Anthropophagical Willemsen

The Creator of Brazilian Literature in the Netherlands

Abstract

August Willemsen's afterwords in the translated works of the most well known Brazilian authors published in the Netherlands, most generally, present his promises of fidelity as he accounts for his work of reading and translating. With the same assurance, he confesses his inability to repeat the significations he ascertains in the original texts. In this paper, which is part of a pos-doctoral project, my proposal is to introduce a discussion from the perspective of Critical Applied Linguistic of the old age concept of fidelity which involves aspects of language in its several linguistic operations: semantic, phonological, syntactic and cultural, that is, all the aspects of language use and its cultural and grammatical attributes. My primary intention is to confront the translator's promises, stated in interviews, essays and papers, and the creative translations he, in fact, produces. The thesis that orientates this critical reading is that, considering the traditional notion of fidelity as repetition of the totality of signification and despite his genuine intention to be faithful to the authors he loves and translates, Willemsen and his translation protocols battle to reproduce, in the target language, similar creative mechanisms at work in the source language. The creative translations proposed by August Willemsen anticipate a revolutionary sense of fidelity which eludes the expectation of authorial transparency nurtured by tradition. Willemsen's translation project is not unfamiliar with the concept of transcriation – the creative translation concept fostered by Haroldo de Campos's "anthropophagic theory".