University of Illinois Press Chapter Title: TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD: The Decolonial Spark of a Translated Spell Chapter Author(s): MICHAEL IYANAGA Book Title: A Respectable Spell Book Subtitle: Transformations of Samba in Rio de Janeiro Book Author(s): CARLOS SANDRONI Published by: University of Illinois Press. (2021) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctv2321hds.3 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to A Respectable Spell This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD The Decolonial Spark of a Translated Spell MICHAEL IYANAGA Translating is a bit like blazing a trail through an untrodden forest whose flora and fauna comprise clusters of words, intimations, and feelings. While competent translators can always eventually make their way through the rhetoric, it is never entirely possible to shake the nagging sensation that they took a number of wrong turns and missed a lot of the beauty along the way. After all, other paths may have been easier, more picturesque, or simply more direct. Were they in too much of a hurry—too busy searching for a quick path through the trees—to notice the grandeur of the canopy or the lyrical humming of the rustling leaves? Or, conversely, did they obfuscate the path by stopping for too long to admire the forest’s poetry, distracted by the sunlight splashed across the understory or the enmeshed branches curving wondrously around each other? And there you have it, dear reader: your first chance to say, Was that really necessary? Wasn’t that flowery paragraph you just read—or skipped, perhaps— entirely dispensable? Too many silly metaphors . . . oh goodness, you might be thinking. Is this what we’re in for? No, luck is in our favor, for Carlos Sandroni doesn’t write like that; nor do I (usually), for that matter. But this is precisely the point. Translating is, as Jiří Levý famously emphasized, “a decision process.”1 In translating we are (or we’re?) faced with an infinite number of decisions about what to include and what to exclude, what to rephrase and what to rearrange, which target-language word should serve as an “equivalent” to a given sourcelanguage word. But a translation is not simply a sequence of arbitrary choices; the whole process is governed by our own a priori assumptions about what matters and what a given word communicates. As such, to understand a bit about my as- This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword sumptions and the values that guided my approach to Sandroni’s writing, allow me to begin with the book’s title. The book’s original Portuguese-language title, Feitiço decente, tripped me up almost before I even stepped foot into our metaphorical forest. As Sandroni will later show us, this is a phrase taken from the lyrics of a song by famed sambista Noel Rosa. This ostensibly paradoxical expression serves to represent one of the book’s main points about the way in which samba, samba practitioners, and the popular music industry more generally were reconceptualized, reshaped, and redefined around 1930. But how can this phrase—and its cluster of connotations—be brought to life in English? It was the first fork in my road: would I go down the road of cognates, given that both decente and feitiço have entirely legitimate cognates in English (decent and fetish, respectively), or would I choose a different path? As the reader will already have noted, I chose a different path: “respectable” (decente) and “spell” (feitiço). But why? Would a title like “Decent Fetish” have been more correct, more appropriate, or simply better? Or are we dealing here with what the French call faux amis? (Incidentally, do we translate this French phrase as “false cognates,” “false friends,” or the cutest option, “phony friends”?) I will spend some time on the process by which I arrived at this particular translation for two important reasons. First, it is not an accident that Sandroni chose this phrase as the title of the book: these highly charged words encapsulate the major themes dealt with in the pages that follow. And second, the thought process behind my translation of these two terms reveals something about my approach to translating the whole book. A “Decent Fetish”: Thinking Translation If we play the dictionary game, we discover that according to one definition or another, “decent fetish” would indeed be a translation of feitiço decente. “Decent,” according to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, has a range of meanings, from “marked by moral integrity” and “free from obscenity” to “fairly good” or “adequate.” And indeed, these definitions carry with them connotations that could intersect with the Portuguese word decente, the adjective form of decência, which, for its part, is defined by the authoritative Houaiss dictionary as “conformidade com padrões morais” (that is, conformity to moral standards), “respeitabilidade” (respectability), and “recato” (modesty).2 As for “fetish,” the English-language term has diverse definitions, ranging from a thing (“object . . . believed to have magical power” or “an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification”), to a behavior (“fixation”), to a group/activity (“rite or cult of fetish worshippers”). The Houaiss dictionary, on the other hand, understands the Portuguese-language cognate feitiço more x This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword simply: “bruxaria” (witchcraft or sorcery) or “encantamento” (enchantment or spell).3 Here, finding the overlap between feitiço and “fetish” appears