Translating is Resisting: Subversion and Atheism as a Device for Internationalization of Brazilian Culture

Abstract

The resistance, autonomy and subversion of language and literature in Brazil has its roots in the nineteenth century and extends into the twentieth century, which provided a literary nationality, a cultural and literary independence, demarcating itself from the Portuguese language and literature of the metropolis. In the first part of this article, I make a brief historical analysis of the creation of a language (Brazilian Portuguese) within the language (Portuguese of the metropolis) resistance to Portuguese literary impositions from two examples of Brazilian writers, José de Alencar and Mário de Andrade, and their respective novels, Iracema and Macunaíma. And in the second part, I reflect on the place of literary Brazil on the world map of literatures from José Lambert's theory of the multiplication of World Maps and Pascale Casanova's theory on the parameter of Greenwich's Meridian and dominant and dominated literatures as well as the question of the power and domination of languages-cultures. Every argument is made from the perspective of translation as a means of resisting hegemonic power and as a form of cultural atheism.