One way to measure the reception of Toni Morrison in Brazil can be made through the translation of her fiction. Of her nine novels, there is one which has received two translations to Brazilian Portuguese: Beloved, translated as Amada, by Massaro in 1994 and by Siqueira in 2007. Regarding the two Brazilian Amadas, my comments are directed to the translation strategies that the two translators used in order to account for the sermon on self-love with regard to the black body that holy Baby Suggs spoke to the former slaves of the community of Bluestone Road. Firstly, by reading their translations, one perceives that Massaro and Siqueira agree that the children, the women and the men follow Baby Suggs to the Clearing; one notices that they laugh, dance and cry; that she offers them her heart; and that they must see or imagine the grace they want, because, as she says, "if they could not see it, they would not have it" (MORRISON, 1988: 88).
Then one realizes that both Amadas also agree on the content of the sermon. For instance, in Massaro and Siqueira, one hears Baby Suggs teach her people to consider the beauty of the black body, ask them to touch and imagine their individual and collective beauty, tell them about their gains and losses in this experience of self-love: gains that are related to their contact with the group, when she says to them "here (...) in this place, we flesh”; and losses that come from their abandonment of the community clearly demonstrated by the preacher, in these words, "yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it” (MORRISON, 1988: 88). The people also learn that the love they feel for themselves and for the brothers and the sisters can keep hate at bay. It is an attitude that fosters the loving touch on all parts of the body, both the internal and external ones. On the outside of the body, Baby Suggs reminds them that the eyes, backs, hands, face, mouth, feet, arms and neck deserve to be loved; Inside it, one hears her connect the liver, the lung, the uterus and the heart to their love. And, by the end, you see her close his speech, saying that the heart is the priority of physical love. "Hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize” (MORRISON, 1988: 89), Baby Suggs teaches them.
In a manner similar to that of Massaro and Siqueira, some critics of Beloved evaluate Morrison’s most important novel as an experience of physical love. Conner (2000), for example, suggests that the novel "is reputed to be (…) all about love (...) a love that is experienced by, and even told by, the community itself" (CONNER, 2000: 73). In this love, very much collective, Stern (2000) puts side by side the physical love and the suffering of the group, saying that the beauty of the body "has more to do with the commonality of physical suffering than with commonality of taste, more to do with how all bodies feel rather than how they individually look" (STERN, 2000: 90).
Parallel to the evaluation of the content of the sermon, one places the discussion of the translation strategies that Massaro and Siqueira use to make the two Amadas viable in Brazilian Portuguese. In contrast to what happens with the content, on which they agree, the two translators differ in their strategies of translation. This distinction has everything to do with the use of the possessive. Compared with the possessives as used in English, the Brazilian possessive is characterized by three grammatical aspects, which are absent in English. First, the Brazilian possessive has specific inflections of gender – masculine and feminine – and number – singular and plural –, and may also accept the article forms [o(s), a(s)]. You can see these rules in these sentences, comparing them with those of English:
PORTUGUÊS: Amo [o] meu pai e [a] minha mãe.
ENGLISH: I love my father and my mother.
FRANÇAIS: J’aime mon père et ma mère.
PORTUGUÊS: Amamos [os] nossos pais.
ENGLISH: We love our parents.
FRANÇAIS: Nous aimons nos parents.
Compared with English, French has inflections of gender and number, but rejects the article.
In their Amadas, Massaro and Siqueira differ in the way they handle the translation of possessives from English to Brazilian Portuguese. By following the situation below
ENGLISH: Yonder they do not love your flesh (p. 88).
MASSARO: Lá fora eles não amam nossa carne (p. 106).
SIQUEIRA: Lá fora não amam a sua carne (p. 126).
FRANÇAIS: Là-bas, dans le pays, ils n’aiment pas votre chair (p. 127).
we can verify that Massaro has translated the English possessive your as nossa, while Siqueira translated it as a sua. In this case, we see the article [a] before the possessive [sua] and his absence before the possessive [nossa]. In the other two examples below,
ENGLISH: They don’t love your eyes (p. 88).
MASSARO: Nem amam nossos olhos ( p. 106).
SIQUEIRA: Nem amam seus olhos (p. 126).
FRANÇAIS: Ils n’aiment pas vos yeux (p. 127).
ENGLISH: No more do they love the skin on your back (p. 88).
MASSARO: Muito menos amam a pele em nossas costas (p. 106).
SIQUEIRA: Como também não amam a pele de suas costas (p. 126).