to require a bit more creativity, unless we play the etymology game, which shows us that the terms are much closer to each other than these dictionary definitions suggest. “Fetish” in English is in fact derived—by way of the pidgin word fetisso—from the Portuguese feitiço.4 Although in the Middle Ages the Portuguese term feitiço generically referred to “sorcery or magical arts,”5 it took on a new specificity in its use on the African coast, in Portuguese Guinea, starting in the fifteenth century. There the Portuguese used the term feitiço (as opposed to ídolo, or idol) to refer “to an object worn about the body which itself embodied an actual power resulting from the correct ritual combination of materials.”6 Feitiço then developed into the pidgin fetisso, which by the eighteenth century had already come to refer to something that was simultaneously a quasi-personal power and a material object “capable of being influenced both through acts of worship . . . and through manipulations of material substances.”7 And it is this fetisso that becomes the word we know today (in English) as “fetish.” As for feitiço in the context of Afro-Brazilian religions in Brazil—which, it’s worth noting, is generally viewed by practitioners as a pejorative term—it refers to a spell, hex, or curse that is mediated by the assembly of a material concoction made up of spiritually charged objects. This summary glance at the term’s etymology has two important implications for how we might understand the “fetish.” The first concerns its materiality. As William Pietz notes, “essential to the notion of the fetish is that of the fetish object’s irreducible materiality. . . . Marxism’s commodity fetish, psychoanalysis’s sexual fetish, and modernism’s fetish as art object all in an essential way involve the object’s untranscended materiality.”8 And although in Brazil feitiço can signify its medieval Portuguese meaning of magical arts generally (for instance, in the spells and incantations central to so many European-derived fairy tales), the term tends to be understood—particularly in the Afro-Brazilian context of which Noel Rosa’s lyrics are a part—as something with an irreducible materiality, albeit always linked to people’s beliefs and to a spiritual world teeming with different energies. It is not just any spiritual world of energies, however; it is a specifically African-derived world of energies. And this is the second important quality of the meaning of “fetish.” In Pietz’s words, “[as] a novel object not proper to any prior discrete society, [fetish] originated in the cross-cultural spaces of the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”9 In other words, the concept of “fetish” is intrinsically linked to Africa and to the Atlantic world within which it was born. It is not by chance, therefore, that Africa and Africans served as foils even in later European theorizations of the “fetish” (especially by Marx and Freud).10 In fact, anthropologist J. Lorand Matory goes as far as to argue that with the “skin-tight black leather, . . . the centrality of master-slave role play, . . . and the common use xi This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword of whips,” even sexual understandings of the word “fetish” “invite interpretation as a subliminal reenactment of circum-Atlantic racial history.”11 There thus seems no more apposite English-language translation for feitiço than its own progeny, “fetish.” So why did I choose “spell” over “fetish” in this case? To me, translating is not an etymology game, however fascinating that game might be. Rather, it is an investment in meanings and in trying to find the words that are most successful in evoking in target-language readers something close to that which the “original” authors aimed (or appear to have aimed) to evoke in their source-language readers. In many ways, then, it is to me less a “meaning” game than one of feelings and sensations. And here, as the reader may already have surmised, “fetish” does not evoke (to speakers of English) what feitiço does (to speakers of Portuguese). We find a great anecdotal example of this when Matory relates his exchange with Queen Alethia, a shopkeeper at a so-called “fetish store” in Ohio: “When I asked Queen Aletheia what a ‘fetish’ is . . . she simply defined a fetish as ‘an obsession’ and ‘anything that makes you happy.’”12 Incidentally, this understanding of “fetish” is, in Portuguese, not feitiço but rather fetiche. In other words, while “fetish” might mean feitiço, it does not (to the English speaker) mean it in the same way. Put simply, it does not feel the same. And as I see it, the job of the translator—the “intimate reader,”13 in Gayatri Spivak’s words—is to try to feel the original and render those feelings accessible in the target language. Not by chance, this is precisely what is at the heart of Sandroni’s investigation: how could samba mean different things—how could it feel different—to given groups of people depending on their eras and places in society? The book is about recognizing that “samba” in 1917 was different from “samba” in, say, 1933. We learn that the meanings surrounding the word “samba” changed; the things it evoked—compositional structures, rhythms, musical instruments, rights to authorship, and so forth—changed. This is indeed a study of the shift in what the word “samba” felt like in Rio de Janeiro around 1930; the masterfully executed analysis shows that how a word feels, and how it is meant to feel, correlates directly to people’s expectations. Translating words strikes me as a similar