, Europe could constitute itself as a unified ego exploring, conquering, colonizing an alterity that gave back its image to itself. (65-66)

The notion of being the center of the world corresponds to the belief that those at the center possess that which the rest of the world needs, although it is hard to imagine that one could discover exactly what it is one has without positing a lack in an “other.” We have already seen how Europeans created the “savage,” and implicit in this model is the idea that the former distinguished themselves by comparison, that they saw themselves as 115

what the savage was not. I mentioned a moment ago that Aristotle was used to understand, or rather, create an understanding of the Amerindians, but we can also find examples of how the Amerindians were used to understand (or again, create an understanding) of Aristotle. Bartolomé de Las Casas, for example, in his lengthy In Defense of the Indians, writes against those who have used Aristotle to justify brutalities against the indigenous Americans. He clearly believes he is providing the correct reading of Aristotle, and that his foes, most notably the theologian Sepúlveda, were wrong in their reading: “[…] the Reverend Doctor Sepúlveda has spoken wrongly and viciously against people like these, either out of malice or ignorance of Aristotle’s teaching, and, therefore, has falsely and perhaps irreparably slandered them before the entire world” (42). Pagden says that Las Casas’s work “was the first large-scale attempt to apply the categories of sixteenth-century Aristotelian anthropology to a substantial body of empirical data,” and that he had set out to correct the erroneous view of the Indians’ nature precisely by making recourse to this empirical data, “which, he claimed, his enemies had either ignored or willfully misrepresented” (145). It is hard to imagine that his extensive contact with the Indians through which he gathered his data did not, indeed, color his reading of Aristotle, especially what the Philosopher meant when he spoke of barbarians. At the same time, as Las Casas laid out his vision of the civilizations and cultures of the Amerindians, he, perhaps unwittingly, had to explicitly detail what he believed it meant to be fully human. By contrasting itself to the radically “other” that it encountered in the New World, Europe, which in 1492 was a collection of disjunct citystates that were often at odds with each other, began to establish a common identity, which it equated with the fullest expression of humanity and culture.

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At the beginning of this chapter, I spoke of the view the Spanish had of their language as superior to that of the Tagalog people. However, the Spanish language, upon which Tagalog was modeled, was to some extent, a product of Spain’s previous encounters with other lands, especially lands it wanted to conquer. Henry Kamen, in his book Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity, recounts the famous story of Antonio de Nebrija’s presentation of his Gramática Castellana, the first grammar of the Spanish language, to Queen Isabella: When she asked what purpose it served, her confessor, Fray Hernando de Talavera, bishop of Avila, broke in and spoke on Nebrija’s behalf: “After your Highness has subjected barbarous peoples and nations of varied tongues,” he explained, “with conquest will come the need for them to accept the laws that the conqueror imposes in the conquered, and among them will be our language.” (151)

The official language of the empire did not precede it, but rather arose out of the necessity of having a structured language to impose on the colonial subjects. It was also the impending rise of the Spanish empire, according to Kamen, that moved Spain to officially adopt Castilian as the national language instead of the sacred Latin and the other languages spoken in the territory that had become Spain (ibid.). He claims that it is a myth that a language creates a nation, and that this nation and its language “triumph over” others, although this is the standard belief held by imperial powers (153). 63 The fact that this particular version of Spanish was selected and made the object of standardization by way of a specific formalized grammar shows that the originality of a language is not something naturally inherent or intrinsic to that language, but instead, is constructed, often in a reactionary way, through its differentiation from its “others.” Nevertheless, the language, in this case Castilian, was considered to possess something 63

What has become known as “Spanish,” similar to what happened with Tagalog, was only one of the many languages spoken in Spain. Kamen discusses the adoption of Castilian Spanish by the Crown in the chapter “The Myth of a Universal Language.”

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lacking in the others, and it then served as a model to rewrite the grammars of the conquered peoples (as in the Philippines), or was imposed outright (as it was throughout Hispanic Latin America). Just as the “original” Europe was shaped by the “translations” it made of itself in the form of colonies, there are multiple examples of how original texts are transformed, or, in fact, come into being through their translations. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I discussed the history of the translation of the Bible and showed that the “original” texts that comprise the Bible cannot be separated from the great body of theology that has been based on the many translations we have of this book. The specific interpretative frame provided by, for example, The King James Version, has endowed the text with new meaning that, thereafter, has been attributed to the original, meaning that is sought in subsequent translations. The case is also very clear in the works of “world literature” that are read, interpreted, and discussed in translation, all of which creates new meaning associated with the originals. Furthermore, awards such as the Nobel Prize for Literature are often given to “originals” based on assessments made of them through their translations. 64 This type of award clearly has an impact on influencing how and by whom

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According to the official website of the Nobel Foundation, the organization prides itself on the linguistic competency of its judges for the prize in literature, noting that most of the judges know English, French, German, Spanish or Italian, and for the cases in which an author of another language is nominated, there is at least one judge who can read that language. Since 1996 there have been four awards given to authors who write in English (although one is from Iran and another from Trinidad), two awarded to authors who write in German, and one in both French and Italian. We are told that “[w]here translations into English, French, German or the Scandinavian languages are missing [for the other languages], special translations can also be procured.” This would be the case, then, for the other five recipients of the Noble Prize for Literature since 1996 who write in Turkish, Hungarian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Polish. Obviously translation plays an integral role in determining who will be the recipients of this award, not to mention that the lack of translations also plays an integral role in determining who will not even be considered for nomination. Oddly enough (although not at all strange considering the traditional view of translation), it is hard to find any mention of the names of translators on the Nobel Foundation’s website, even in the cases in which it was obviously crucial for the judges to come into contact with the texts of some of the award recipients.

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the “original” will be read all around the world, including in its country of origin. Clearly separating the “true original” and what it becomes from its translations is not a task that really be fulfilled. We should be cautious, however, and not assume that, because the colonies had a great role in shaping the empires that ruled them, we have an equal exchange of influences between the two, or that all translations in all languages have the same impact in shaping “the original.” The colonial cultures helped shape Europe, but it is quite different from how Europe shaped the countries over which it ruled. Both sides are impacted, changed, and shaped by the encounter, but we should not say that a reciprocal process of exchange is established at this encounter. My intention here is to argue that, contrary to the way we generally think about colonial domination, i.e., that the dominant power simply imposes itself on its subjects, the colonial powers that consider themselves “original” are, in part, also recreated in the process of their translation. Likewise, we could say something similar of original texts and their translations. I said at the end of the previous section that, in a certain sense, Europe’s translation of itself onto the populations of the Americas can be considered successful because it was able to instill in the New World much of what it considered to be its “essence.” If, however, we examine this process of translation from the point of view of the indigenous people (which we cannot really do), and how they were represented, we would have to say that it was, in fact, a “mistranslation,” considering that it seems that they were transformed into something that had little to do with who they were before the colonial encounter. In order to provide a segue to the next section, as well as to offer

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some words of caution, I want to turn, once again, to a passage from Edwin Gentzler’s Translation and Identity in the Americas. In the introduction he writes: “America” is a mistranslation, a word imposed from the outside that has little connection with the lands to which it refers, a word that represents its submission rather than its life. […] Latin America is another mistranslation, referring to Latin languages – Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese primarily – translated to and written in America. Latin America thus reflects “original” European cultures and how those displaced languages and cultures have evolved in the New World. (5)

On the next page he continues by saying that, “[s]o many mistranslations of American people, landscape, culture, and artifacts have occurred in the process of the European explorers and colonizers translating and domesticating that which they encountered into their own terms, concepts, and worldviews that any accurate description becomes impossible” (6). While the first statements seem reasonable, it is problematic that Gentzler writes that the impossibility of arriving at an “accurate description” of Latin Americas and the people inhabiting it is due to the many mistranslations it has undergone. It seems that Gentzler is implying that if the natives and their cultures had been translated correctly we would be able to describe them properly. This is a common assumption, which often leads people to think that if we could just let others speak on their own behalf, we could discover their true essence, not the one fabricated for them by outsiders. At the core, this view essentializes identity, much in the way we essentialize meaning in texts. To begin investigating this assumption, I want to move now to a particular case in which two native South Americans did, in fact, write their own story.

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4. Before the World Existed The book Antes O Mundo Não Existia 65 was created so that the mythological stories of the Desana people could be preserved. What distinguishes this book from so many others that contain mythological histories of indigenous groups is that, according to the anthropologist Berta Ribeiro who wrote its introduction, Antes O Mundo marks “the first time that the indigenous protagonists are the authors of their own mythology” (9). The majority of the ethnographic studies that have been done of the Amerindians have been written by and from the point of view of Western anthropologists with their Western audiences in mind, such as the accounts of the Desana written in several books by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff. 66 In the case of Antes O Mundo, however, the indigenous people themselves wrote their own mythology, and did so primarily for an audience of their own people, and thus, this book is often hailed as a more authentic account of the Desana’s cultural identity. However, as I will argue, the idea of an “authentic” representation of any identity is problematic, even in cases when representations are drawn directly from the pen of the people themselves.

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I will reference both the introduction, which was written by Berta Ribeiro, as well as the main text written by Umúsin Panlõn Kumu and Tolamãn Kenhíri. Because there are different authors for these two parts of the book, when referring to the introduction, I will give the reference “Ribeiro,” and “Kumu and Kenhíri” for the main text. All translations from both the introduction and the main text itself are mine. 66 The anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote several books and articles about the Desâna, including Desana: Simbolismo de los Indios Tukano del Vaupés (translated by the author as Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Symbolism of the Tukano Indians) and The Forest Within: The WorldView of the Tukano Amazonian Indians. Amazonian Cosmos was written in close collaboration with a Desana informant named Antonio Guzmán, who fluently spoke half a dozen Tukano dialects, had been educated by missionaries and entered the Catholic priesthood, became a corporal in the Colombian army, and, because of his work with Reichel-Dolmatoff, also became a member of the Universidad de los Andes (Amazonian Cosmos xiii-xiv). In a way, Reichel-Dolmatoff’s books give us the reverse scenario from what we will see with Antes O Mundo, which was written by two DesanaIndians and then edited and adapted by a Brazilian anthropologist. Reichel-Dolmatoff’s goal was “to find some way to synthesize the culture, some large model, some affirmation tacitly accepted by all Desana in which the universe was ‘explained’” (xix). He claims, in The Forest Within, that he is recounting the “Desana origin myth, as it was told in [his] presence on several occasions by shamans and knowledgeable elders” (25); however, his account is considerably different from the one provided by the authors of Antes O Mundo.

