From Isomorphism to Cannibalism: The Evolution of Haroldo de Campos’s Translation Concepts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay charts the evolution of the translation concepts developed by the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos from his early concrete phase in the 1950s to what could be termed a postcolonial turn in the 1980s. I argue that the early concept of “transcreation” emerged from the practice of concrete poetry with its isomorphic mirroring of form and content. Stemming from the difficulty of translating concrete poetry and similar isomorphic texts, de Campos suggests a form of translation where a correspondence between the form and content of the original is also sought in the target text. Moving away from primarily formal concerns, in later developments, de Campos lays emphasis on a translation concept that puts forth a critical view of the original through the metaphor of the cannibal, who both reveres and devours the enemy, literally incorporating its energies into his body. This later concept of translation as cannibalism can be read within the larger arena of postcolonial translation. Although De Campos’s concepts were mainly developed independently from the mainstream currents of translation theory, they may be understood in relation to more recent discussions by Lefevere, Bassnett, and Trivedi, among others.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".