endeavor. It is an attempt to read intimately two languages—in my case, Portuguese and English—in order to interpret the signified worlds that particular words and phrases might evoke. This is why the fluidity of a translation will often attest to how closely it hits the mark. In this particular case, I will leave it up to the reader to judge how well the language of this translation approximates a book that, in its original Portuguese, was described by Ernesto Donas as “‘catchy’ and easy to read.”14 But for now, back to the title. If not “decent fetish,” what should Sandroni’s book be called? Here I had to consider not just where Sandroni got the title and what it meant in that original context but also why Sandroni chose this as the book’s title. xii This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword I have already touched on the first two questions (and Sandroni will go into great detail in his own analysis), but what of the last? I briefly mentioned one reason earlier, which is that the title effectively encapsulates the text’s central issues: the transition of “samba” (again, as a word referring to a specific set of expectations) from Brazilian society’s Black margins to a place of broad, racially diverse appeal, not by shedding its Blackness but rather by embracing a redefined understanding of such Blackness and making it an integral part of the nascent music industry. But there is more. None of this was agentless, as no feitiço can be; none of it just happened. (In this sense, it seems not entirely irrelevant that the term feitiço “derives linguistically from the Latin facticius or factitius, an adjective formed from . . . the verb facere, ‘to make,’”15 meaning thus something made.) “Samba” was defined and redefined by people with names, experiences, birthplaces, and desires; and all of it mattered. As such, samba’s newly discovered decência, or “respectability,” had little to do with any internal changes. Rather, samba’s transformations resulted from—while also being an active force in—broader social changes regarding people’s expectations, biases, and understandings toward Afro-Brazilian cultural practices generally. It thus seemed clear to me that decente would best be understood as “respectable,” for the term carries with it an implication of presentability (that is, presentable publicly to Brazilian society). My solution for feitiço was less intuitive and, frankly, less satisfying. After all, the term that would ostensibly be the most accurate, “fetish,” seemed to me incapable of translating the symbolic power of feitiço. One could argue that English has terms that approximate feitiço: charm, hand, or conjure bag (also called gris-gris, mojo/mojo hand, toby, root bag, juju, and the like),16 in addition to more explicitly pejorative terms derived from the “voodoo” imaginary, such as “hex” or simply “voodoo” (as in “doing voodoo”). However, most of these terms struck me as too object specific, too antiquated or obscure, too ambiguous, or too regional to resonate with the broad comprehensibility of the word feitiço. And the only term that seemed to be in the ballpark (at least to my mind’s ear) was “voodoo.” In fact, a “respectable voodoo” feels just about right, but only if we can abstract it from its particular geopolitical context without also losing the implied anti-Black racism (I’m thinking, for instance, of the infamous “voodoo economics” of George H. W. Bush). The problem, of course, is that the term “voodoo” carries far too much historical/geopolitical weight—immediately indexing Haiti’s and Louisiana’s mystical role in the popular imaginary, as in Hollywood’s “voodoo doll” or “voodoo witchdoctor”—to make it symbolically effective or appropriate in the Brazilian context, where the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé is Brazil’s “Voodoo,” so to speak, and where the cognate vodum can designate, in certain Candomblé temples in Brazil (particularly those of the Jeje nation), a specific pantheon of deities. xiii This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword In the end, then, I found a middle ground in the term “spell.” Indeed, “spell” seems to me to evoke the ambiguous space between Europe and Africa that feitiço does. Feitiço is, like “spell,” a fairy-tale word as much as it is a reference to nonfairy-tale witchcraft and sorcery. That is, in both English and Portuguese, the term “spell”/feitiço is as appropriate in the context of Snow White/Branca de Neve as it is in the context of African and Afro-Diasporic religions (children in the United States are indoctrinated early on to fear “voodoo spells,” for instance; though I recognize that here, too, we need “voodoo” to modify “spell” for us to see it as necessarily African derived). And although “spell” seems to lack the materiality so central to feitiço in the Afro-Brazilian context, it only takes remembering the “eye of newt and toe of frog” from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for example, to be reminded of a spell’s potential materiality. Finally, if we note that Noel Rosa used feitiço in his song lyric as a metaphor for samba, and if we remember that a spell must be cast—in other words, it is necessarily both a verbal and a corporeal act—it seems hardly a stretch to suggest that samba (which is above all else a song-dance expression) could be reimagined as a spell indeed. All of this is simply a glimpse into what I intended to do with my translation of the whole book, Feitiço decente. I will not take you, dear reader, through my translation process in each instance; that would