The Performance of a Corpus in Translation

Wahdaha chajarat ar-ruman (2010), by Sinan Antoon, from Arabic into Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

As an exercise of the body-text, this article attempts to partially describe the performance of the translation process of the Iraqi novel Wahdaha chajarat ar-ruman (2010) (The Corpse Washer, 2013, translated by the author), by Sinan Antoon, from Arabic to Brazilian Portuguese. Starting from the context of its production, which dates back to the US military invasion of Iraq in 2003, the narrative echoes the terror that takes hold in the country. After so many years of imprisonment and torture, we are presented, through the voice of a mghassilchi – a Shiite body washer –, with an Iraq shattered by bellicose policies and military colonialism that turns it into a death field. Thus, I work on a description that unfolds from the experience of a foreign reader, translator, and academic of literature – commonly regarded as a corpus of historical, ethnic, as well as anthropological records – that attempts, to some extent, to present it as an artistic body. As an artistic body formed by a craftsman, it requires the translator’s creative ability to bring into the world – and why not give birth to – a body that constitutes itself as a different repetition.