Guimarães Rosa retraduzido: aspectos da mitologia indígena nas traduções de "Meu tio o Iauaretê" para a língua inglesa

Abstract

The question of untranslatability is recurrent in Translation Studies, often revisited in discussions about the translation of literary, poetic and philosophical texts, to take just a few examples. Thus, we have the emergence of a certain 'paradox' where, at one extreme, there is the idea that translation is theoretically impossible and, at the other, that translation is possible due to a universal structure. Based on the considerations of Ricoeur (2011), Berman (2007; 2009) and Cassin (2018), we arrive not at a discourse of the failure of translation and its inevitable losses, but of the untranslatable as that which enables the permanence of the Other, its alterity and multiplicity of meanings. Untranslatability is present in this research as an essential part of the discussion about Guimarães Rosa's work, often described as untranslatable, both in the inter and intralingual sense – that is, both for those who seek to translate it into another language and for those who seek to interpret it in Portuguese. For this research, the interest in the short story “Meu tio o Iauaretê” is justified on the basis of its cultural aspects intrinsically linked to indigenous mythology, visible mainly in the form of the Nheengatu lexicon used throughout the text, since we are interested in understanding how this virtually untranslatable element is manifested in the translations into English by Giovanni Pontiero (“My Uncle the Jaguar”, 1996) and David Treece (“The Jaguar”, 2001). Hybridity, both linguistic and cultural , is one of its main characteristics of “Meu tio o Iauaretê” , and it is shown not only in the originality of the linguistic work with Portuguese and Nheengatu, but in the very place where the character-narrator is found, always placed between two conditions – man/animal, white/indigenous – but never fixed in any of them. Considering anthropological studies, we rely on Lévi-Strauss (2010) and Viveiros de Castro (2007) for the reconstruction of the metasysystem of Brazilian and Amerindian mythological narratives in which the jaguar is found. Considering also the recent studies on retranslation from a systemic perspective, proposed by Cadera (2017) and Koskinen and Paloposki (2019), we seek not only to look at the translated texts and their comparison with the source text, but also to pay special attention to the historical and political context in which not only the translation and publication of the short stories studied are inserted, but of the entire work of Guimarães Rosa translated into English. With the contextualization of Rosa’s translation into English since the 1960s, until its eventual reintroduction into the literary system of this language, with the support of the historical and political context presented by Barbosa (1994), Fitz (2005), Liporaci (2013) and Morinaka (2017), we understand that it will be possible to better understand the influences on the process of (re)translation. Based on this analysis, we intend to dive into considerations about the role of the Other in the text and translation, and understand translation not as loss or betrayal, but as an acceptance of the untranslatable.