On Masuo Yamaki and Paulo Colina's collaborative translation of Takuboku Ishikawa's tanka into Portuguese
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2026.e105188Keywords:
collaborative translation, translaboration, Takuboku Ishikawa, critical cosmopolitanism, poetry translationAbstract
The text discusses issues related to the translation of Takuboku Ishikawa's (1886–1912) tanka poems into Portuguese, highlighting the dynamics and implications of a collaboratively conducted translation. The translation in question, Tankas ([1985]1988), was carried out by the Japanese-Brazilian Masuo Yamaki (?-?), who was responsible for a version that remained closer to the source text of Takuboku's verses, and by the Afro-Brazilian poet Paulo Colina (1950–1999), who was in charge of modifying Yamaki’s initial version through revision, arrangement, adaptation, and restructuring. The argument is made that the collaborative translation process, as a form of translaboration, despite also involving certain power imbalances, fosters an entanglement of diverse positions that, even in conflict, contribute to the construction of something that is only possible through this collective process. This text thus proposes that Yamaki and Colina's translation of Takuboku's poems may offer glimpses of a critical/dissident cosmopolitanism that, through translaboration, finds (re)new(ed) ways to transform (and thus intensify) the Japanese author's poetics. In this process, the fruitful encounter of differences enables the creation of something new through collaboration (between translators, but also between them and the original text), rather than the overcoming of their respective differences.
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