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The Desana Indians, 67 a subgroup of the Tukano, can be found on both sides of the border between northwestern Brazil and southeastern Colombia and live primarily in the basins of the Uaupés, Tiqué, and Papurí rivers. It is difficult to determine their total population as they are scattered throughout this large region in small villages, and because there are between ten and fifteen subgroups of Tukano Indians who often coexist in the same villages (Reichel-Dolmatoff, Amazonian Cosmos 3-5; Ribeiro 11-12, n3). However, the estimates seem to indicate that their population is somewhere around one thousand. 68 Apart from the many Tukano subgroups in this region, there are also several groups from the Arawakan family, a few groups of the nomadic Makú, as well as one Carib-speaking tribe (Reichel-Dolmatoff, Amazonian Cosmos 4). In addition to the four language families represented by these groups, there is, of course, also the presence of both Spanish and Portuguese, the official languages of the nation states in which the Desana live. The Desana, then, form part of an extremely diverse region with a wealth of languages and cultures that have mixed and clashed over the past several centuries. However, it is not my intention to give an ethnographic overview of this indigenous group. Instead, I will focus on the relationship between the writing and subsequent

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According to Reichel-Dolmatoff, the name the Desana use to call themselves is Wirá (wind) or Wiráporá (sons of the wind) (Amazonian Cosmos 10). The term “Desana,” he adds, probably comes from an Arawakan dialect (ibid.). He goes on to say that “the Desana themselves consider this designation somewhat derogatory, and if we keep it throughout this work it is only because the name is already established in ethnographical literature and we do not want to cause further confusion” (ibid.). It is also worth pointing out that “Desana” is also the name used throughout Antes O Mundo Não Existia, both in the introduction and in the myths themselves. This is significant in light of our previous discussion regarding the naming of indigenous groups. It also foretells part of my examination of Antes O Mundo, considering that, even though this is not the name with which the people refer to themselves, from the very title page, we see that this is “The Heroic Mythology of the Desana Indians.” 68 An estimate by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff in 1968 put their total number at one thousand (Amazonian Cosmos 3). In the introduction to Antes O Mundo, published in 1980, Berta Ribeiro says that the population of Desanain Brazil alone is 820, divided into twelve different villages on three rivers (11-12, n3). In 1998, in his Ethnic Groups Worldwide: A Ready Reference Handbook, David Levinson puts the total number of Desana at 960.

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translation into Portuguese of what has become Antes O Mundo Não Existia and the mythological history that it was intended to preserve. My main goal here is to examine the interwoven connections that tie original to translation, and which make it impossible to arrive at a pure identity that separates an “us” from a “them.”

Trying to Save Culture by writing it into a Book Antes O Mundo was written by two Desana Indians, Umúsin Panlõn Kumu and his son Tolamãn Kenhíri, 69 from the village of São João. 70 When they began writing, the former occupied the position of “kumu,” a position Tolamãn would also come to occupy later. A “kumu” (pl. kumuá) is a person who is believed to have the power to control natural phenomena, predict the future and perform rituals to stave off malfeasance, and can also execute certain cures in the absence of a yé (pl. yeá), which can be translated as “shaman” (Ribeiro 10, n2). The kumu is at the pinnacle of the tribal hierarchy, just above the five to eight yeá, and is a person that has reached the highest level of true wisdom, which includes knowledge of the “great law of the energy circuit of the biosphere [..,] the mechanism of the ‘echo’ (keorí) by which all Creation continually transmits the message of its Creator […, and] the acceleration of time and the hallucinations that permit [the kumu] momentarily to return to the source of everything” (Reichel-Dolmatoff, Amazonian Cosmos 249). The kumu is also, in a sense, the guardian of tradition, and

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These are the authors’ names as listed on the cover. Ribeiro introduces the two authors as “Umúsin, whose Christian name is Firmiano Arantes Lana, and Tolamãn, his eldest son, baptized with the name Luiz Gomes Lana” (9). However, the name of the clan is also “Tolamãn Kenhíri ponlãn,” a name that can be translated as “filhos das flores do sonho” (“children of the dream flowers.” Literally: Tolamãn – proper name; Kenhíri – flowers or images that appear in dreams; ponlãn – descendant) (33). Ribeiro says that the Tolamãn Kenhíri that live in São João use the last name “Lana” instead of the designation of the clan (33, n26). I will refer to the father and son as Umúsin and Tolamãn, although Ribeiro refers to the two as Firmiano and Luiz in the quotes. 70 Fifty-four inhabitants in 1978 (Ribeiro 9, n1).

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plays a very important part in the communal festivals as the one who recites the legends that are enacted. The fact that the myths that make up Antes O Mundo were recorded by men who held this position that is responsible for safeguarding the group’s mythology appears to bolster the claim that this book is perhaps the most “authentic” version possible of the Desâna’s stories. Ángel Rama, who includes a discussion of Antes O Mundo in Transculturación narrativa en América Latina, compares this book to ReichelDolmatoff’s anthropological portrait of the Desana in Amazonian Cosmos by saying that the former “corresponds to a more profound interior layer of the literary texts of Latin America […],” because of who its authors are, and because it is tied to an indigenous language (81). Rama, too, sees Antes O Mundo as distinct from other anthropological studies of the Indians, and he seems to insinuate here that it can bring us closer to the core of the Desâna, to the inner essence of the identity of this group. Like so many indigenous peoples in this region and across South America, as well as throughout the rest of the world, the Desana have been losing many of their customs to the influx of external influences, and they have been undergoing a process of enculturation into the larger Brazilian and Colombian societies. Berta Ribeiro says that many Desana in the region in which she lived, for example, have the Brazilian national identification card and there are around eight hundred registered voters (Ribeiro 11-12). Many Desana also receive assistance from FUNRURAL, the Brazilian government’s program for rural medical and dental services (ibid.). Almost all of the children and adolescents, as well as a large portion of the men under forty are literate in Portuguese, and the schools in the area follow the same basic curricula as in the rest of Brazil (ibid. 12). In addition, there is a great presence of Christianity in the area and many Desana

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participate in church activities. Although there is still a widespread practice of shamanism, their traditional ceremonies are often performed in grandiose folkloric shows at the mission compounds, at the insistence of the missionaries, in order to honor important visitors and to celebrate certain Church or official Brazilian holidays (ibid.). It was what Tolamãn Kenhíri considered the disappearance of his people’s cultural knowledge of themselves that led him to undertake the project that resulted in Antes O Mundo. However, it does not seem to be simply the fact that people were drifting from their traditions that inspired the book, but, rather, it was the possibility that the Desana history could be improperly recorded that impelled him to the task. In her introduction, Ribeiro includes an interview she did with Tolamãn in which he says, “it was when I saw that even seventeen-year old kids were going around with tape recorders that I began to write down [the stories]. My cousin […] began to make drawings about our tribe, confusing it with another. I then said to my father: ‘Everyone is going to think that we’re telling the story wrong, everything will be confused’” (Ribeiro 9-10). He then convinced his father to join him in documenting their legends because both desired to “leave their descendants the mythical legacy of their tribe, convinced that, in another form, it would become lost or disfigured” (Ribeiro 9). Apart from simply documenting the stories, which he wrote on scraps of paper and in old notebooks, Tolamãn felt that the work had to be “published so that it could remain with [his] children, so that it would remain forever” (Ribeiro 10). Berta Ribeiro notes that she became aware of the importance of this project when she consulted the books the Desana children studied in the local school. All the texts “were about Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and they were taught nothing about the

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indigenous peoples of the Americas, the autochthonous civilizations, [or] the American and Brazilian inhabitants of the rainforest,” and they received no education of any kind regarding their people’s conception of themselves (32-33). She mentions one book that was available, written by the priest Alcionílio Brüzzi: A Civilização do Uaupés, published in 1962. According to her, although this book has many merits and contains some good observations of the Rio Negro area from a person who spent many years in the Uaupés region, the account is ultimately “full of so many preconceptions against [the indigenous population] that reading it only serves to undermine the tribal pride, making them internalize the image that the white man has of them” (33). In other words, almost five hundred years after the beginning of colonialism, the same kind of hierarchy typical of colonial representation was being followed. Ribeiro hoped that Antes O Mundo would be an exception, one that could put the representation of the people back into their own hands, and she says that her desire, as well as that of Umúsin and Tolamãn, was that, after its publication, the book would “return to Uaupés and become accessible to the people,” and “that the readers [would be], principally, the thousands of protagonists of this mythical story” (33). Ribeiro also recalls Umúsin and Tolamãn’s bitter reaction when she first met them and asked them if she could consult their unpublished manuscript. According to them, anthropologists too often go and spend time with the Indians, “collect their legends [and] study their traditions, and afterwards [the anthropologists] publish [their] work in Brazil and the United States, while they, the heirs to those traditions, only earn some miserable presents” (31-32). She agreed with their assessment and promised that she would treat the manuscript as any other bibliographical source, giving them credit for the

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information she used, and that, if published, the book would also be different from other accounts of indigenous myths in that their names would appear on the cover as the authors’ and that they would have all the rights of authorship (32).

For and By the Desâna? On one level, Antes O Mundo was written for Indians by Indians, but the fact that it is in Portuguese also gives us a strong indication that the book is not simply for the Desâna. In Tolamãn’s interview with Ribeiro included in her introduction, he says that when he finished the original in Desâna, he sent it to Father Casemiro, a priest who lived for many years among the Desâna. It is telling that the text was first sent to Casemiro, someone who was not part of the tribe. Furthermore, after he sent it, Tolamãn says: “I continued working on another original, this time in Portuguese” (10, my emphasis). He does not explain why he considered the second text – which is a translation of the one he first wrote in Desana – as an “original,” although we can speculate that it is because he was also the author of the first version of the Portuguese text before Berta Ribeiro began her extensive transformation and revision of it. The original Portuguese text was originally rejected for publication. Years later, when Ribeiro first read the manuscript, she, like the publishing company that had rejected it, felt that it was unpublishable the way it was and offered to help revise and copyedit it (Ribeiro 32). She and Tolamãn worked long days together for a month and a half on the revised version that consisted of fourteen chapters that would eventually be published by Livraria Cultura Editora in June of 1980.

