Alberto Mussa e a tradução

Abstract

Translation - whether real or not - has an important role Alberto Mussa's work. Among the presumed sources of his novels are languages such as Arabic, Tupi, French or German. Mussa is also a translator. In this activity, employs a very Borgean concept of translation: in literature there is no original, there are only rewritings. Translation, in the work of Mussa, is used as a pretext, as an aesthetic and narrative feature, as well as the evidence of a conception of human language as a game and as an end in and of itself. For Mussa - as well as for Borges - translating is not repetition, but recreation, and the translator is inevitably doomed to be a poet, since "words are not even synonymous with themselves".