Amerindian repertoires and translingual poetics in Brazil: translation, creation, and their glottopolitical inflections

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing reflection on the glottopolitical dimensions of cultural practices on the agenda of Latin American Studies. This movement is in line with the questioning of the monolingual paradigm in current literature, as well as emphasizing the political role of the presence of indigenous languages and cosmologies on the contemporary cultural scene. Based on the assumption that literature and translation function as important agents of language policies, I propose the conceptual elaboration of a literary glottopolitical perspective, in order to debate forms of silencing of plurilingualism and translingualism in the Brazilian literary field, and on the other, to make visible the critical performativity that the zones of contact/friction between multiple language-cultures have brought to the poetic discourse. Therefore, I aim to discuss the correlations and tensions between creation and translation, provoked by the gestures of aesthetic appropiation of Amerindian linguistic and poetic repertoires, developed through procedures like quotation, selecting/montage and translation/self-translation by current indigenous and non indigenous authors. To this end, I analyze poems by Graça Graúna and Márcia Wayna Kambeba, as well as transcreations of Guarani Mbya repertoire by poet-translators Douglas Diegues and Josely Vianna Baptista.