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Although the goal was to make the book accessible to the people about whom it was written, it seems that many of the measures Ribeiro took in her editing were geared towards also making it accessible to a Brazilian audience. However, we should not speak of these two audiences as such separate and distinct entities. The schools in the area were run by priests, and classes were taught in Portuguese. In order, then, for the school children to read about themselves (and we should remember that one of the goals for the book was that it “return to Uaupés and become accessible to the people”), it would have to be readable by the missionary teachers who taught them how to read and selected what it was they would be reading. Ribeiro says that she thought Father Casemiro should have written the introduction to the book, as he had a much more profound knowledge of the people than she did due to the many years he lived in the Rio Negro region. However, he was forced to leave for reasons she does not explain, although it seems to be related to matters of the church. Both Father Casemiro and Tolamãn felt they would compromise potential audiences of the book if the former were to write the introduction (Ribeiro 32). The original, then, was always already conditioned by its non-native reception that, in turn, conditioned how the native audience was to receive it. At this point, the “Portuguese original” was still not accessible to a general Portuguese speaking audience, however, as Tolamãn had left a considerable number of Desana words in his text. Many of these words were proper nouns that conveyed symbolic meaning and Ribeiro explained to him that the stories would not make sense to readers unless they provided translations of those words (ibid. 36). She decided (with Tolamãn’s approval) to keep the Desana words in the Portuguese text and include, in parentheses, word-for-word translations of the Desana words in the same order as in the

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original (33), with the exception of those that Tolamãn felt were sacred, i.e., ceremonial words that could not be translated (36). “Literal translation,” she writes, “in my view, permits one to infer the thought structure of the Tukano speakers and the symbolic significance of expressions such as Tolamãn Kenhíri ponlãn” 71 (33). Her literal translations are also sometimes accompanied by a gloss that gives a more detailed explanation. At the same time, Ribeiro and Tolamãn added footnotes stating the equivalents in Tukano, the lingua franca of the area, “so that linguists and Indian readers could understand it, given that Desana is in danger of becoming extinct” (36). In this manner, she felt they could represent both the spirit and the character of the Desana language and, at the same time, communicate its significance to an outside reader. For example, in the first pages of the creation story, we are introduced to the first woman who “sprouted from herself” and created a dwelling place “called etãn bë tali bu (quartz, room or layer). She herself was named Yebá bëlo (earth, great-great-grandmother), that is, grandmother of the universe” (Kumu and Kenhíri 51). This is followed by an explanation of how Yebá bëlo created herself from the “six invisible things,” and how, as she “chewed the magic ipadu 72 and smoked the magic cigarette,” her thoughts rose up and formed a sphere: Having done this, she called the sphere ëmëkho patolé (universe, womb).* 73 It was like a big hut. Afterwards she wanted to populate this great house. She went back to chewing the ipadu and smoking a cigarette, and both were invisible in the beginning, not like the ones today. She spit the ipadu from her mouth and made it transform into people: the ëmëkho ñehké semá (universe, grandparents, many),* the five claps of thunder called etãn bë weli mahsá (quartz, that are, people). That is to say, people of the white stone, who are eternal, not mortal like us. This she did in the dwelling where she had appeared. (Kumu and Kenhíri 52)

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See footnote 69 A variety of the coca plant whose leaves are still chewed by the Desana during ceremonies. 73 The asterisks mark where footnotes containing Tukano equivalents were placed. 72

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In addition to clarifying obscure passages, Ribeiro explained that she was also involved in modifying the vocabulary. “Among other alterations to the text,” she writes, “I made, for example, the following changes: I used the expression ‘ancestral’ instead of ‘grandfather’; ‘descendant’ instead of ‘son’ […]; ‘Creator’ in place of ‘God,’ explaining to Luiz Lana my reasons for the changes” (Ribeiro 36). She does not provide us with any of these explanations in her introduction. Apart from having a great impact on the vocabulary, Ribeiro also shaped the content of the book as she asked Tolamãn to include several myths she had heard, but that the authors had not intended to include in this book, some of which had not even been written down yet (ibid. 36-37). Although this book was originally penned by two Desana people, we cannot ignore the integral role Ribeiro played in editing and preparing the text. At the same time, I do not want to insinuate that Ribeiro stripped this book of its “authenticity,” having imposed upon it certain standards or ideas from her culture. First, without her assistance, Antes O Mundo would probably have never been published since she acted as a mediator between the Desana and the audiences of the Brazilian readership (publishers, linguists and anthropologists), and, strangely enough, other Indian groups in the area. In the second place, Ribeiro was merely assisting in a project that, it can be said, always already bore the marks of a culture foreign to the Desana simply because of its medium: writing

From Oral Text to Written While it is true that this is a unique book that does indeed provide a different perspective from the ones traditionally written by Western ethnographers, I want to highlight the way in which Antes O Mundo is still trapped in the context it is trying to

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escape. Although it has been said that this book gives an “authentic” view of the Desâna, as we will see, the fact that it is being recorded in writing makes it, to some extent, an “inauthentic” expression of their mythology from the beginning. The mythical stories were traditionally performed in the two yearly collective celebrations, dabucurí and cachirí, in which all the inhabitants of the villages in the area would join together in elaborate costumes to dance, sing and listen to the kumu and yeá recite their myths (Rama 86). Ángel Rama calls the transformation of these myths into writing an “atrocious impoverishment” of their original communal and oral form (87). He claims that the written texts, which were previously “transmitted orally and thus fixed by communal censure, situated inside and outside of history, [texts] that document a composite genre (words, rhythms, beliefs, dances, drawings, smells, sex, skin), designed to regulate the life of the community,” are then turned into a text authored by individuals and inserted into “the genre of mythic tale” of Western fiction (90). Writing of the communal celebrations in which the myths are enacted, Rama says: It is this organic community that ties together the collective group, bringing about a spiritual, physical, and social participation that guides the plurality of emotional and rational energy of these human beings who now find themselves substituted by a person who no longer speaks, but writes, and writes alone with his pencil and paper, with the ambition that other people who are far away and equally alone read it and try to reconstruct with their imaginations the complex codes that are put into practice in communal festivals. (87)

Tolamãn takes a similar stance against writing, positing it as something that is proper to the “white man,” and external to his own culture. In a testimony entitled “Nosso Saber Não Está Nos Livros!” (“Our Knowledge is Not in Books!”), collected by the anthropologist Dominique Buchillet, Tolamãn claims that, according to Desana mythology, To us, who are the older brothers of the white man, Yebá-gõãmi gave the power of memory, the ability to keep everything in our memory, the songs, the dances,

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the ceremonies, the prayers to cure diseases... We keep all this in our memory! Our knowledge is not in books! But to the white man, who was the last one to leave the Canoe-of-Transformation, 74 he gave the power of writing. With books he could get everything the white man would need, he had said. That's why the white man arrived in our land with writing, with books. This is what Yebágõãmi had said! (Kenhíri, my translation) 75

It is quite ironic that the very author of the written forms of his people’s myths makes a statement like this, drawing such a sharp line between his people and the outsiders, a line that he then crosses. It is even more ironic that he wanted to pursue the publication of the text “so that it would remain forever,” and that he did so with the Portuguese version. If we strictly adopt his assessment of writing, it appears that Antes O Mundo escalates the cultural breakdown that it is trying to stave off by adopting the expressive forms of those who are considered to be responsible for much of what is seen as the Desâna’s cultural deterioration. It would seem, then, that Antes O Mundo cannot be considered as an authentic expression of the Desana myths, but instead, as an expression of their destruction. However, this book was never intended to replace the oral tradition, but to provide something that could safeguard the meaning of the Desâna’s collective celebrations, and it is more constructive to focus on the fact that the writing of Antes O Mundo represents an encounter between two civilizations. Ribeiro says that this book “documents the result of the symbiosis between cultural conservativism and the use of an instrument acquired from our civilization to extract it: written language” (9). She sees this book as a fusion, one in which the mode of cultural preservation is taken from the non-

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In the next section I will be discussing the passages to which he is referring here. This testimony was recorded by the anthropologist Dominique Buchillet in June of 1992 and published in French in the journal Ethnies. Droits de l’Homme et Peuples autochtones, in 1993. The original Portuguese version can be found on the website “Povos Indígenas no Brasil” (Indigenous Peoples of Brazil) run by the organization Instituto Socioambiental. 75

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indigenous world. Ángel Rama, for his part, refers to this move from an oral to a written text as a kind of translation, and says: What the barrier of translation reveals is our lack of cultural codes that can frame the indigenous texts, texts which are incarnated in the strict linguistic operations that serve the formulation of thoughts and feelings into meaning. The Indian literary products that belong to the vein of cultural resistance are those that draw the limits of literature in Latin America, as they clearly show, more than any other type of linguistic communication, cultural otherness. (93)