be intolerable for us both. But I will take a moment to review a few general issues. While I tried my very best to translate the poetry of Sandroni’s prose into English without deforming the flow or the feeling, I did not do the same with the song lyrics he cites. And except perhaps for the song titles and for a verse here or there, I prioritized clarity and meaning above all else. While I recognize that this is a transgression against the original composers, to whom, as Vladimir Nabokov notes, “it comes as a shock to discover that a work of art can present itself to the would-be translator as split into form and content,”17 it is a pragmatic choice designed to serve Sandroni’s interpretations and arguments. I felt that trying to cook up translations that could fit into the original rhyme schemes, for instance, would too easily risk obfuscating meanings, thus inhibiting the reader’s understanding of Sandroni’s analysis. However, I included the original titles and song lyrics in Portuguese together with the English as part of the text so that readers somewhat familiar with Portuguese (or another Romance language) could stop to appreciate the songs’ poetry (or check my translations) whenever they felt so inclined. As for citations, I treated them a bit more literally than in my approach to Sandroni’s own words, and I was much more deliberate in translating in accordance with the sociohistorical contexts in which they were originally written. This differed a bit from my approach to Sandroni’s writing, which was updated in a few minor spots in order to avoid the risk of the prose feeling dated. (It is surprising how much can change in twenty years!) As for citations of works that exist in translation, whenever possible I cited the published English-language versions xiv This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword of sources. Although I did not necessarily agree with all of the decisions made by the translators of these published works—and in a few cases, duly observed with notes, I went ahead and altered a word or two in their translations to render them more accurate—I nevertheless went with this approach because it allows readers easier access to material already available in English, should they wish to confer or conduct further research. While A Respectable Spell is not necessarily designed to read like an “overt” translation (to use Juliane House’s terminology), there is also nothing “covert” about the text.18 In other words, evident from the profusion of translator’s notes alone, this translation does not seek to fool the reader into thinking it was originally written in English. And this is further reinforced by the repeated appearance of words in Portuguese. For cases in which the Portuguese-language terms are not explained by Sandroni within the text itself, utilitarian definitions or short explications are offered between parentheses or in the notes. There is also a glossary at the book’s end that will hopefully clear up any confusion the reader might still have along the way. Now, when translators leave words or phrases in the “source language” (untranslated), they are always making an implicit statement of some sort. And while I will not go into any detail here about the politics of language, suffice it to say that the words I left in Portuguese were ones I felt would be meaningless in translation (what some might call “untranslatable”), were so specific to the Brazilian context that they should indeed be left in Portuguese, or were repeated so many times that they seemed worthy of becoming part of the reader’s vocabulary. Finally, it is worth mentioning my fidelity to Sandroni’s use of names throughout the text. He refers to many people by their first names, nicknames, and other terms of endearment: Noel, Mário, Ismael, Tia Ciata, Cartola, Caetano, among many others. My translation maintains the designations employed by Sandroni. And while some readers of English, accustomed to seeing only full names or surnames in scholarly texts, may be surprised by what appears to be an informal treatment of historical figures, I see it as Brazilian convention. For instance, there is nothing odd about seeing former president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva referred to as “Lula”; in fact, it would be odd to see him referred to as “da Silva.” Sandroni’s use of intimate names is part of bringing readers into a world in which the name “Cartola,” for example, means far more than would “Oliveira,” the sambista’s legal surname. As such, this translation tries to transmit some of the evocative power of the names readers will encounter in the text. The Dialogic Process of Assembling A Respectable Spell My name alone is listed as translator of A Respectable Spell. This means I take full responsibility for any of the translation’s successes and failures. And not without good reason: I spent a tremendous amount of time researching, even more time xv This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword thinking, and I was the one who typed up the manuscript. To take the credit/ responsibility for the translation, however, is not to suggest that it is mine alone; I received help here and there from the internet, colleagues, and my wife (not to mention a reviewer and the copy editor).19 My most important interlocutor, however, was someone who was fully invested in my getting it right: Carlos Sandroni. He was my main collaborator and an integral part of the translation even before it began. What this means is that A Respectable Spell is a decidedly dialogic translation, the