The aim of this communication is to publish and discuss the data we gathered on the circulation of the Literatures of Portuguese-Speaking Africa in translation in Europe.
While many departments of Portuguese Language and Literature, both in the Portuguese-Speaking World and elsewhere, have showed a growing interest in studying works coming from Portuguese-Speaking Africa and while the scientific community has increasingly studied this subfield of Portuguese-Speaking literatures, the attention to the circulation of these literatures outside the Portuguese-Speaking area through their translation is still scarce among scholars.
Given that translation is the main device through which a literary work manages to overcome the narrow borders of the language and culture in which it has originally been written – following the most traditional comparative view of literary circulation, and adding to this the fact that a new light has been cast on translation facts and agendas by the Translation Studies in the last decades – especially Lefevere (1992) and Venuti's (1998) –, we strongly believe that a general study of a literary space is not complete without adding to it a broad research about the literary translations that have been published. This is especially relevant when we look at peripheral literary productions and to their translation into the centre of the World Literary System. Theorizations such as Said's (1994) have shown the relevancy of a contrapuntal reading and study of post-colonial and metropolitan canons (to manage which translation is necessary if we don't want to restrict ourselves into a single language-area); while the more recent work of scholars such as Sapiro's (2014, 2015) and Heilbron's (2010) give us new methodological tools to research and analyse the relationships between literature, translation and publishing structure in a literary space. The way in which Pascale Casanova (1999 and further works) theorizes the World Literary System helps us to work on a general structure that covers various literary phenomena of translation, hybridation, appropriation and circulation and the centre/periphery relationship.
In order to research these matters, data have been gathered on the presence of the Literatures of Portuguese-Speaking Africa in Europe. First of all, the Portuguese literary space and publishing system have been researched in order to assess the relevance of their intermediation between African authors and the rest of the world. Considering that Portugal has a strong publishing tradition and a developed book market, and adding that Portuguese public entities, such as DGLAB and Camões support the translation of African authors into other languages, we have discovered that the role played by the Portuguese mediation in projecting the African literary production abroad is unquestionable.
Data have then been gathered on literary translation from the Portuguese-Speaking Africa in the rest of Europe, combining information on translators, publishers, their size and their location, the presence of public Portuguese funding, the general data on language, country of publishing and year of publication. The landscape that these data depict of literary translation from the Portuguese-Speaking Africa into Europe revealed a reality that has to be further researched and commented.
As expected, stronger and bigger literary systems host more translations than smaller or newer ones. Even so, differences between relatively comparable language areas in Europe are sensible, revealing the translation patterns and contexts of the target cultures. Discrepancies between the status some authors have attained (such as Mia Couto and José Eduardo Agualusa, broadly translated everywhere and with literary prizes awarded abroad) and the relative obscurity of most translations of other authors and the publishing space their presses occupy struck as relevant matters of discussion and further work.
We hope to draw conclusions that can be helpful in the advancement not only in the study of the circulation of these literatures, but also constitute a model for other African productions, and for possible cross-language research on African Literatures.