At first Rama seems specifically concerned with the “impoverishment” involved in trying to transfer a wholly other discourse into the Portuguese language, a framework that is completely different from that of the original. Translation is a barrier, but a revealing one – it reveals our own lack of means to represent otherness. It reveals our inability to capture otherness, even in this case when the “others” are representing themselves. But does it stop there? Is translation just a barrier that exposes the existence of otherness, as if the “other” were on the opposite side of this divide that translation marks, forever separated and unapprehendable? Rama says that the “literary products of the Indians […] draw the limits of literature in Latin America,” and, thus, they impact the possibilities of literary expression in Latin America. Perhaps it would be better to say that indigenous literatures “push” the limits of literature in Latin America. It is not that the Indians are merely using a tool from the white man’s culture to express themselves, but by using this tool they are changing the very framework of this medium, both in content and form. It introduces new forms and new content, considering that, as Rama points out, these texts function as forms of cultural resistance and have provided some awareness as to the existence of forms of cultural otherness, which serve to shape the national identities and literatures of Latin America. Rama uses the analogy of theater to illustrate the difference between the oral, communal reenactment of the mythology and its written form in Antes O Mundo. He 133

says, “our memory of how the performance was acted out on the stage permits us to measure the enormous distance at which the written text finds itself and the supreme expressive poverty that it manifests” (87-88). The written text, or script, is analogous to the “models we know from the testimonies of anthropologists,” and what happens on the stage is akin to the actual celebrations (88). The “poverty” for Rama results in the fact that it is hard to commit to paper the “multiple codes that compose the theatrical scene (gestures, intonations, lights, costumes, etc)” (87). But let us think a little more about this analogy. A playwright begins by attempting to transform a mental image into words. The mental image can arise from any number of inspirations, including a particular historical moment (for example, the historical plays by Shakespeare). Tolamãn, too, translated his and his father’s perceptions of the myths they had seen enacted throughout their lives (and in which they had participated) into a written text. As certain aspects of their culture were disappearing and many of the Desana were no longer knowledgeable of the stories they were performing in the festivals, Antes O Mundo, with its goal of “returning the myths to the people,” was supposed to serve as something that would remind those of a certain meaning in their actions that had been forgotten. Of course, the text would then have an impact on the way the celebrations would be performed. A script provides the basis for a play, it informs the actions that will be put into play by the actors, but in no way is it the sole guide for what will appear on the stage. At the same time, the manner in which a play is performed will have an impact on the way a spectator reads the play thereafter, and he or she will be influenced by the performance that was witnessed. There is a two-way motion at work here. The Desana celebrations engendered the written text, but are, in turn, influenced by this written text, which was seen as necessary in the first

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place because people were forgetting the meaning behind their actions in the celebrations. Furthermore, this new medium that changes their culture also brings about some awareness of their existence and their (changing) cultural mythology to areas of the world outside their region. I want to turn now from the question of writing into which these stories were translated to some of the myths themselves. We have seen that the act of documenting the Desana mythology in writing was always already marked by the encounter between their culture and those from whom they were attempting to defend it. Now we will see that this encounter is embedded within the very stories that recount the origins of the Desana people.

Encounters in Desana Mythology Much of the Desana mythology that is collected in Antes O Mundo Não Existia reflects the cultural contact between the Desana and the culture that is considered responsible for a great deal of the changes they have undergone, changes that were the impetus for the creation of this book in the first place, and it is pertinent to the present discussion to examine some of the myths themselves. As indicated in the long quote from Antes O Mundo a few pages back, Yebá bëlo, after creating herself, transformed five claps of thunder into five beings. She then told these thunder-men, the ëmëkho ulãn (universe, brothers): “‘I produced you to create the world. It is now up to you to imagine a way to make light, make rivers and the future humanity, the pamani mahsá aninbolá’ (transformation, people, that will be)” (Kumu and Kenhíri 53). The third thunder-man,

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Ëmëkho sulãn ñehké, (universe, ceremonial word, 76 great-grandfather) was given magical riches, which were to be transformed into humanity, to safeguard in his house. All of the thunder-men, however, stayed inside and not one of them set himself to the task that Yebá bëlo had given them. So, Yebá bëlo created Ëmëkho sulãn Panlãmin (universe, ceremonial word, great-grandson), also known as Yebá ngoamãn (earth, creator), to undertake the creation of the world (54-55). Panlãmin went to the house of Ëmëkho ñehké to get the riches needed to create humanity and it was there that Ëmëkho mashsãn Boléka (universe, person, uaracu fish), his brother and the greatest ancestor of the Desâna, first appeared (57). After Panlãmin and Boléka attained the riches, Ëmëkho ñehké transformed into a giant snake, the pahmelin

pinlun

(transformation,

snake),

also

called

the

pahmelin

gahsilu

(transformation, canoe) 77 to carry them on their journey (61). Panlãmin and Boléka ride the Canoe of Transformation around the diá ahpikun dihtálu (river, milk, lake) that covered all the land, building houses of transformation along the way. They traveled throughout the entire region, “arriving to the coast of Brazil, 78 going up through the Amazon, entering the Rio Negro, and reaching all the way to Uaupés, continuing on to

76

“Sulãn” does not mean “ceremonial word,” but, instead, it is one of the sacred, ceremonial words that Tolamãn feels has no translation (see Ribeiro 36). 77 We are told in a footnote that the word “pahmelin” comes from the word “pamë,” which means “the arrival of some thing that did not exist before” (61, n4). I will relate this word later to the notion of translation. In addition, although Reichel-Dolmatoff’s account of the creation story varies considerably from this one, he does mention the canoe of transformation. However, he writes its name as “pamurígahaíru,” which, he says, means “to ferment-placenta” (Amazonian Cosmos 56-57). 78 Throughout Antes O Mundo, we are given the names for places that would not have existed at the time these stories were supposedly taking place, reminding us that the Desana mythology is now always already framed in the context of colonization. The text tells us that, during the voyage of the Canoe of Transformation, for example, “according to our ancestors [the fifty-second House of Transformation] was located where the Mission of Pari-Cachoeira is today” (69). Also, the territory in which the Desana live is located on the Equator and there are several references to it even though, as we are told in a footnote, they have no word for it (81; ibid n8). In fact, not only is it mentioned, but it is sometimes considered as something of high importance. Consider, for example, the following sentence: “Returning to the center of the world, to the Equator, Boléka went to the wihun wi […]” (82).

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Tiquié,” scattering the riches in the houses, which acted as incubators for the future people that would inhabit the earth (62). The entire creation up to this point, all the houses and people, was still underwater, and it was not until the fifty-sixth house was built that the people began to step onto land. Here, we are told, was where humanity was divided into groups, and a man and a woman from each group began forming a line. The order that the groups stepped onto land determined the age of each particular group – the first are considered to be older than the ones that followed them. The first to touch land was Waúro, the leader of the Tukano, then Boléka with the Desâna, each carrying the eternal riches that contained the power to make their great celebrations with the neighboring tribes (73). Afterwards came the other tribes that live in the same region as the Desâna. The seventh to step out on land was the white man. Panlãmin told him that there were no riches left and he said: “you will have to make war to take riches from others” (74). The white man shot his gun in the air and headed south. The text continues by saying that Panlãmin “gave the white man the power to make wars; war for [the white man] is like a celebration” (ibid.). The eighth to leave the water for the land was the priest, who carried a book and was ordered to remain with the white man (ibid.). If we are to agree with the assessment that the white man’s culture has led to the breakdown of the Desana traditions, it is interesting to note that, in the beginning, within the story of the origins of humanity in the Desana mythology, we can already identify the seeds of their own destruction. Although the white man and the Desana come from the same origin, in this initial story they are still separated into different groups. In another story from a later chapter,

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however, we see aspects of the white man’s culture being born directly amongst the Desana people. A Desana mother gave birth to a baby girl who, already at the age of two, was remarkably different from the other little girls because she would sing songs that nobody had ever heard before (Kumu and Kenhíri 86). At five she organized her friends together to fashion a cross out of some sticks. At thirteen she asked her father to build a big cross out of Brazil-wood. 79 “Every afternoon the little girls would get together to sing these songs whose origin nobody knew” (ibid 87). When she turned fifteen, she told her parents that these songs had been taught to her by Kirítu, which is the translation of Jesus Christ (ibid.) “The parents of the girl did not know who this Kirítu was, but she ended up convincing them that they should believe in him” (ibid.). This girl had a great impact on the village, and we are told that her fame spread throughout the entire region, and that the spirits of the dead commoners 80 began to disappear because “it seemed that the song of the kurúsa (cross) took them to heaven” (ibid.). Many years later, another prophet appeared named Yewá, who was also a great Tukano yé (ibid.). He prophesized that “men of God” and virgins dressed in black and white would come (ibid.). It was only after these predictions that the priests and nuns came to this region (ibid. 88). As Berta Ribeiro explains, this story “reveals the effects of indigenous-Christian religious syncretism, as it speaks of Kirítu (Christ), Balia (María), Yúse (Joseph) and of the transference of the souls of the dead according to the Biblical revelations, from their

79

I mentioned this particular type of wood in the previous chapter in connection with Oswald de Andrade who named one of his books Pau-brasil. In Antes O Mundo, we are told that the word in Desana is guëlapolelu, which means: name, heart, because it does not rot (Kumu and Kenhíri 86, n26). 80 The Desana believe that people go to different places when they die, depending on their position in society. The kumuá and the yeá go to a different place than the common people who go to a place called wahpíru wi. We are told in this story that, for centuries, they would go to wahpíru wi until the this girl taught the village of Kirítu who then brought them to heaven (Kumu and Kenhíri 86).

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original subterranean dwelling to the heavenly one, although, at the same time it continues to be an indigenous myth” (Ribeiro 37). We can end this section with, perhaps, one of the most striking stories that illustrates the encounter between the Indian and the white man that is found in the Desana mythology: the kidnapping of their primogenitor Ëmëkho mashsãn Boléka by the white man. After the creation of the world, the Desana had been divided into different villages and they all lived peacefully together. Boléka kept a little figurine of Ngoamãn (a.k.a. Panlãmin), the creator, in his house. At night, in dreams, Ngoamãn would be with the wife of Boléka, as well as with other women, but only those that were married. “When a child was born from the mixture of the semen of Ngoamãn and the husband, they knew that he would be wise and foresee the future as an adult” (96). Ngoamãn had great powers and protected Boléka. When the white men who, at that time, were capturing all the Indians, arrived, they went towards Boléka’s house, but something happened to their bodies and they were not able to go further. They tried again and again before asking other tribes why they could not enter the village of Boléka. They were told it was because of Ngoamãn, and were also informed of where the figurine was kept. The next time they came they shot it down from its place above the door with a gun. They were then able to capture Boléka and he was carried away. The end of the story reads: The brother of [Boléka] was able to escape and took the place of Ëmëkho mashsãn Boléka as the supreme chief of the Desana. Boléka took with him his powers when he was dragged away by the white men. Maybe he is in Bahia, or Rio [de Janeiro], or in Portugal. This nobody knows. (Kumu and Kenhíri 97)

Berta Ribeiro connects this particular myth with something that happened to her when she was living in São João with the Desana. Umúsin (Tolamãn’s father) sent his daughter to Ribeiro to ask her, since she was from Rio de Janeiro, if she had ever heard of the

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whereabouts of Boléka. She speculates that, deep down, he was trying to “discover an explanation, within his psychic horizon, of the extraordinary domination of the white man over the Indian, in the fact that the white man had kidnapped the creator of his people and, in this way, had seized his wisdom and power” (Ribeiro 37). Umúsin Panlõn Kumu and Tolamãn Kenhíri undertook the project of committing their mythology to writing in order to preserve it, to record it before the influx of external influences erased it from the memories of the Desana people. However, at the same time, we have seen that from the very beginning of the project, the other from whom they were trying to protect themselves was always already part of themselves. In the three myths we have just seen, first we see that the other, the white man, who is opposed to the Desana, is present with them at the origins of humanity, then his religion is spontaneously born among the Desana, and, finally, within the stories that attempt to provide some kind of collective Desana identity, we have a scene that portrays the white man’s dominance over this particular Amerindian group. Of course, we most certainly talk about different groups such as the indigenous versus the non-indigenous, the Brazilians versus the Desana, or the Europeans versus the Latin Americans, but at the same time, it is clear that they are also woven together, and that the “them” is always already present within the “us.”

