If translation practice can be understood as “a continual act of compromise, a continual search, rejection, renewed search, reluctant acceptance of particular decisions, and particular solutions” (Sin-wai, 2004), then translation practitioners and scholars underscore the potential of Black literature in translation to disrupt structural racism. John Keene (2016) advocates for the need for more translations of non-anglophone Black authors into English in order to understand the complexities of the African Diaspora. In her definition of anti-racist translation, Corine Tachtiris (2020) proposes “translating into a racialized English that challenges the White mainstream norm” or “selecting texts that undermine racist stereotypes of other cultures, especially racist formulations that are meant to come off as positive.” Giving priority to “translating modes of resistance” (Bandia, 2010), the presentations will attend to the negotiation of translational strategies by the translators of Black literature, whose agency is recognized as a political act. Central to the translation of these literary texts is the creative use of Pretuguês, or Africanized Portuguese, as theorized by Lélia Gonzalez (2020).
In examining the global impact of lusophone Black women’s translated body of work, the session will discuss the broader implications of the topic, including cultural and linguistic challenges, challenges in writing and translation, rendition of ancestral African-derived knowledge, writing as translation, and decolonization of language(s). We will shed light on the singularity of translations of works by Black women, especially those who challenge dominant narratives and provide new perspectives on race, identity, and language. In doing so, the session contributes to reflecting upon the role of translation in promoting diversity and amplifying marginalized voices in literature.
To guarantee a fifteen-minute discussion period, twelve minutes will be allocated to each of the following presenters.
Eliza Araújo translates Black women’s poetry in Cadernos Negros, a publication that has served as a platform for promoting the visibility of Afro-Brazilian poets and fiction writers. Her translation concentrates on Black women’s poetic experimentation and expression of diasporic consciousness, which attests to their refusal to conform to utilitarian uses of literacy and the ways their writing decolonizes common-sense social reading practices. Through a focus on interpretation in translation, Araújo underscores the aesthetic impact of poetry, engaging readers with the contemporary voices of Black women writers, who insert themselves into a literary tradition by poetic and political means.
In framing her analyses and translation of Cristiane Sobral’s work, Cristina Pinto-Bailey critiques the limited visibility and challenges faced by Black Brazilian writers within both the national literary market and the broader English-language publishing industry. The critic addresses her own position as a reader and a translator, translation as a political act, and the translator’s impostor syndrome. By exploring cultural and linguistic challenges in translating Sobral’s work, offering strategies and concrete examples of her translations, regardless of her own racial identity as a translator, Pinto-Bailey highlights a writer struggling for visibility in a (still) globally “minor” language.
In his translation of Cidinha da Silva’s short stories, Felipe Rodrigues attends to her employment of African-derived knowledge in a contemporary narrative that decolonizes the perception of racialized spaces, including the streets of New York, terreiros, favela, and the altar of Our Lady of the Rosary. Her elegant and ironic language is couched in global Pretuguês (“de dreads,” “na gringa,” “ebó-fast-food,” “Zaratempô,” etc) and centers the Yoruba divine linguist Exu as a topos and trope. At the crossroads of language, as Rodrigues argues, her renditions of mythopoetic power and blackness transform slavery legacies into a celebration of Black humanity.
Joyce Fernandes closes the session with a discussion of the concept of writing as translation in short stories by Lília Momplé and Paulina Chiziane. By emphasizing their struggles with a foreign language, standard Portuguese, and Chiziane’s adoption of Pretuguês, Fernandes explores how language and creative interpretations define their works, considering the critical discourse on language politics in African literature, and the significance of language in reflecting societal dynamics. The analyses of Momplé’s and Chiziane’s stories demonstrate their perspectives on the writing process as translation and the complexities of cultural and linguistic identities in their narratives.