«Hercules's tongue: force and eloquence in sixteenth-century Brazil»

Luciana Villas Bôas
«A língua de Hércules: força e eloquência no Brasil do século XVI»
Cadernos de traduçao, n.º 2, jul/dez 2014; edição especial: Depois de Babel

Cadernos de traduçao | Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina | Centro de Comunicação e Expressão - CCE | Pós-Graduação em Estudos da Tradução | Departamento de Língua e Literatura Estrangeiras (DLLE) | Florianópolis | Santa Catarina | BRASIL


Extracto de apartados en páginas 122 y 130-133 de la publicación en PDF. Véanse las referencias en la publicación original del texto.

«Abstract

»Drawing on the ancient tradition of the body-metaphor for representing the kingdom and its ruling state, the Portuguese word língua (tongue) emerges in the sixteenth century to designate colonial translators overseas. While many studies were dedicated to the interplay between anatomical and political imagery of the period, few have tackled its imprint on particular lexica and discursive contexts. Based upon a variety of sources related to colonial experiences in Brazil, this essay establishes a nexus between the historical semantics of the word língua and different models of colonial rule.

»Keywords

»Translators. Colonialism. Rhetoric. Politics. Anatomy.

»Portugal’s Exiled Tongues

»The word used in 15th-century chronicles, turgimão (from the same Arabic source as the French truchement), was replaced in the sixteenth century by the synecdoche, língua, which, designating the translator by means of the organ required for his performance, calls forth a series of relationships between part and whole. Within official discourses, the word necessarily entails a connection between the kingdom’s rule and its protruding tongues. Keenly aware of the importance of interpreters for the success of its ventures overseas, the Crown issued a blueprint to use the institution of penal exile, called degredo, to ensure the availability of colonial interpreters.

»According to the Portuguese law code, the compilation of laws called Ordenações Manuelinas, the penalty of degredo applies to different categories of crimes, from murder, blasphemy, to treason (lese-majesty) and was adopted not only by the state, but by the Inquisition, as well. A recent study suggests that about half of the convicts sent to colonial Brazil had been tried for betraying signs of “Jewishness.”

»The letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha announcing to D. João the “discovery” of Brazil records the association between penal exile and colonial translation. Caminha writes that two exiles, Afonso Ribeiro and João de Thomarinto, were abandoned ashore in order “learn their [natives] speech well and understand them” (“para aprenderem bem a sua fala e os entenderem”). A contemporary relation by the anonymous pilot of the expedition lays bare the penitential nature of the fleet’s decision: “[we] left two exiles who began to cry. The men of that land comforted us and appeared to feel pity for them” (“deixou dois degredados os quais começaram a chorar. Os homens daquela terra confortavam-nos e mostravam ter piedade deles.”

»An insubordinate subject of the kingdom, the penal exile is cut off from the social body of his homeland. The act of banning the convicted subject from his homeland is reminiscent of the act of cutting off the malicious, slippery tongue from the body characteristic of anatomical, moral discourses. Although it is hard to determine the number of exiles convicted for sins of the tongue, the transformation of the exile into an interpreter implies that the punishment is enforced not only on the convict’s body as a whole, but also distinctively on a body part – the tongue – hence compelled to utter foreign sounds. Extant official documents issued by the Crown explicitly refer to the penalty of degredo as a means to purge the kingdom from corrupt or dangerous members.

»The expectation to make penal exiles serve as colonial interpreters conforms to fantasies of the tamed tongue: like the excised tongue, the exiled subject was doomed to serve the Crown, reduced to a serviceable vehicle. From Caminha’s letter to the report sent by Jesuit missionaries from Brazil, the figure of subjectible línguas is pervasive in colonial writing. Since their arrival in 1549, the Jesuits confidently relied on línguas to preach to the Indians and translate Christian liturgy into their tongue. After sharing lay interpreters with settlers and colonial authorities, the Jesuits began to recruit and educate their own línguas.

»The newly founded schools served as a site where, cut off from their families, “gentile boys,” could be “formed by [their] own hands” (“feytos aa nossa mão”). Nóbrega ensured that both the pupils and their parents willingly submitted to the Jesuit’s design: “[the parents] give their children with good will” (“Dão os filhos de boa vontade”); “This house [school] of São Vicente is the poorest of all and the brothers and priests and the boys suffer great hunger and it is that they do not run away to their parents” (“Esta casa de S. Vicente é a mais pobre de todas e padecem os Irmãos e Padres e meninos muita fome e é maravilha não fugirem para os seus pais”).

»Calling them “little brothers of the land” (“hermanitos de la tierra”) Nóbrega writes on the young línguas with affection, and believes “that they would never leave us [the members of the Order] and our administration” (“Foy parecer-me que nunca meninos do gentio se apartarião de nós e de nossa administração”). A couple of years later, the first school founded in Bahia is empty: “There are no boys from the gentiles now at home” (“Meninos do gentio não há agora em casa”) as most inmates “fled to their own” (“os mais fugram para os seus”). Nóbrega’s amorous language turns political as he recognizes that only the availability of coercive means would have prevented the Indian boys to escape school: “and because there were no means to subject them, they fled” (“e como não havia sujeitá-los, lá se andaram”).

»Nóbrega’s letters, much like anatomical images of tongues, suggest that the figure of the orderly tongue is always potentially disorderly. Just like the dismemberment of the tongue could yield “declarations of independence” (think of representations of the flying tongue), the Jesuits’ little tongues (“meninos línguas”) could and did autonomously step out of office. More often than not, dismemberment culminated not in the taming of the tongue into a diligent messenger in the service of the Crown or religious Order, but into a colonial subject who acted in his own right.

»Exiles from the kingdom, whether convicts, runaways or shipwrecks, who assimilated to local culture, were called lançados, from the Portuguese verb lancer (to throw). While the term degredado indicates how the state strives to hold sway over its scattered subjects and territories, the term lançados implies less the exertion of state power than its transmission within an unbound territory. Grounded in the state’s centralization of coercive means, and lack of apt proxies overseas, the connection of penal exiles and colonial translators was paradoxical. Thrown ashore by the state, exiles could easily evade its direct control and cross over to the native’s side. The Crown regretted the backlash of creating runaways, but could not afford withdrawing them.»