5. The Origin that a Difference Makes Attempts at defining particular identities are often constructed around an us/them dichotomy coupled with a search for origins, for an unadulterated and authentic core from which the “us” stems.

“True” identity is often seen as something inside a people,

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something that reaches back to their origins, and external influences from any “them” are considered sources of corruption. However, in this chapter we have seen how the “us” and the “them” are constantly involved in shaping each other and, also, that the others from whom a people often tries to distinguish itself are often present within it, making it an impossible task to root an identity in a fixed and unchanging origin that previously existed. If there is no pure, unchanging identity, it is impossible to transfer said identity. 81

With respect to the translation of texts, we have seen that the original and the

translation become tangled up with each other and that the process is not simply a matter of transferring meaning from the former to the latter. At the same time, when I say that two “sides” such as the New World and the Old World meet and act upon each other, we should not think that before their encounter there are two homogenous groups – the two sides of the dichotomy are different from each other, but each one is also different from itself. I said at the beginning of this chapter that, at the time of the encounter with the New World, Europe was a disjunct collection of city-states that were busy distinguishing themselves from one another, often involved in bloody conflicts that would draw the boundaries that served as attempts to demarcate national identities. In the fifteenth century, Spain was distinguishing itself from other European countries to the north and the Arabs to the south (both of which left lasting marks on Spain), but it cannot be said that, within Spain there was one particular identity that set them apart from the others. At the time of the colonial conquest the idea that 81

Nietzsche briefly addresses this very issue in an essay we can find in Untimely Meditations, although he writes of the dichotomy between the Greeks and the Orient: “The Hellenization of the world and, to make this possible, the orientalization of the Hellenic – the twofold task of the great Alexander – is still the last great event; the old question whether a culture can be transplanted to a foreign soil at all is still the problem over which the moderns weary themselves. The rhythmic play against one another of these two factors is what has especially determined the course of history hitherto” (208).

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Spain possessed some kind of national unity was a myth that served the interests of those who were trying to construct an empire. 82 Within the territory called Spain there was a wealth of languages and cultural traditions, and positing something called a “Spanish identity” could only be done by selecting some at the exclusion of others. This multiple Spanish identity persists to this day as can be seen in the current debates regarding what it means to be Spanish, especially given that there are vastly different autonomous regions that are often at odds with the federal government. 83 And, of course, the same kinds of debates can be found within the autonomous regions regarding their specific identities (for example, what it really means to be Valencian 84). This is not just the case with something that might be called “Spanish identity,” but all collective identities. Even with the Desana, a group of people whose numbers are very small, there is not one unified version of their identity, as exemplified in the differing versions of the Desana world view put forth by Reichel-Dolmatoff and his native informant, and those of Tolamãn, Umúsin, and Ribeiro. Unity is often sought in a point of origin to which everyone and everything could be tied. If we return to the Desana’s image of the Canoe of Transformation, however, we can paint a different metaphorical picture of origins. As we have just seen, included in the Desana mythology of origins is an encounter with a radical other, and, at the root of how they envision the world from which they are already distinguishing themselves, they coexist with this other in the Canoe of Transformation that engendered all humankind.

82

For a detailed discussion of this issue, see, for example, the chapter “The Myth of the Historic Nation” in Henry Kamen’s Imagining Spain (1-37). 83 Consider, for example, the piece, “Cultura federal y nacionalismos,” written by Miquel Caminal on the thirtieth anniversary of the Spanish Constitution, in which he discusses the complex relationship between the federal government and the various autonomous regions. 84 For example, see, “Valenciano y catalán, ¿sólo una cuestión de nombre?” by Calpe, Ferrer, and Ahuir.

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The origin is not a source of sameness; it is filled with difference and the guarantee that there will be change. We can also return to Haroldo de Campos’s translation of the book of Genesis for another metaphorical image of origins, this time from Western mythology. According to the King James Version, Genesis 1:1 reads: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” In Chapter II, we saw that De Campos translates this as: “No começar/Deus criando/O fogoágua/e a terra” (“In the beginning/God creating/the firewater/and the earth”). In the Western tradition, heaven is generally considered the origin of all creation, posited in opposition to the earth. Here, instead of translating “shamáyim” as “céu” (“heaven” in Portuguese), he uses fogoágua (“firewater”), a word composed of opposites, coexisting with each other, while, at the same time, negating each other, and is thus comparable to the way in which the Desana myth begins with their ancestors sharing the origins of humanity with those who will transform (or destroy) them. Fogoágua also serves to break down the opposition between heaven and earth. At the origin we always find the seeds for the transformation of the origin. In the beginning, the beginning is always already transforming itself. In the myths I referenced earlier, the word “pahmelin” is frequently used and it is translated as “transformation” or “transformative.” I mentioned that this word comes from “pamë,” which means “the arrival of some thing that did not exist before” (Kumu and Kenhíri 61, n4). “Pahmelin” is particularly appropriate for our discussion of translation, considering that I have been saying that the act of translation cannot be the transfer of something from one place to another, but that it is, is a sense, the process by which something new is created, something that did not exist before and that comes into existence with translation. Traditionally, the goal of translation has been to maintain sameness as much as possible;

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in other words, to ensure that nothing different comes into existence. Antes O Mundo, given that it is first a translation into writing, then into Portuguese, of the Desana mythology, is itself a “pahmelin.” In a similar manner, all translation transforms a text into something that did not exist before: the words are different, the context is different, the readership is different, all of which may even transform the text from which it came. Translation is a craft of “pahmelin” on many levels. 85 The Europeans attempted to transport their culture to the New World, to convert the people there into something similar to themselves. While they did succeed in transforming the Amerindians, the latter are not perfect copies of the former since what they have are transformations, pahmelin, of European traits. The colonial process was a transformation of traits of the Old World in a different context. And, as we saw, Europe was also transformed by the encounter, making both the New and the Old Worlds, to some extent, bound together, new transformations that are still inseparable from each other. However, as I said earlier in this chapter, just because the two sides influence each other we should not assume that these kinds of encounters constitute equal exchanges, or that the New World and the Old World have the same degree of influence on each other. Latin America did, indeed, have a great impact on shaping Europe’s identity, but it would be ridiculous to say that it took place on the same scale as Europe’s shaping of Latin America. Beyond questions of the degree of influence, it was Europe, to the greatest extent, that controlled the terms of the exchange. Similarly, some translations

85

In poststructuralist thought, it is a common notion that translation entails transformation. Probably one of the clearest and most groundbreaking examples is found in Jacques Derrida: “In the limits to which it is possible or at least appears possible, translation practices the difference between signified and signifier. But if this difference is never pure, no more so is translation, and for the notion of translation we would have to substitute a notion of transformation: a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another (Ear of the Other 95).

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have had an enormous impact on what the original becomes, but this varies depending on a number of factors. Jerome’s translation of the Bible has had a huge impact on what people understand as the original Bible, but a translation of this book into an African dialect spoken by a few hundred people will probably have little impact on how the rest of the world understands the Bible. When I say that the original is shaped by translation I am not trying to insinuate that there is only one agreed-upon original. When I say, for example, that Jerome’s Bible has shaped the way a large part of the world views the original, but a translation into an African dialect may not, I am not saying that the former somehow impacts the original and the latter does not. The latter most certainly creates the original for that specific audience, 86 but it probably does not have the kind of power or influence necessary to spread its particular view of the original to a wider audience. This unequal exchange highlights something that is often repressed in traditional Western notions of both imperialism and translation: the fundamental role that power plays in creating what is considered truth. As we have learned from Nietzsche, truth is not inherent; it is created, imposed. The Spanish were able to create the “truth” of the Amerindians and turn them into what they considered them to be. This would be unfathomable the other way around. What I would like to emphasize is that it is through the process of interpretation, translation, cannibalization, that we, in a sense, give life to whatever we are attempting to interpret or translate, by calling it into being in our version of it. As we search for origins we posit them. Translation, like all forms of interpretation, is the act through which we form the original by attributing meaning to it. This is the case with our attempts to say what texts mean, as well as the identity of a particular people. When, for example, 86

Consider Eugene Nida’s story about the missionary in Africa recounted in Chapter I.

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Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff writes of his collaboration with Antonio Guzmán, his native informant, he says that Guzmán “was now discovering for himself relationships in his own culture that he had not consciously established before” (Amazonian Cosmos xix). For Reichel-Dolmatoff, Guzmán was “discovering” the truths of his people. It is more probable, however, that Guzmán was evaluating his Desana culture through the frames he had gained from all the years he had lived away from the Desana in urban Colombia and in the seminary. This is not to say that Guzmán’s view was wrong, but simply that it was conditioned by his experiences both growing up with and living many years away from the Desana. The same could be said for Tolamãn, whose version of the Desana identity is also marked by his experiences. By saying “marked,” I am not implying that there is a true, authentic identity that is obscured by people’s points of view. At the end of Chapter I, following Nietzsche, we saw that the veils of representation that are often said to obscure truth actually engender truth itself; these veils frame what we consider to be truth. Similarly, Tolamãn’s view is framed by his experiences, and these frames (which, too, are always already in the process of transformation) are necessary to interpret what is perceived. We cannot escape the frames through which we view the world; they are the condition for our making sense of it. As I have been arguing, Tolamãn’s portrait of his people exemplifies the transformative nature of all acts of interpretation, all acts of creating and attributing meaning, and we can call this process “translation,” both as a trope and in its “proper” sense, which can be described as the act of reframing a text in a language other than the one in which it was originally written. In the beginning there is always already translation.

