In his essay “Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness,” translator and scholar John Keene (2016) urged that “we need more translation of literary works by non-Anglophone black diasporic authors into English, particularly by U.S.-based translators, and that these translations should then be published by U.S.-based publishing organs, including literary periodicals, as well as by publishing houses large and small.” Central to his argument is the understanding that the translation of black Diasporic writers is a powerful instrument to challenge structural racism across the globe. Considering that translation plays an important role in social conflicts (Baker, 2018), the session provides anti-racist critiques of Afro-Brazilian texts translated into English. In doing so, we attend to questions such as what are the theoretical and practical implications in the literary translation of black literatures? How do translators deal with Eurocentrism, appropriation, and whitewashing in their projects? What principles underlie their decisions? What strategies do they apply when translating black epistemologies and subjectivities?
To guarantee a fifteen-minute discussion period, fifteen minutes will be allocated to each of the following presenters, all of them interested in the global impact of Afro-Brazilian literatures on an anti-racist agenda.
Luciana Mesquita reflects on race and gender issues in Cristiane Sobral’s literature and the challenges in its translation from Brazilian Portuguese into English. In her creative work, Sobral, an author who is considered one of the most prominent contemporary Afro-Brazilian female authors, explores different ways of loving and presents multiple black subjectivities. To accomplish the purpose of reflecting on the literary translation of race and gender in black women’s writing, Mesquita focuses on Sobral’s short story collection Amar antes que amanheça and John Keene’s anglophone translation of Sobral’s poems. Drawing upon Descriptive Translation Studies (Lefevere, 1990; Bassnett, 1998), activist translation (Tymoczko, 2010), poetry and blackness translation (Keene, 2016), and translocalities/translocalidades (Alvarez, 2014), Mesquita provides direct insight into some particularities related to contemporary black women’s texts and their respective translations. Her case study, which also considers the idea of amefricanidade (Gonzalez, 1988) related to different Black experiences in the Americas, demonstrates that the translation of Afro-Brazilian women’s literature is crucial for the thorough understanding of this body of work and its sociopolitical context.
Susana Fuentes presents her creative anglophone translation of Cristiane Sobral’s short story “Cândido Abdellah Jr.” (2021) and shows translation as a dialogue with Afro-diasporic temporalities. Her creative translation of Sobral’s narrative renders the boy Cândido suffering the prejudice and pain that have been repeated for centuries. In her translational strategies, Fuentes listens to his suffering by thinking about the borders of spaces in displacements, passages, cultural traffic, invention, creation, where his body is staged. Considering the translation of borders in movement, Fuentes highlights the black boy who survives, his strength against impositions and erasure in the house of white parents, rewritten by black voices that form his struggle. Based on Bhabha’s “space of intervention that emerges in the cultural interstices,” and that “introduces creative invention within existence,” Fuentes emphasizes the return of identity as iteration, the re-creation of the self in the world of the journey, the re-establishment of the border community of migration.
Finally, Luiz Antonio Silva situates the emergence of the need to translate literary fiction produced by low-income black men and women in Brazilian society in the 1990s, the decade in which the country officially started to follow the neoliberal ideology. In his historical critique of neoliberalism as an ideology, Silva denounces it as a systematic reduction of workers’ rights, income, and the consequent increase of elitism, individualism, and racism. In this way, the translation of the literary fiction produced by black people in the poor regions of Brazilian metropolises counteracts the effects of neoliberalism. Thus, based on the studies of Afro-Brazilian geographer Milton Santos on toward another globalization and the concept of intercommunalism by Huey Newton, a founding member of the Black Panther movement in the USA, the critic argues that the translations of black literature are cultural and political actions against the hegemonic power of neoliberal culture.