Isabel Gomez's lecture

 Isabel Gomez's theoretical proposal seemed striking at first – imagining translators as cannibals seemed to me a very violent way of approaching translation. However, when reading her texts and listening to her talk I understood how historically the cannibal has been reclaimed by Latin American thinkers as a symbol of creative and loving destruction. This has been part of a postcolonial endeavor to recover the Tupi's tribe ideology of cannibalism as part of a ritualistic act that shows respect– you only devour what enriches you. Oswald de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto highlights this idea as he champions a Brazilian culture that doesn't copy European aesthetics but takes what it needs from them and transforms them into something completely new. In this sense, symbolically cannibalism becomes a way of both showing admiration and exercising creative liberties that enrich the source text. 

Gomez uses the term "cannibal translation" as an umbrella term for the creative translation methods that Latin American writers have employed. Gomez gave several examples of these creative methods such as transcreations, translations that are based on sound, and untranslations, among others. She highlighted the term "translationship" as the special relationship that Latin American translators established with their authors where they aimed to be seen as fellow poets with the same creative power. This type of relationship was a different one that translators from other cultures, like France or Germany, established with the authors where they saw the source text as something sacred and the author as the only one who could take creative liberties. Gomez's "Cannibal Translation" is a call to translators everywhere to refuse to be invisible, to leave their teeth marks in their translation, and to stop praising translation for being seamless or fluid. Gomez is encouraging us to see translations as mediated texts and to praise the creative and interpretative efforts of translators everywhere. 

– Lia 

P.S: I also really appreciate the effort of putting Latin America on the translation studies map, and Gomez's production into English puts these writers in conversation with the rest of the translation studies thinkers further enriching this field.