Untranslations and Transcreations

Abstract

My title is taken from words coined by the Brazilian poets Augusto de Campos and Haroldo de Campos to refer to their experiments in translation. For the past forty years, the Campos brothers have redefined the poetics of translation with examples that range from classical Greek, Latin and Chinese authors to modernists such as Mallarmé, Pound, cummings, Mayakovsky, Khliebnikov and Joyce. Augusto de Campos, in particular, has applied many of the principles of concrete poetry to translation. His typographic translations are a clear instance of the spatial marking of textual meaning. I want to explore the relationship between linguistic meaning and typographical space that sustains the specific textuality of his translations.