Comments on the Translation of an Excerpt from Rafael Reyes’ text entitled “South America's Great Waterways: Wonders of the Continent”

Abstract

This paper reports comments regarding the translation of an excerpt from Rafael Reyes’ text entitled “Las grandes vías fluviales de Sud América: maravillas del continente” (South America's great waterways: wonders of the continent) into Portuguese. The translation seeks to highlight the ideological bias of the text, deeply imbued with Eurocentric values that reveal the capitalist perspective of the author, who would later become president of the Republic of Colombia and sees the exuberant nature of America as a resource to be exploited. The decolonial approach that runs through the proposed translation finds support in the Bermanian ethical proposal (Berman, 2012) regarding the presence of indigenous identities in the text, but without shying away from a domesticating stance toward the presence of the West. The comment concludes by pointing out that Reyes’ intent found echoes in the Brazilian elite of the time, as well as the disastrous consequences that his journey and the predation inherent in the Western civilizational project would have for the peoples and nature of the Amazon.