Suchergebnisse

This essay reassesses the political significance of the creative impulses, performance aesthetics and artistic work that became identified collectively asmúsica popular black, and their contribution to the anti-racist cause in Brazil during the 1964-85 dictatorship. It reevaluates how the state orthodoxy of racial nationalism and denialism was challenged, not merely in the adoption of the soul aesthetic as a marker of diasporic identification with US blackness, but in the cumulative emergence of an autonomous anti-racist consciousness and voice for Afro-Brazilians within their own musical and social world. This was expressed, not only in a body of powerfully explicit anti-racist statements but also in a creolized, cosmopolitan idiom of vocal and performative style that connected local artists and the Black Rio dance scene, and that contributed to the building of a Black public sphere, leaving a potent legacy for the musical and political movements of the 1980s, 1990s and beyond.

Drawing on the field of Brazilian popular music and its internationalization, the work of some key Brazilian and French theorists of song and oral poetry, and on my own translation practice, this essay offers a radical new approach to song translation. I first sketch out an ethics of song translation within the broader political context of postcolonial debates about globalization, cosmopolitanism and intercultural translation. I then examine the language-music relationship and its implications for song translation, not as a matter of compromise between competing criteria of semantic information, form and "singability", as is sometimes suggested, but rather as a unified, convergent project focused on enacting the composition's melodic-discursive unfolding in time as movement, as language-in-song. Finally, I explore in some detailed examples how formal and performative challenges might be integrated together in the translator's approach to questions of inflection, rhythm, time and persona.