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Conclusion There is nothing more serious than a translation. I […wish] to mark the fact that every translator is in a position to speak about translation, in a place which is more than any not second or secondary” Jacques Derrida, Des Tours de Babel

In The Poetics of Imperialism, Eric Cheyfitz says that translation can help us understand imperialism because “our imperialism historically has functioned (and continues to function) by substituting for the difficult politics of translation another politics of translation that represses these difficulties” (xxii). At the end of my first chapter, in connection with Nietzsche’s work, I argued that we ignore or repress the fact that we cannot arrive at a solid, essential body under the clothes of representation, and in my third chapter I addressed the fact that we often embrace an uncomplicated view of cultural and national identities, thinking of them as solid essences, to which we refer as the “true” identity, or the “real” nature of a certain group of people. By rethinking translation in the manner in which I have been doing throughout this dissertation, we can begin to view the practice more realistically by seriously analyzing and questioning the complex web of ideological, social, political, historical, and conventional factors that shape and have shaped how we both teach and practice this activity, an analysis that quickly shows us that translation is anything but a process of neutral transfer of meaning. Instead of repressing the fact that these factors all play immeasurable roles not only in our study and practice, but even in what we consider translation to be in the first place, 147

we can also recognize that translation does not merely play a part in this world of bringing information from one place to another, but it plays a fundamental role in shaping and transforming the information in question, as well as the contexts from which and into which information is being translated. Furthermore, when we appreciate the complexity of the process of translation and how it is related to the formation and dissemination of truth and, as we expose how we often repress “the difficult politics of translation,” we can use our reflection about this activity to assess the manner in which some of the same kinds of difficulties are repressed in order to allow our political systems to (dis)function as they do. Nietzsche’s work has helped us see that what is “proper” comes from a long history that has been constructed of metaphors and language that reflect countless ideologies, which compose our designations of truth. For example, even our very notion of the proper, which we often equate with what is “correct,” has its roots in the idea of ownership, and the proper/improper distinction, as we saw in the introduction of this dissertation with Aristotle, is based on the difference between “us” and “them” (Poetics XXI). What we call “proper” does not reflect an essence, but a viewpoint that places “us” at the center. Since we have no names that “properly” reflect essences, the ability to name is a highly political matter, and we can see evidence everywhere of the struggles over the ownership of language and over who has the power to name. 87 It is not surprising, then, that translation, an activity that is essentially one of endowing texts with new names, is also caught up in these same kinds of power dynamics.

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We can think, for example, of the debates in the United Nations surrounding the application of the word “genocide” in the Rwanda conflict (Cf. Carroll), the use in the U.S. press of “climate change” versus “global warming” (Cf. Tundell), or the question of who ends up being named a “soldier,” a “militant,” an “insurgent,” an “enemy combatant,” a “freedom fighter,” or a “terrorist.”

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In The Gay Science, Nietzsche comments directly on translation saying that “the degree of the historical sense of any age may be inferred from the manner in which this age makes translations and tries to absorb former ages and books” (137, author’s emphasis), and, with this in mind, we can consider our own translation practices and how they reflect the way in which we build our relationships with other cultures. Venuti has pointed out, for example, that the number of texts translated into English is extremely low, especially considering the amount of translation from English into other languages (160). Obviously, his indicates that there is little interest in the English-speaking world concerning what other, non-English speaking cultures are saying. This tendency has posed major problems for the relationship between the U.S. and other cultures, and we are continually reminded of how little the U.S. government seems to know about other cultures, especially those of its so-called enemies. Reflecting on the relationship between metaphor, translation, and truth gives us a critical apparatus to examine some of the greater contexts in which translation operates. As we have seen, because translation both reflects and reinforces these structures within which it works, it can serve as a metaphor to contemplate larger questions regarding how national identities are constructed and by whom. Combining some of the ideas we have encountered throughout this dissertation, we could use our metaphor of the body/clothes, for example, to examine the situation of the prisoners that have been held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, in which we are literally confronted with bodies that have been translated into distinctive clothes whose designation places them outside of the national and international jurisdiction that normally governs the treatment of prisoners. 88

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As I’m writing, the situation is changing as the new president, Barak Obama, signed an executive order on January 22, 2009 to shut down this detention center. Debates are currently underway as to how the U.S.

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These detainees, for many years, did not have the right of habeas corpus or the right to see the evidence that names them as wearers of the bright orange jumpsuits with which we are all familiar, and, in most cases, there are no formal charges that would justify them being dressed in this way. The only thing we can know about these individuals is their uniform, which is exclusively defined by their captors. Nietzsche says that “it is enough to create new names […] in order to create in the long run new ‘things’” (Gay Science 122), and we have, in effect, witnessed the creation of a new type of prisoner. At the same time, we must not assume that everyone has the power to embark on such radical naming policies and, in this case, the U.S. government has taken many steps to ensure that its designations of both sides on the us/them opposition remain unquestioned. The “us” in this formulation is equated with the “ultimate good,” whereas the “them” is repeatedly described as “evil.” In fact, the U.S. government has attempted to compartmentalize the whole world into these two categories, and we have heard the often-repeated phrase by President Bush that “you are either with us or with them.” 89 The ultimate good/evil distinction allows the administration, and many North Americans, to believe (at least on the surface) that their own ideology plays no role in this process of naming; what they say is considered a self-evident truth. This simplistic polarization of the world requires that we reduce the complexity of the issues involved in the so-called “war on terror,” and it mirrors the traditional view of translation according to which objective meaning can be found and, subsequently,

government can undo what cannot be undone. Although Bush’s approach to leadership is probably quite different than that of President Obama, and Guantanamo is most certainly the product of a very bold and brash administration, I do not want to suggest that the kind of beliefs regarding the place of the United States in the world that allowed this to happen has also taken their leave from Washington or even the White House. 89 See former President George W. Bush’s speech at the “Anne Northup for Congress Luncheon” on September 5, 2002, for one of many examples.

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neutrally transferred, independently of all the ideological interests that saturate language and its reproduction. It would be naïve, for example, to think that the unique circumstances created at Guantanamo have no bearing on the actual process of translating the testimonies and documents related to the detainees. Interpreters are expected to be neutral, but at the same time, “neutrality,” in this case, is tied more to the interests of the U.S. mission than to a supposedly impersonal interpretation of the original words in question. Several translators have been arrested because it was alleged that they did not sufficiently serve U.S. interests. 90

What never seems to enter the discussions of

translation in the “war on terror” is how much the situation of these detainees impacts both the words they utter and the way in which they are translated. A further complication in the search to obtain neutral information regarding the identity of the prisoners is that the clothes, as we saw in Chapter I, often do make the man, and since the release of more than three quarters of those who had been held for years without charge, it has been reported that many prisoners who had possibly been mistakenly detained and sent to Guantanamo and were eventually released are now fighting with the “enemy,” that is, they have actually become who the clothes have been saying they are. 91 In a similar vein, the process by which the U.S. dresses these detainees in their emblematic clothes is having a profound impact on the way the U.S. is viewed abroad, as well as the way the

90

One example can be found with Senior Airman and Guantanamo interpreter Ahmad al-Halabi who was arrested and charged with, among other things, espionage (which is punishable by the death penalty) because he overstepped the boundaries established for his profession by allegedly trying to communicate information about the camp and detainees to the outside world. The most serious charges were eventually dropped (cf. “Court-Martial Begins for Ex-Gitmo Interpreter”). 91 See, for example, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s piece in The Washington Post, in which he traces Abdallah alAjmi’s voyage from Afghanistan to Guantanamo as a detainee, and back to the battle field, this time in Iraq, as a suicide bomber. According to Ajimi’s lawyer, Thomas Wilner, it was his detention in Guantanamo that turned him into a “terrorist,” something he had not been before his stay at Guantanamo. See also Tom Lasseter’s “Militants Found Recruits Among Guantanamo's Wrongly Detained.”

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country is constructing its own vision of itself, by both those who accept the existence of this kind of detention center and those who do not. Translation is inseparable from politics, which both shapes and is shaped by how translation is practiced. When we rigorously investigate the intersection of the trope of translation and its actual practice, we can develop some tools that may help deconstruct systems that depend on “repressing the difficulties” associated with the production of truth. By reflecting on the instability of meaning and how we create it for originals through translation, we can reflect on the instability of the weighty words upon which we found so many of our actions – words like “democracy” and “freedom,” for example, that, no matter how much we would like them to denote pure, eternal and stable concepts, are constantly being transformed and translated into countless contexts for infinite agendas. In fact, the main purpose of this dissertation has been to show how interdependent our conception of translation and its practice are, and how both participate and are shaped by the many contexts within which they work. I have also wanted to paint a picture of translation that shows the interconnected nature of the concepts of translation, metaphor, and truth. It is my hope that these portraits of translation will contribute to making a case in the young discipline of translation studies for the importance of theoretical and philosophical reflection on and for this task we translators perform. As I said in the introduction to this dissertation, translation has been receiving more and more attention over the past decade, both in professional areas that are being impacted by globalization, as well as in institutions of education and academia in general. And the two are related: since there is increasing attention being paid to translation in the areas of businesses, government agencies, service organizations, and the like, there is

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more awareness of the need for translators and interpreters who have some kind of training, and thus, more willingness by universities to implement programs to train them. There has also been more interest in translation from other disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, such as history, anthropology, and comparative literature over the past ten or twenty years because it is an exemplary trope for cultural contact and the dissemination of ideas, identity, and culture. For example, every year at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) there are more and more panels explicitly dedicated to translation. The same is true of the Modern Language Association (MLA), which, in fact, has chosen translation as its “Presidential Theme” for the 2009 convention. According to the president of the MLA, Helen Porter, this is because issues of translation are fundamental for “our institutional commitments to studying and teaching language and literature.” She says that a “wide-ranging exploration” of many of the issues related to the MLA can be “organized around three axes: translation in teaching, translation in theory, and translation in practice-translation at work in the world” (Porter, 2009 Presidential Theme). This is most certainly welcome news to those of us who have been working over the years to make translation more visible in academia. And, although I do agree that it is good to address translation from these different perspectives, we must be careful to remember that these three areas overlap with and have great implications for one another. It would be irresponsible, for example, to examine the teaching of translation without considering how it is practiced in the world, or, as I have been arguing, to talk about the practice of translation without acknowledging the relevance of theory.

