Translatability of Memory in an Age of Globalization

Abstract

In the growing debate around globalization, the notion of world literature has taken on new conjectures. Pascale Casanova, in his recent La république mondiale des lettres, explores the relationship between national and international literature with Paris, and later, London and New York as the Greenwich of the world literary republic. 1 Franco Moretti has recently stated in "Conjectures on World Literature" that literature around us is now unmistakably a planetary system and proposes a return to the ambition of Weltliteratur,arguing for the need to find a new critical method. 2 World literature in a global age is still Janus-faced—it is critiqued as the global cannibal consuming minor and peripheral literatures and at the same time hailed for its cosmopolitan possibilities. While Moretti gathers on the momentum of the millennium to make his case, the question goes back a long way. For example, the Brazilian translator Haroldo de Campos reclaims for translation the cannibalistic metaphor (antropofagia) used by the Brazilian modernismo in the 1920s. One of the most significant documents of the movement was the "Manifesto Antropofagista," published by Oswald de Andrade in the Revista de Antropofagia. Andrade endeavours to transform the taboo into a totem. In the same spirit, Campos' cannibalistic translation suggests a creative mutual cannibalism in literary exchange through translation and a post-colonial critique of the peripheral viewing the center. 3