THE INFINITE TASK OF THE POETRY TRANSLATOR

UNTRANSLABILITY, OTHERNESS, AND AUTHORSHIP

Abstract

This article offers a reflection on poetic translation as a practice of aesthetic creation and a politics of difference, drawing on the notions of untranslatability (Cassin) and transcreation (Haroldo de Campos). Building upon Walter Benjamin’s conception that “translation is a form” that expresses the “afterlife” of the work, I discuss how poetic translation surpasses the paradigm of fidelity and becomes a gesture of authorship, an ethics of alterity, and a space of resistance to monolingualism. In dialogue with Benjamin, Derrida, Cassin, Jakobson, and Brazilian poet-translators, the text examines paradigmatic cases – Rubáiyát (Omar Khayyám), Cathay (Ezra Pound), Um garoto de Haifa gira a palavra (Najwan Darwish), and Roça Barroca (Josely Vianna Baptista) – to show how poetic translation becomes a site of survival and recreation. Furthermore, I argue in this study that translating poetry establishes a relation with the other that transforms both the translated text and the target language, through a process of hospitality, invention, and difference. The article concludes that translating poetry is a way of thinking and inhabiting the world: a practice that welcomes the other, complicates the universal, and reveals – through the friction between languages and the persistence of the untranslatable – the creative and ethical power of translation.