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The dichotomy between theory and practice has often driven a wedge between translation theory and practice and there is often a lot of resistance by translators, or even scholars within the discipline of translation studies, to much of what falls into the realm of theoretical approaches to translation. A perfect example comes from an interview with Barbara Harshav, a distinguished translator of German, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish into English who was interviewed by Rainer Schulte, co-founder of the American Literary Translators Association and editor of the organization’s journal, Translation Review, in which the interview appeared. Part of their discussion involves the role of theory in translation teaching: Rainer Schulte: As you indicated […] all of your thinking about translation comes from the actual practice of translation, an attitude that I fully share with you. What role then should the theory of translation play, especially in the context of literature and language programs? Barbara Harshav: My problem is that whenever I look at any theoretical stuff, first of all there is a kind of gibberish that prevails in these studies, and I really don’t understand what the whole thing is about. I find it absolutely of no help whatsoever for the practice of translation. By the way, there is an essay by Willis Barnstone that is a kind of explication of the text of Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator,” in which Barnestone concludes that it is of absolutely no practical value. I am against all jargon. […] I find purposeful obfuscation really sinful. It violates good practice. And what I find with many theorists is that they really do not know any foreign languages. A lot of linguists do not know the language they are writing about. (4)

Perhaps she is just confessing her ignorance when she says she does not understand it, but Harshav exhibits here a clear contempt for theory, though she never gives examples of the kinds of “studies” in which “gibberish […] prevails,” nor does she mention what theorists she feels participate in “purposeful obfuscation.” This resistance to theory is common, and I think many translators would share her opinion that theory is irrelevant when it comes to actual translation. It is ironic that she follows her tirade against theory by detailing some of the activities she uses in her translation workshops, specifically various comparative studies of translations that she assigns to her students, in which it 154

seems that she, in fact, draws on theory to discuss the exercises with her students. Discussing the Chekov story “The Lady and the Dog” she says, “it is fascinating because you see the whole issue of the culture of difference and the impact of that” (ibid.). After a few examples of different translations of specific phrases, she says, “[j]ust those tiny details shift the whole focus of the story, and it is fascinating to me to see precisely what the impact of translation is on conveying literature,” and she mentions the fact that one of her Chinese students “found the most accessible the translation that was most ‘domesticated,’ as it were” (ibid.). “It’s not the story that’s the issue here,” Harshav continues, “it is how the story is presented. And that is where translation has the greatest impact.” What is ironic is that after saying that theory is “absolutely of no help whatsoever for the practice of translation,” and that she is “against all jargon,” she makes recourse to a theoretical notion such as domestication (and, conversely, we could assume “foreignization”). Furthermore, if we are to take her arguments at face value, we can assume that she feels she uses no theoretical basis for her discussion on cultural differences or the impact that form ultimately has on the content of a text, given that she says all of her theory comes from the actual practice. Perhaps she only gleans her theoretical views from her experience with a few texts, but it is puzzling why she would want to ignore the ample theoretical work that could supplement her approach to these topics. Both Schulte and Harshav seem to hold to a clear-cut distinction between theory and practice (in fact, if we combine the question and the answer quoted above, there even seems to be a distinction drawn between “thinking about translation” and theory). This dichotomous view is not altogether different from that of Anthony Pym whom I quote in

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the introduction to this dissertation. According to Pym, we should not get bogged down in “philosophical discourses” because they “miss […] the logics of the more everyday activities, the many techniques by which translators themselves constantly reduce complexity” (44). He goes on to say that “we should perhaps learn to think more bottomup, from the actual practices, rather than top-down, from the great conceptual systems” (ibid.). One of my intentions in this dissertation has been to break down this distinction and show that when we begin translating we are always already steeped in theoretical assumptions that are not “natural” to the practice, but rather, are products of conventions constructed on ideologies, agendas, and biases. By placing in opposition “top-down” and “bottom-up” or “practice” and “conceptual systems” or “theory,” one assumes that we could actually arrive at a practice that is completely devoid of theoretical guidance. As we can extrapolate from Chapter III, the bottom is already at the top, and vice versa. While she rejects theory, Harshav says, “I like to begin at the beginning. Let’s learn languages and respect the language and the cultural differences” (4). Very few translators would argue with the idea that we need to respect languages and cultural differences, although, just as we saw with the notion of “fidelity” in Chapter I, what we believe “respect” to be is not founded on any essence; it is not something that is selfevident. Some would say, for example, that the “domesticated” translation mentioned above does not “respect” cultural differences. Contemporary theory can help us address and question the ways in which we construct what we consider to be “respect” towards languages and cultural differences. We could ask: to what extent can we respect another culture, free from preconceived notions ingrained in our own cultures and languages? How much do power differentials aid in determining what counts as “respect,” and are all

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the criteria applied consistently to all languages and cultures, when translating both to and from the dominant ones? Harshav says we should “begin at the beginning,” but as we have seen throughout this dissertation, the beginning is no simple point of origin. What is more, when she says “respect the language and the cultural differences,” she is essentializing culture and assuming that we could simply place two distinct and homogenous cultures in opposition to each other. At the same time, theories of translation ultimately do stem from thinking about the practice. Although I find Harshav’s anti-theoritical statements almost ridiculous, I can understand her sentiment because, at times, it seems that theorists are completely unconcerned with the actual practice. I have been arguing throughout this dissertation that we cannot truly separate metaphorical notions of translation from “translation proper,” and while I have been saying that we should consider the implications of the broader trope of translation for the task of translating texts, I also believe that those who employ the trope of translation should not completely ignore the practice of translation as is common. Dilek Dizdar, in her essay, “Translational Transitions: ‘Translation proper’ and Translation Studies in the Humanities,” says that, while scholars in the humanities have increasingly been using the trope of translation in their work “thereby bringing translation-related issues to the fore in their discipline,” translation studies remains largely unnoticed by a majority of scholars in these other areas of study (89). She says that, too often, a binary is established between what is considered the “creative and critical power of translation concepts or metaphors” and “a ‘flat’ idea of translation proper” (90). Not only does this view “[overlook] the complexity of textual-linguistic acts of translation (proper),” it is assumed that the latter, which is equated with “the

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negative part of the pair,” is “addressed within the field of translation studies, and there is therefore no need for it to be studied closely elsewhere,” and, conversely, since “translation studies is considered to be responsible for translation proper only, it need not (or even cannot, must not) think beyond this idea” (ibid). Dizdar says that eliminating the distinction between the two does not make this problem go away and she proposes that we keep “the tension between translation proper and other translations, with the proviso that a closer look be taken at translation proper in theory and practice, and that precisely this tension could serve as a productive (and necessary) means for analysing interrelations between different orders of signification” (90). As Dizdar recognizes, many scholars in translation studies over the last twenty years or so have shown that “translation proper” is not merely a “flat” concept, and that the discipline has been expanding its frontiers to theorize the implications of, for example, “power relations,” “gender issues,” or “(post)colonial conditions” to the task of translating (95). Although these studies are extremely relevant to the kinds of theorization that employ the trope of translation in disciplines such as comparative literature or anthropology, for the most part, translation studies, and the research it produces, is largely ignored by other disciplines. 92 We can take as an example the recent book Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood. 93 Although it contains some very interesting essays that are highly pertinent to the field of translation studies, the work that has been done in translation studies that is quite 92

Dizdar makes the claim at the beginning of her essay that completely ignoring translation proper “leads to blind spots in theoretical work, thereby weakening postrepresentationalist arguments” (90). One of the examples she gives of how simplistic notions of “translation proper” bring about these “blind spots” is the essay “The Politics of Translation and the Anthropological Nation of the Ethnography of South America,” by Tullio Maranhão, who proposes that anthropology should be studied “in a direction opposite to translation,” but employs a somewhat outdated view of translation. 93 For more details of this work see Arrojo and Van Wyke.

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pertinent to the overall theme of this book is completely absent, with the exception of Lawrence Venuti who is, perhaps, the only author directly associated with the discipline of translation studies that scholars from other disciplines have noticed. Although Douglas Robinson is mentioned one time, it is not in reference to any of his work related to the topics presented by this book, but only in reference to his definition of “pseudotranslation” (161). Completely absent are many names of scholars from other disciplines who have published studies on the intersection of “nation, language, and the ethics of translation,” scholars such as Eric Cheyfitz, Tejaswini Niranjana, Vicente Rafael, Susan Bassnett, Annie Brisset, Michael Cronin, Harish Trivedi, and Maria Tymoczko, just to name a few. It is understandable why all of these names were overlooked considering that the study of translation is stretched over so many disciplines given the acknowledged impact it has for so many of them. This is why a formalized discipline such as translation studies is so important: to provide an area in which all of the studies related to translation produced in the many disciplines that have become interested in it can be brought together to produce more ample and productive discussions on this important craft. In no way am I saying that all scholars should be, so to speak, on the same page and that everyone must constantly read and write about the same texts, thereby imposing a certain canon on the field. Nor am I attempting to demarcate the scope of this field and define exactly what does and does not fall within the realm of this discipline. 94 Quite the 94

See the lengthy debate in Target, “Shared Ground in Translation Studies,” in which Andrew Chesterman and Rosemary Arrojo were asked to formulate a set of common principles to translation studies. After establishing the thirty thesis and codas by both authors articulating their differences, the debate was opened to other scholars in subsequent issues of the journals. After eighteen scholars in fourteen essays chimed in, Arrojo questions the “argument often voiced by scholars in general according to which in order for us to successfully build a discipline we should at least know exactly what all of us are talking about when we talk of translation, the very object of our inquiry” (138). She associates the desire to establish a firm

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contrary, I believe that there must be more dialogue among the disciplines, but since translation is a topic of interest for so many other disciplines such as linguistics, cultural studies, history, philosophy, comparative literature, journalism, or foreign languages that do not always have contact with one another, the dialogue is generally fragmented and the many disciplines that study translation are unfamiliar with each other’s work. Because the practice of translation is its primary focus, translation studies is the area that aims to bring together a variety of the perspectives on translation and, if it gains visibility as a discipline, it can, in turn, bring a lot to these other areas of study. I do not want to posit this as some kind of utopian discipline in which there is some harmony that binds together all scholars of translation under the aegis of a unified treatise on translation. However, I do think it is important to take seriously the establishment of a discipline devoted specifically to the study of translation, a discipline that, while it already exists, is still not completely recognized as such and whose work remains invisible to a large part of academia. As I finish this dissertation, one of the first proposed in the area of translation studies in the United States, I have received information detailing the requirements for completing my degree. The “Survey of Earned Degrees” (SED), conducted by the National Organization for Research (NORC) for the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Department of Education, National Endowment for the Humanities, USDA, and NASA requires (and completing this survey one of the requirements for receiving a degree) that those who fill it out enter a number that corresponds to the field of the degree they are receiving. There are two hundred ninety-

foundation that could be shared by all those within a discipline called Translation Studies to the traditional aspirations of translators with respect to their craft (138).

