Haroldo de Campos and the Theory of Literary Translation

Abstract

In this essay, I will attempt to articulate the creative positions of the poet Haroldo de Campos with the premises that support them and that stem from Brazilian modernism, in particular Oswald de Andrade's ideas on “anthropophagy”, and that Haroldo de Campos knew in an outstanding way how to combine with practice and theory of literary translation. Starting from the anthropophagy, erected as the modernism password (Oswald de Andrade), he designated the translation as the anthropophagous operation by excellence. Combining Walter Benjamin’s thinking about the translator’s task to the creative practice of Ezra Pound, he proposes a theory about literary translation as a critical and transcreation activity. The purpose of this activity is, on the one hand, the enrichment of the Brazilian literary heritage, the valorization of the materiality of the sign taken as the starting point for the transcreation of another. His bibliography in this sense is immense: it is evidenced by his large body of work in the field of transcreation (from the Provençal troubadours, Dante, the Bible and from Homer to Ezra Pound, or James Joyce).