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

JOÃO FERREIRA DUARTE–REPRESENTING TRANSLATION IN THE COLONIAL ENCOUNTER
advanced by the British philosopher Donald Davidson (1984: 183-98) on the analogy with
natural languages.
Now, faced with incommensurable alterity, reporters from the contact zone had no
alternative available other than to compare and translate, as I have already suggested.
Furthermore, what they did in this situation can be accurately grasped by means of what
anthropologists call “cultural translation” 3 , that is, “the tendency to read the implicit in alien
cultures” (Asad 1986: 160) in the sense that textual meanings are not determined by, and
constitutive of the source culture but rather filtered by the translator’s conceptual grids,
which are in the last instance those shared by his home constituency. According to the
terminological repertoire of translation studies, this is usually called “domestication”, a
process of assimilationist identity-construction that does not basically differ from Stephen
Greenblatt’s hypotheses that “European representations of the New World tell us
something about the European practice of representation” (1991: 7) and “in the account of
the other we principally learn something about the writer of the account” (1991: 14).
Among the most conspicuous acts of cultural translation in these accounts is the
imprint of what Iris Zavala (1989: 325-26) calls the “social imaginary” of mythical utopias.
Thus, aspects of the New World are perceived through categories shaped by the culturally
dominant narratives of the time, such as the Bible, classical mythology, chivalry romances,
bestiaries, and travelogues; images of the earthly paradise and the Golden Age are
abundantly documented, and less explicitly, the dream of a new Land of Cockaigne, where
gold and women are there for the taking 4 . In Caminha’s “Letter” the presence of this
interpretative social imaginary is considerably toned down in comparison with many other
writers’ enthusiastic statements. Echoing it, however, one significant detail stands out,
namely the portrayal of the natives as “innocent”, particularly in connection with their
nakedness: “They go naked, without any covering; neither do they pay more attention to
concealing or exposing their shame than they do to showing their faces, and in this respect
they are very innocent” (10-11); “and her privy parts so nude and exposed with such
innocence that there was not there any shame” (21); “They seem to me people of such
innocence that, if one could understand them and they us, they would soon be Christians”
(29); finally, “the innocence of this people is such, that that of Adam could not have been
greater in respect to shame” (32). Obviously the inference here is that the natives’ lack of
shame is but the visible sign of their lack of sin according to the cultural matrix traceable to
Genesis, 3, 7-10, therefore they live in Eden before the Fall; in this context, Caminha’s
pleading the King to take measures to ensure the natives’ salvation (32-33) reminds us that
ironically it was discovery itself that brought about their Fall.
It must be mentioned that cultural translation is not only a question of how the
Europeans’ universe of discourse was deployed in coming to terms with foreignness; even
the seemingly factual description of nudity, for instance, betrays the mark of domestication.
The decision to select this item as representative of the natives “is typical”, Greenblatt
notes, adding that “to a ruling class obsessed with the symbolism of dress, the Indians’
physical appearance was a token of a cultural void” (1990: 17). This is probably true and
tallies with Caminha’s comment that “they are bestial people of very little knowledge” (23),
but it would be enough to point out that this “fact” is only relevant as such from the
standpoint of a mindset that operates with an opposition naked vs. dressed, one moreover
3 A useful discussion of the metaphor of translation in anthropology can be found in Gísli Pálsson
(ed.). Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse. Oxford and Providence:
Berg,1993, pp. 14-39.
4 See Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. Visão do paraíso: os motivos edênicos no descobrimento e colonização do Brasil.
Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1959.
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