RELIGIOUS SYNCRETISM AS A STRATEGY FOR TRANSNATIONAL AND TRANSLATIONAL SURVIVAL: AFRICAN DEITIES AND CATHOLIC SAINTS IN TRANSLATION

ABSTRACT

The arrival of the Portuguese settlers on the land formerly inhabited by several Amerindian ethnic groups, later to be called Brazil, represented the outbreak of severe acts of violence against various population groups, notably the many indigenous peoples of this country and the dozens of African ethnic groups kidnapped to Brazil as slaves and deprived of their fundamental rights. Although they were mixed in various ethnic groups, and despite the sufferings and the intolerable levels of hardship of which they were victims, Africans sought - consciously or unconsciously - practical solutions to solve daily problems, such as how to practice their religious rituals. In course of time, they were familiar with the Catholic context and were thus able to infer cultural and religious transfers, adaptations, and recreations. This way of translating two distinct religious traditions helped them to keep alive their ancestral religious practices, although these had to be mixed with the Catholic hagiological system. In this work, our focus will be on the notions of Afro-Brazilian religions proposed by Verger (1997) and Bastide (2001), and concepts of Afro-Cuban religions by Aróstegui (1990). As a highlight of one of the forms of representation of the African-American religious syncretism, we start by analyzing the lyrics of two songs with expressive content regarding the aims of this article: the Brazilian song Guerreira and the Cuban song Babalú. Since we understand that Africans have carried out a translation process in which syncretism acts as a transnational and translational survival strategy, in this article we have recourse to some notions proposed by Bhabha (1994). Aiming to exemplify the practical meaning of religious syncretism as both a communicative act and a translation process that uses different extratextual and intratextual factors, we apply in this work part of Nord's theoretical framework (NORD, 2016). Finally, we bring examples of translations of Jorge Amado's novels in German translations, to show the complexity of translating Afro-Brazilian terms into a foreign language.

Keywords:
religious syncretism; survival strategy; translation