Haroldo de Campos The Ethics and Poetics of Transcreation Essay Example

Haroldo de Campos: The Ethics and Poetics of Transcreation Essay Haroldo de Campos: The Ethics and Poetics of Transcreation This paper discusses the Brazilian theory and practice of translation as transcreation, set in motion in the 1950s by the Neograndes group of concrete poets (namely the late Haroldo de Campos, his brother Augusto and Dcio Pignateri), in light of two of the most challenging cultural approaches to translation in the late 1990s: Lawrence Venutis alignment with an ethics of difference in translation (1997), and Henri Meschonnicss call for a poetics of translating (1999). Following Venutis lead that minority situations redefine what constitutes thedomestic and theforeign, the concept of transcreation will be analyzed as a forcible junction of a European metaphysics of translation that displaces the original (Benjamin, Derrida) and an indigenous anthropophagic tradition, updated by the modernist Oswald de Andrade as the absorption of the sacred [Western colonial] enemy. In Haroldo de Camposs writings, however, the indebtedness to primitive traditions and art forms is matched with the recovery of a creolized Iberian baroque. Furthermore, both are but parcels of a universal poetical legacy that needs to be expropriated and appropriated through translation in order to bring Brazilian cultural productions to the fore of a poetics of modernity that is basically construed through Western parameters, catapulting Brazilian concretism to its visionary role in the post-industrial technological era. Haroldo de Campos anchors the poetics of concretism in the avant-garde experiments of authors such as Mallarm, Pound and Joyce. Mallarms A Throw of Dice (1897) is seen as the precursor of the verbi-voco-visual experiments of the concrete poets, where structural elements such as rhythm and (typographical) spatiality are privileged over ve