For a Decolonial Latin American Politological Lexicon: O Homem Cordial, Alter Ego of El Hombre Cordial

Abstract

The 2016 critical edition of Raízes do Brasil, recomposing the corpus of the five editions published by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda between 1936 and 1969, makes it clear how the initial positive connotation of the metaphor o homem cordial has changed into a negative one. The first translations - into Italian (1954) and into Spanish-American (1955) - appeared when the re-conceptualization process of the metaphor was not yet complete. Once concluded, and when the Buarquian metaphor had already established itself in the Portuguese language as a polyrematic, both languages would have a second translation (2000 and 2016]. From a cognitive perspective, such data implies that the mere literal translation of the syntagma may not be the most appropriate option: semantically, el hombre cordial and o homem cordial lead in opposite directions and, moreover, the first metaphor remains functional to the reconceptualization of the second one. Especially in the Hispano-American context, the Portuguese version of the syntagma would better suit, instead of a back-translation, to fully disambiguate the conceptual hiatus, now definitively acquired, between the two metaphors, allowing to alert, in a de-colonial logic, on the mutation in the twentieth century of certain power groups, from libertadores to reactionary elites.