Mais ou menos negra? Questões de negritude, tradução e a poesia de Harryette Mullen

• Autor(a) principal: Amorim, Lauro Maia [UNESP]
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UNESP
• Texto Completo: http://ojs.c3sl.ufpr.br/ojs2/index.php/letras/article/view/26637; http://hdl.handle.net/11449/122628
• topic: tradução; literatura afro-americana; miscigenação; translation; African-American literature; miscegenation

This paper addresses issues regarding my translation of selected poems by Harryette Mullen, a rising African-American contemporary poet, whose dense poetry works on the black oral tradition, the experimentalism of writing, the (African-American) pop music, in addition to delving into issues such as the representation of (black) female sexuality. One of the complex aspects of her poetry is the notion of miscegenation, conceived as an aesthetic argument and as a constitutive condition of the identity of multiracial Americans. This concept establishes a textuality that questions the accessible intelligibility generally expected from black American poetry, insofar as a mosaic of dissonant voices are brought to light in her text, which makes it difficult to categorize. In Brazil, especially among politically engaged Afro-Brazilians, there has been criticism towards the praise of miscegenation, since the latter has been considered to support of the myth of racial democracy. Building on these aspects, we investigate the extent to which it is a challenge to translate her poetry – based on miscegenation and hybridity as aesthetic constructs – especially when taking into account the discursive locus of readers identified with an Afro-Brazilian aesthetic, particularly critical of miscegenation. From the point of view of translation, we evaluate the extent to which her poetry could be read by the predominant cultural discourse in Brazil, inclined to favor miscegenation as an integral concept of national identity, as a seductively experimental poetry. In view of this, one wonders whether this perspective makes hers poetry “less black” for Afro-Brazilian literary standards.