FRANÇAIS: Pás plus qu’ils n’aiment la peau de votre dos (p. 127).
the same standard of translation is followed, where Massaro’s translation makes use of the possessive of the first person of plural [nossos/nossas], respectively, while that of Siqueira resides in the second/third person of singular [seus/suas], respectively. In the next sentence,
ENGLISH: O my people they do not love your hands (…) Love your hands (p. 88)
MASSARO: Meu povo, eles não amam nossas mãos (...) Amem suas mãos (p. 106).
SIQUEIRA: Ah, meu povo, eles não amam as suas mãos (,..) Amem suas mãos (p. 126).
FRANÇAIS: Ô mon peuple, ils n’aiment pas vos mains (...) Aimez vos mains (p. 127).
the standard of translation is changed, because Massaro combines the two modalities – the first and the third persons – by mixing the possessive [nossas] with [suas]. As Baby Suggs’s speech is one of exhortation, with which she wants to encourage her people to be fully aware of their bodies, we see other similar uses of other forms of the possessive. In these cases, Massaro moves from the first person of singular to the third and returns to the first, walking away and, then, coming closer to Siqueira, who remains faithful to his use of the possessive in the third person [suas/suas] respectively, with and without the article [as]. In Baby Suggs’s final and strongest request to her people, Massaro and Siqueira differ again:
ENGLISH: Love your heart (p. 89).
MASSARO: Devemos amar nosso coração (p. 107)
SIQUEIRA: Amem seu coração (p.126).
FRANÇAIS: Aimez votre coeur (p. 128).
Massaro takes the possessive [nosso] and Siqueira applies the possessive [seu] to translate the possessive [your], thus repeating the first and the second/third persons.
Following Lefevere’s (2007) discussion, in which he sees translation as manipulative and adaptive rewriting, one can relate the two translations of Baby Suggs’s speech into Brazilian Portuguese to Venuti (1998) and Gates (1988). On the one hand, one says, with Venuti, that Massaro rewrites the speech of the black leader at the same time to domesticate it to the linguistic and cultural stereotypes of Brazilian Portuguese through the employment of the possessive of the first person nosso(s)/nossa(s) and to foreignize her words through the use of possessive seu(s)/sua(s). On the other hand, one can argue that the translation of Siqueira follows the direction of foreignization when it focuses on the possessive seu(s)/sua(s).
Gates helps us to consider that the two rewritings are presented as the double voice of blackness that Baby Suggs’s community has decided to live. He explains that "signifyin(g) is the figure of the double-voiced, epitomized by Esu’s depictions in sculpture as possessing two mouths” (GATES, 1988: xxv). This is the double voice of translation that allows us to see what happens between the source text and the two target texts as signifyin(g), that is to say, as "repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal difference" (GATES, 1988: xxiv)
I see translation as a domesticating or foreignizing rewriting. In order to make my position more reasonable, I assume Lefevere’s words (2007). Rewriting, he says, "is a way to restore to the study of literature a little bit of the social relevance that literary studies as a whole have lost” (LEFEVERE, 2007: 24). He explains that
Translation is certainly a rewriting of an original text. Every rewriting, whatever its intention, reflects a certain ideology and a poetics and as such handles literature for it work within a given society and a specific way. Rewriting is manipulation, performed in the service of power, and in its positive aspect can help develop a literature and a society (LEFEVERE, 2007: 11).
As conclusion, one must say that, with these comments on the two rewritings of the novel Beloved as Amada, I did not want to discuss which would be the best translation, or whether a rewriting of foreignization would excel a domesticated translation. I did not either wish to compare the two translations with the source text. Massaro’s and Siqueira’s Amadas are autonomous rewritings within their ideological and poetological decisions and that’s how I wanted to consider them in this comparative proposal. I wished to follow Lefevere’s words that say that "rewriters adapt, to some extent manipulate the originals on which they work, usually to fit the current trend or one of the ideological or poetological current trends dominant in their time” (LEFEVERE, 2007: 23).
References.
CONNER, Marc C. From the Sublime to the Beautiful: The Aesthetic Progression of Toni Morrison. In: CONNER, Marc C. (ed.). The Aesthetic of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000, p. 49-76.
LEFEVERE, André. Tradução, Reescrita e Manipulação da Fama Literária. Tradução Claudia Matos Seligmann. Bauru, SP: Edusc, 2007.
MORRISON, Toni. Beloved. Traduction Hortense Chabrier et Sylviane Rué. Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 2009.
-------------------------. Beloved. London: Picador, 1988.
-------------------------. Amada. Evelyn Kay Massaro. São Paulo: Círculo do Livro Ltda, 1994.
-------------------------. Amada. José Rubens Siqueira. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2007.
STERN, Katherine. Toni Morrison’s Beauty Formula. In: CONNER, Marc C. (ed.). The Aesthetic of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000, p. 77-91.
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