The American Portuguese Studies Association proposes a non-guaranteed session on translating between Portuguese and other languages. By addressing both the visible and invisible labor of translation, the panelists will explore the working conditions of translators, as well as of scholars and teachers who engage with topics of translation, in the contemporary academy. The session offers practical and theoretical approaches that consider the ethics and politics of translation; the hierarchies between languages like Portuguese, Tupi, and English; the challenges of translating cultural specificity; and the conceptual potential of mistranslations, translatability, and untranslatability. The three panelists will examine these topics from their experiences as scholar-translators working primarily from Portuguese into English. With an interest in the creative and pedagogical labors of translation, this panel will dialogue with the MLA’s 2023 presidential theme “Working Conditions.” It will also correspond to APSA’s commitment to translation as a critical component of scholarship in our field. Reflecting this belief, the association’s journal, the Journal of Lusophone Studies, is inaugurating a new section on translation, edited by Marguerite Itamar Harrison. This session will study and discuss this importance of translation as a creative practice, a theoretical tool, a scholarly topic, and a pedagogical instrument.

Through their capacious approach to the topic, the panelists will dialogue with key ideas of translation theory and studies, including the concepts “transcreation” and “in-translation” from Brazilian poets, translators, and critics Haroldo and Augusto de Campos and the “cannibalistic” approach to translation as articulated by Rosemary Arrojo, Else R.P. Vieira, and Edwin Gentzler. Recent articles and books by Earl Fitz, Elizabeth Lowe, Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, Isabel Gómez, Krista Brune, and Tal Goldfajn, among others, have analyzed the critical role of translation in the creation and circulation of Brazilian literature and culture beyond national and linguistic borders. This session’s participants will contribute to these existing conversations by paying special attention to the experiences of scholar-translators, the creative challenges of translating between languages and media, and the pedagogical potential of translation.

The panel will consist of three papers of eighteen minutes each. This time limit for individual presentations will allow for the presider to introduce each panelist and to preserve at least fifteen minutes of discussion at the end of the session. Harrison will preside over the session. The first presenter, Katrina Dodson, will discuss her approach to translating Mário de Andrade’s 1928 modernist masterpiece Macunaíma into English. Her presentation will posit Haroldo de Campos’s theoretical term “transcreation” as a key concept to understand her creative and scholarly approach to translating this text from its original Brazilian Portuguese. Another practicing translator Magdalena Edwards, who translates from Portuguese and Spanish into English, will explore the difficulties of translating Clarice Lispector onto the screen. Drawing on her own experiences translating Lispector, Edwards’ presentation will consider how the enigmatic writer resists translation of her image, words, and voice near the end of her life. The panel’s final presenter, Rex Nielson, will bridge scholarly, creative, and pedagogical questions with his discussion of an anthology of Brazilian nature writing in English. He will offer insights into how Brazil has historically been rendered as a tropical and fertile land, and how translating a wider range of nature writing can contribute to a reimagining of Brazilian lands and peoples. These three speakers will dialogue with each other as they address the possibilities and the dangers of translating from Brazilian Portuguese into other languages, primarily English. Their interventions will draw attention to the creative decisions at play, the ethical and political questions at stake, and the pedagogical potential of such tasks. As scholars-translators who view translation from a practical and a theoretical framework, these speakers will invite us to consider the labor of translation and of translators as essential to our fields.