This ain't no tragedy! Poesia dub e tradução numa perspectiva afrodiaspórica

Abstract

This Master’s thesis is the culmination of an exercise in translation experimentation that considers the body, the rhythm and performance as fundamental translation resources to build the translation of an Afrodiasporic literature that is born from orality. Taking into consideration the low number of translations of Afrodiasporic literary regarding dub poetry and all its performativity originated in the Afro-Caribbean culture, more specifically the Jamaican culture, it is very important to develop translation methodologies that do not tangent nor erase the Afrodiasporic aesthetic features and the transforming cultural power that the genre incorporates. This work presents dub poetry as an Afrodiasporic literary genre and analyzes the aesthetic elements that compose it based on the reflections of Kamau Braithwaite, Mervyn Morris, and Christian Habekost, among others. Due to a scarcity of research that focuses on analyzing dub poetry, especially those produced by Black women, some analyses end up trapping them in controlling images (Collins, 2019). The paper aims to map the importance of Black women for the dissemination of dub poetry as a literary genre and as a Jamaican art form, with a special attention to the artistic-poetic production of Afua Cooper. Establishing a dialogue with intellectuals such as Leda Maria Martins, Denise Carrascosa, Richard Schechner, Luciana Reis, Olabiyi Babalola Yai (1939-2020), Muniz Sodré and other intellectuals who consider the body as an important source of knowledge production, this study aims to put into practice a reflection on an embodied and performative translation exercise. Considering the linguistic dimension of translation, I rely on the use of pretoguês (Gonzalez, 1988) to make evident the Afrodiasporic linguistic movements and the influences, transformations and vocabular, morphological, syntactic, and phonological interferences that the Banto languages produce in the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil, with a more specific focus on the Kimbundu language spoken in Angola (Mon'a-Nzambi, 2019; Castro, 2022). Finally, this work aims to develop a discussion on dub poetry as a multimodal genre that connects different elements to build a network of meanings.