últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

JOÃO FERREIRA DUARTE–REPRESENTING TRANSLATION IN THE COLONIAL ENCOUNTER
Caminha’s “Letter” has meanwhile become a highly canonical work in Portuguese
travel literature and thus the object of many different interpretations. It has been read as
journalism, ethnography, epic narrative, and so on 2 ; in this paper, however, I want to look
at the text first and foremost as a report from the contact zone, and ultimately as discourse
rather than genre. Mary Louise Pratt’s well-known concept is defined in her own words as
“the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and
historically separated come into contact with each other and establish relations, usually
involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (1992: 6).
While the contact zone opened up by the landfall and reported by Caminha was still a long
way from grounding the acts of coercion that were to follow, nevertheless one essential
characteristic of what goes on in colonial encounters and helps to give the space of contact
its particular ideological layout is, as Mary Louise Pratt puts it, the creation of domestic subjects.
The phrase, borrowed from Gayatri Spivak, has the function of giving conceptual
shape to the process of self-representation which inevitably accompanies any attempt to
describe an Other. Similarly, in a different but theoretically related context, Lawrence
Venuti introduces the concept in order to account for the role played by translation in the
“formation of domestic identities” (1998: 75). In other words, translations are conceived of
as representations of foreign texts fixed into stereotypes whose intelligibility depends on
the target-culture agendas in which they are inscribed. Linking together Pratt’s and Venuti’s
concepts allows me to put forward now my starting-point thesis, that the contact zone is
essentially a space of translation, at least before the thrust of colonisation pushed native
languages into underground existence, confined margins or creolisation. My next move,
then, involves the reclaiming of texts engendered by colonial encounters for the sort of
analysis that answers questions such as: how did the first writers of the New World
negotiate the representation of the utterly foreign? What strategies did they adopt in
attempting to communicate across semiotic boundaries? Is it feasible to read their writings
in the light of specific issues in the history of translation in Europe, and if so, in what ways?
In what follows, I will examine Caminha’s “Letter” (translated by William Brooks Greenlee
in 1938) as a threefold statement on translation: epistemological, thematic, and allegorical.
2. EPISTEMOLOGY
Let me start with a quotation from Stuart B. Schwartz in the book Implicit
Understandings: “First observers of another culture, the traveller to foreign lands, the
historian, and the ethnographer all share the common problem of observing,
understanding, and representing. In all these cases there are fundamental epistemological
problems” (1994: 1). When we move from this general scenario – which, incidentally, could
be easily extended to accommodate the translator – to the specificity of encountering the
New World, these epistemological problems come more sharply into focus: they concern
the co-presence of two incommensurable worlds, as Anthony Pagden pointed out (1993: 1-
15), and therefore, the problem of bridging the gap of intelligibility or making the unknown
known. The notion of incommensurable conceptual schemes, paradigms or language
games has become, of course, stock-in-trade of contemporary philosophy and the centre of
endless debates, which I am not going to scrutinise here. It suffices to recall that arguably
one of the most interesting proposals to counteract the difficulties in understanding and
communication raised by incommensurability was translation, or rather intertranslation, as
2 A recent survey of the “Letter”, including extensive bibliography, can be found in Luís Adão da
Fonseca. Pedro Álvares Cabral: uma viagem. Lisboa: INAPA, 1999, pp. 63-85; 150-57.
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