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JOÃO FERREIRA DUARTE–REPRESENTING TRANSLATION IN THE COLONIAL ENCOUNTER
Certainly much could be said about the scene, but for the purposes of this paper I
want to focus on the chain of concessions the author pile up in order to cope with the
difficulties in intersemiotic translation. According to the logbook of the first voyage,
Columbus is often found either straightforwardly acknowledging failure in communication
or blatantly misinterpreting the natives’ utterances; as Todorov puts it rather dryly,
“Columbus regularly claims to understand what is said to him, while giving, at the same
time, every proof of incomprehension” (1999: 31). But here we are denied any certainties
however contradictory; instead, we are given the grammar of fictional interpretation, which
leaves meanings open, modalising devices, which inscribe subjectivity within referential
discourse. Rather than presenting an illusion of peaceful intelligibility, Caminha lets the
disturbing voice of desire be heard, as later in the text: “He [a native] went about among
them and talked to them, pointing his finger to the altar, and afterwards he lifted his finger
towards Heaven, as though he were telling them something good, and thus we understood
it [e nós assim o tomámos]” (31).
4. ALLEGORY
A standard colonial tactic to circumvent communication problems, long practised
by Portuguese explorers of the African coast, consisted of capturing natives and bringing
them back home to learn the language and serve as interpreters in future expeditions. That
was precisely what Columbus did in his first voyage, which triggered off Greenblatt’s
comment that “the primal crime in the new world was committed in the interests of
language” (1990: 17). Although Cabral and his officers at one time did envisage this course
of action and openly discussed it, soon they abandoned it for pragmatic reasons:
informants in this situation are not reliable, the process of learning the language is too slow,
and acts of violence might indispose the natives towards future expeditions. What was
decided, instead, was to leave ashore two convicts among those carried by the fleet in the
hope that they would get acquainted with the native’s customs and learn their language.
The order was duly carried out and, according to the author of “The Anonymous
Narrative”, the two convicts “began to weep and the men of the land comforted them and
showed that they pitied them” (Greenlee 1938: 60). Historiographical sources tell us that
the next expedition to Brazil, which left Lisbon in August 1501 and carried Amerigo
Vespucci in one of his famous voyages, picked up one 6 of the convicts and brought him
back to Portugal; and it has recently been suggested that at least some of the ethnographic
material contained in Vespucci’s Mundus Novus is based on information gathered and
reported by the convict (Bueno 1998: 47 7 ).
These convicts (degredados) were people usually sentenced for minor offences to
penal exile either in the country or overseas. Since middle of the fifteenth century, it had
become Portuguese official policy to transport degredados to newly discovered territories as
forced colonisers, most notoriously to Cape Verde, S. Tomé, and later Brazil. In a
6 Early sixteenth-century documents do not agree on how many convicts were brought home. The
Carta de el-rei D.Manuel ao rei catholico … (1505) mentions only one returning convict, who learned the natives’
language and informed the King of everything (1892: 11). The “Acto Notarial de Valentim Fernandes”
(1503), in turn, speaks of two men who had spent twenty months among the natives and whose account -
undersigned by them - the notary set down in writing, read in the presence of the King, noblemen, and
captains, and sealed (Fontoura 1939: 91-96).
7 On this subject the Brazilian historian Moacyr Pereira limits himself to cautiously noting the
similarities between Vespucci’s narrative and the two men’s account as summarised in the “Acto Notarial”
(1984: 27-31).
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