product of Sandroni’s and my joint efforts to render his rhetoric—and consequently his ideas, analyses, and eloquence—meaningful and expressive in what is almost entirely my English. In other words, our collaboration was not limited to me bringing him questions about his text. (Which is, incidentally, a common practice among translators when translating works written by living authors.) Indeed, our dialogue was not a question-and-answer session but rather a series of in-depth conversations that lasted months. What’s more, we painstakingly went through the translated text line by line (including “my” translator’s notes), discussing words I chose, removing or changing terms, adding phrases and explanations, correcting errors, and so forth. While this approach could be a burden to some—the translator is giving up autonomy and the author is doing “extra” work—it seemed entirely routine to us both. It was akin to so much of the collaborative ethnomusicology we had both done throughout our careers, particularly in the Brazilian context. For this reason, it seems to me hardly coincidental that our dialogic approach to this translation was quite in step with what Angela Lühning has noted as the distinctively “participatory” nature of much of Brazil’s ethnomusicology,20 an ethnomusicology characterized by—in the words of Lühning, Carvalho, Diniz, and Lopes—“the steady replacement of participant observation with dialogic, shared, and collaborative processes.”21 And despite being a historical study, Feitiço decente/A Respectable Spell offers a glimpse of this Brazilian approach to ethnomusicology—a discipline whose solidification in Brazil over the past two decades is in fact deeply indebted to Sandroni (as I’ll discuss to follow)—in the horizontal way it treats the differing perspectives of positionally distinct cultural agents. More than just resonating with Brazilian ethnomusicology, however, our dialogic approach to translation overlaps with some of the more recent attempts to decolonize research methodologies generally. For instance, if we substitute the word “translator” for “ethnographer” in the following outline for a decolonial ethnography, we get a general sense of what a “decolonial translation” might mean: “anti-objectivist—or, in another sense, anti-objectificationist—in that it asks ethnographers [translators] to regard their study populations [that is, authors and their words] not as objects, but as fully equal subjects capable of becoming their own ethnographers [translators].”22 But what’s the point in finding a de- xvi This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword colonial method to translating if we are still translating into English, a language that has been the hegemonic language of the social and hard sciences par excellence for the better part of a century (especially in more recent decades)?23 First off, it is worth recognizing that English is, as Lawrence Venuti notes, “the most translated [language] . . . worldwide, but one of the least translated into.” 24 As such, there is arguably something decolonial about translating into English, as it fights the common current of knowledge imposition. At the same time, however, if we were to translate everything into English, we would do little more than feed the hegemonic notion that English is (and should continue to be) the academic “lingua franca.” The decolonial quandary seems obvious. Nevertheless, if we want to give peripheralized and excluded voices a chance to be heard/read in what is still the most widely spoken second language in the world, translating into English might be a necessary evil or, as Sherry Simon puts it, “a practical necessity.”25 Ultimately, it is precisely the accessibility of English that leads Spivak to insist that women who write in Arabic or Vietnamese “must be made to speak English.”26 Thus even if these “foreign” ideas, epistemologies, approaches, perspectives, histories, and terminologies can be made available outside of their original language only by making them speak in a different language (an inevitable “distortion,” in the most literal sense), this process nevertheless allows them—albeit in altered form—to reach another (presumably larger) audience. With this in mind, translation can always potentially be a tool in decoloniality—that is, a tool in helping to undo the “logical structure of colonial domination.”27 While this may seem to place an excessive amount of power in the hands of the translator, translators have always wielded such power. Although they may sometimes be conceived as neutral vessels that ferry the author’s voice from one linguistic shore to another, Bassnett and Trivedi rightly remind us that “translation is not an innocent, transparent activity.”28 In fact, the agency of translators is ever present; they use their own words to present the ideas and narrative style of the author, which is always an effective silencing of the author as a speaking subject. This is precisely why Rolando Vázquez, in discussing a broader “epistemic translation” that nevertheless includes language, describes translation as a process of erasure, “an exercise of . . . appropriation, incorporation.”29 And whether we choose to call it “appropriation” or not, this is indeed what is expected of translators; good ones, in other words, are expected to assimilate the author’s words in order to make them intelligible to a different community of readers. Translations could thus be said to be little more than elaborate paraphrases. Put otherwise, translators imperceptibly interject themselves in between