National by translation

Abstract

In a now classic essay, Roberto Schwarz (1986) distanced himself from both “left-wing and right-wing nationalisms” and their “search for a genuine national background [...] through the elimination of what is not native” (the “national by subtraction”), as well as from “a certain recent French philosophy” in the wake of which critics such as Silviano Santiago and Haroldo de Campos sought to invert the commonplace according to which “the copy is secondary to the original”, offering “a triumphalist interpretation of our backwardness”. Three decades later, João Adolfo Hansen (2016), adopting an “internationalist perspective” that simultaneously dismisses the problem of “misplaced ideas” as well as the nationalist response to it, will defend, based on Abel Barros Baptista, the “idea of ​​literature as unconditional hospitality and translation”, thereby ignoring the profound inequalities recognized by Franco Moretti (2001) in the “literary world-system”. The problem lies in the false equivalence suggested by Hansen between “conditional hospitality” and “translation”: returning to Baptista’s propositions (2005a, 2005b, 2014), we will show that translation is imposed, in fact, precisely because unconditional hospitality in relation to literature is nothing more than a “utopia”, and that the linguistic heterogeneity that demands translation as a constitutive performance of language is precisely what allows the problem of national(ism) in the aesthetic-literary field in general, and in the comparative field in particular, to be redefined in a new key: national by translation.