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two fields listed, but translation studies is not yet one of them. Even though there are currently two PhD programs in translation studies in the United States (four in North America), a handful of MA programs, and a good indication that there will soon be more, it has not made it onto the official list of disciplines. That the discipline is still invisible is comparable to the traditional role that has been expected of the translator. However, as the craft of translation gains visibility, perhaps the discipline of translation studies, too, will become more visible to the rest of academia.

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Appendix The Anthropophagic Manifesto Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The only law of the world. The masked expression of all individualism, of all collectives. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. Tupi or not tupi, that is the question. Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracchi. I’m only interested in what is not mine. The law of man. The law of the cannibal. We’re tired of all the suspicious Catholic husbands thrown into drama. Freud did away with the enigma of woman and with other frights of printed psychology. What trampled truth was clothing, the impenetrable coat between the interior and exterior worlds. America cinema will keep us informed. Children of the sun, mother of the living. Found and ferociously loved, like all the hypocrisy of nostalgia, by immigrated peoples, by the enslaved, and the tourists. In the land of the great snake. It was because we never had grammars, nor collections of old plants. And we had no notion of urban, suburban, frontier and continental. Lazybones on the world map of Brazil. A participating consciousness, a religious rhythmics. Against all the importers of canned consciousness. The palpable existence of life. And the pre-logical mentality for Mr. Lévy-Bruhl to study. We want the Cariban revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. The unification of all the effective revolts in the direction of man. Without us Europe wouldn’t even have its poor declaration of the rights of man. The Golden Age proclaimed by America. The Golden Age. And all the Miss Americas. 162

Filiation. The contact with Cariban Brazil. Ori Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. Natural Man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist Revolution and to Keyserling’s mechanized barbarian. We’re moving right along. We were never catechized. We live according to a somnambular law. We made Christ be born in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará. But we never permitted the birth of logic among us. Against Padre Vieira. The author of our first loan, to get his commission. The illiterate king told him: write it down on paper but without all the clever gab. And the deal was made. Carved in Brazilian sugar. Vieira left the money in Portugal and gave us the gift of gab. Spirit refuses to conceive spirit without body. Anthropomorphism. The need of an anthropophagic vaccine. For equilibrium against the religions of the meridian. And the exterior inquisitions. We can only heed the orecular world We had justice codified as vengeance. Science codified as Magic. Anthropophagy. The permanent transformation of Taboo into totem. Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Cadaverizied. The stop sign of thought that is dynamic. The individual victim of the system. Source of classical injustices. Of romantic injustices. And the forgetting of interior conquests. Scripts. Scripts. Scripts. Scripts. Scripts. Scripts. Scripts. The Cariban instinct. Death and life of hypotheses. From the equation myself part of the Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos part of myself. Subsistence. Knowledge. Anthropofagy. Against the plant elite. In communication with the earth. We were never catechized. We threw Carnival. The Indian dressed as a senator of the Empire. Pretending to be Pitt. Or appearing in the operas of Alencar full of good old Portuguese feelings. We already had communism. We already had a surrealist tongue. The Golden Age.

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Catiti Catiti Imara Notiá Notiá Imara Ipeju ∗ Magic and life. We had the invoice and distribution of physical goods, moral goods, and dignitary goods. And we knew how to transport the mystery of death with the aid of some grammatical forms. I asked a man what was Law. He told me it was the guarantee of exercising possibility. This man’s name was Gali Matias. I ate him. Determinism is lacking only where there is mystery. But what does any of this have to do with us? Against stories of man that begin at Cape Finisterra. The undated world. Unsigned. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar. The fixation of progress by way of catalogues and television sets. Only machinery. And blood transfusions. Against antagonistic subliminations. Brought in caravels. Against the truth of the missionary peoples, defined by the sagacity of an anthropophagite, or the Viscount of Cairu: — It’s a lie told over and over again. But those who came were not crusaders. They were fugitives from a civilization that we are eating, because we are strong and vindictive like the Jabuti tortoise. If God is the conscience of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of the living. Jaci is the mother of the plants. We never had speculation. But we did have divination. We had Politics, which is the science of distribution. It is a socio-planetary system. Migrations. The flight from tedious states. Against urban sclerosis. Against Conservatories and speculative boredom. From William James and Voronoff. The transfiguration of Taboo into totem. Anthropofagy.

∗

Andrade gives the translation of this Tupi verse taken from Couto Magalhães’s O Selvagem as: “Lua Nova, ó Lua Nova, assopra em Fulano lembranças de mim,” which we can translate as: “New moon, oh New Moon, blow thoughts and memories of me into Fulano.” “Fulano” is the rough equivalent of “Joe Blow,” although, in her annotated “Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Cannibalist Manifesto,’” Leslie Bary says is means here “the man I want” (46).

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The pater familias and the creation of the Moral of the Stork: Real ignorance of things + lack of imagination + feelings of authority before the curious progeny. It is necessary to begin from a profound atheism in order to arrive at the idea of God. But the Cariban didn’t need it. Because they had Guaraci. The created objective clashes with the Fallen Angel. After that Moses wanders. What does all this have to do with us? Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness. Against the Indian with a torch. The Indian son of Mary, godson of Catherine de’ Medici and son-in-law of Don Antônio de Mariz. Happiness is the proof in the pudding. In the matriarchy of Pindorama. Against Memory source of custom. Personal experience renewed. We are Concretists. Ideas take root, react, burn people in public squares. Lets suppress ideas and other paralysis. For scripts and routes. Believing in our signs, believing in our instruments and in the stars. Against Goethe, the mother of Gracchi, and the Court of Don João VI. Happiness is the proof of the pudding. The struggle between what is called the Uncreated and the Creature – illustrated by the the permanent contradiction between man and his Taboo. Quotidian love and the capitalist modus vivendi. Antropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into totem. The human adventure. The earthy goal. Nevertheless, only the purest elites could manage to bring about carnal anthropophagy, which brings with itself the highest sense of life and avoids all the evils identified by Freud, catechist evils. What happens is not sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is the thermometric scale of the anthropophagic instinct. From carnal, it becomes selective, and breeds friendship. Affectionate, love. Speculative, science. It deviates and transfers. We arrive at vilification. Low anthropophagy accumulated in the sins of chatechism – envy, usury, slander, murder. Plague of the so-called cultured and christianized peoples is that which we act against. Anthropophagites. Against Anchieta eulogizing the eleven thousand virgins in heaven, in the land of Iracema – João Ramalho the patriarch, founder of São Paulo. 165

Our independence has not yet been proclaimed. A typical saying of João VI: – My son, put this crown on your head, before some adventurer does. We banished the dynasty. It is imperative to banish the spirit of Bragança, the ordinations and snuff of Maria da Fonte. Against social reality, oppressive and dressed to kill, registered by Freud – reality without complexes, without insanity, without prostitution, without prisons in the matriarchy of Pindorama. OSWALD DE ANDRADE In Piratininga, Year 374 after the devoriong of Bishop Sardinha. (Revista de Antropofagia, Ano 1, No. 1, maio de 1928.) BEN VAN WYKE In Binghamton, Year 458 after the devouring of Bishop Sardinha.

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Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights.” Trans. Esther Allen. The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2000. 34-48. Bourne, Edward Gaylord. “The Naming of America,” The American Historical Review 10. 1 (Oct., 1904): 41-51. Bush, George W. “Remarks by the President at Anne Northup for Congress Luncheon.” The White House. 5 Sept. 2002. . Calpe, Ángel V., Ramon Ferrer and Artur Ahuir. “Valenciano y catalán, ¿sólo una cuestión de nombre?” El Mundo. 8 Jan. 2005. . Caminal, Miquel. “Cultura federal y nacionalismos.” El Pais. 6 Dec. 2008. . Carroll, Rory. “US Chose to Ignore Rwandan Genocide.” The Guardian. 31 Mar. 2004. . Cheyfitz, Eric. The Politics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. “Translating Greek Orations into Latin.” Trans. Harris Rackham. Western Translation Theory: From Herodotus to Nietzsche. Ed. Douglas Robinson. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1997. 7. Chamberlain, Lori. “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2000. 314-330. Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. “From Captive to Suicide Bomber.” The Washington Post 22 Feb. 2009. . Cole, Juan. “Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist; And, ‘We don't Want Your Stinking War!’ JuanCole.com. 2007. Informed Comment. 3 May 2006. Collins, J.F. “Latin (In the Church).” New Catholic Encyclopedia. Washington: Thomson Gale, 2002. 361-366. Corominas, Jorge and Judit Ribas. Identidad y Pensamento Latinoamericano. Managua, Nicaragua: Departmento de Filosofía e Historia, Universidad Centroamericana, 1992. 168

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