SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ART OF TRANSLATION (I) TRANSCREATION

From Ezra Pound’s idea of the translator as a recreator, from Walter Benjamin’s polemic about the primacy of the source language over the target language (the idea of source and target languages has been questioned by linguists such as Henri Meschonnic, especially in his book Poétique du traduire), in Peirce’s theory of signs and in such authors as Valéry and Eliot, Haraldo de Campos’s theory of transcreation emphasizes the recreation of the source text through a vigilant process of criticism, in which the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, influencing this totality in an indelible manner, in the constitution of meaning and the subsequent “appropriation” of this meaning by the translator.

Against mistranslations (literal translations) as opposed to good translations, both Haraldo de Campos and Meschonnic see translation as an act of language, in which the historicity of the text must be allied, umbilically, with the historicity of the subject-translator, where such a fallacious concept as that of identity must not, at any cost, be superimposed over a more than natural, desirable, otherness.

And if in literary translation this premise represents a touchstone, then it is also a law in technical and scientific translations, as the only way to reposition the translation on the axis of a social and subjective theory.

 

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