Haroldo de Campos: intersemiotic dialogues in the transcreation of chinese poetry

Abstract

Among the most diverse horizons of possibilities that the works of the poet, theorist and translator Haroldo de Campos indicate, this article proposes to analyze the phenomenon of translation of Chinese poetry, configured by Campos in his book escrito sobre jade: poesia clássica chinesa reimaginada por Haroldo de Campos as a model of intersemiotic transcreation. It is from his incursion into studies on Chinese language and literary art that Haroldo proposes a distancing from the course of translation according to the common process of literality of linguistic meanings, to signal the formation of a translational model of reconstitution of cultural symbolic elements. Conceptualized as “tradução-tradição”, haroldian transcreation seeks a process of reimagining, whose objective is to recreate the tradition of Chinese poetry from a new framework that allows the recognition of this tradition. This path points to a possible recognition of visual linguistic signs as translators of the presence of Chinese language and culture, a process of dialogue that would take place at a semiotic level made possible by transcreation. As far as Haroldo's proposal is concerned, it is understood, then, about the configuration of the translation action as intersemiotic paths, whose reading potentials are open to the examination of poetic images as living elements of a cultural tradition.