readers and authors, thus dispossessing the latter of their voice; translated authors can only be heard through the voice of their translator(s). xvii This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword Ideally, then, my/our dialogic approach to this translation—facilitated by Sandroni’s command of the English language and the close relationship we already had—has helped assuage some of the dangers of allowing my voice to overpower his. Nevertheless, the end result of this translation should look no different from any other “good” translation. (Incidentally, many translations we read are far more dialogic than we could ever tell.) All of this is therefore much less about the end result than about the process of getting there. And the extensive explanation I am offering here is simply an effort to bring the reader into the spirit of the text—both the one we created and the one that was translated—in which authority belongs not to a single person’s voice alone but rather to the dialogue that emerges from the multiplicity of voices. Indeed, for dialogic translations, “official” translators relinquish total control; the translation is never entirely theirs. As for the nuts and bolts: I began the translation process by doing research (mainly consulting written sources) and going through several analyses and interpretations of Feitiço decente prior to giving my questions to Sandroni. His answers sometimes moved me to rethink my translations of whole sections of the book; at other times his answers made it necessary for me to consult secondary sources, and all of this often resulted in additional questions. After the first few rounds of questions, we got into the nitty-gritty of the translation itself. As we fine-tuned the translation, a constant question was, Will this work in English? Indeed, we shared the common goal of effectively communicating Sandroni’s quite Brazilian prose (filled with idiomatic expressions and local cultural/musical references), though we each exercised different roles. I was the first and last “barrier”; I was the one who put together the first complete draft of the translation; and I, the native English speaker, was also the final judge of the effectiveness of a term or sentence. Sandroni, by contrast, was the main consultant and font of information, as well as the ideal editor. We went back and forth, sometimes revisiting the same line—even the same term—multiple times until we could get it as close as possible to just right. I lost count of how many e-mail, WhatsApp, and phone exchanges we had over the course of translating the book. It was a dynamic and vibrant dialogue; it was, I think, a true collaboration. The dialogue was not unidirectional, however. In other words, it was not just Sandroni participating in my translation of his book; I was also involved in the evolution of this book as it now appears (in translation). My questions sometimes moved him to adjust a phrase. And I also suggested alterations that he always entertained whether or not he decided to accept or reject them in the end. This means that A Respectable Spell is not just an English-language version of Feitiço decente that has been retooled by us to ensure that it resonates effectively with an English-reading audience. It is also a newer version—the newest, in fact (for now, at least)—of Feitiço decente, whose limits have now been expanded and pulled xviii This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword in new directions. With this translation, then, Feitiço decente “attains,” as Walter Benjamin put it, “its latest, continually renewed, and most complete unfolding.”30 A Respectable Spell is simultaneously a new and an old book. It is a previously published book that, by passing through this dialogic translation process, becomes a new publication altogether. Indeed, our dialogue has resulted in another version—a variation—of the original, existing as its own isolatable “original” but never truly isolated from the original. In this way, the translation becomes an extension of the old work while at the same time being new (but also neither!); we might thus think of it as a “becoming-(its own) book,” in a Deleuzean/Guattarian sense, constituting “a zone of proximity and indiscernibility, a no-man’s-land, a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other.”31 It is novel in its form, content, rhetoric, and process of construction while still never being entirely distinct from the original. An Evolving Dialogue: Contextualizing Carlos Sandroni’s Work The dialogic process that produced this translation did not begin with it in mind. Rather, this text is part of a much larger dialogue on samba and ethnomusicology that Carlos Sandroni and I have been engaged in for well over a decade. My first ever interaction with him took place by e-mail in 2007, and it was indeed a dialogue about samba. In that instance, however, the topic was not the Carioca samba that is at the heart of A Respectable Spell; instead, it was the Bahian samba de roda that had, in 2005, been proclaimed a UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity thanks to the dossier Sandroni had organized for Brazil’s Ministry of Culture. When I cold e-mailed him in 2007, he was quick to respond. At the time, I was a young student just beginning to take graduate courses in ethnomusicology at the Universidade Federal da Bahia and was, moreover, a complete stranger to him. Consequently, I remember being surprised and grateful that he took the time to respond to me. After all, Sandroni was already one of the leading voices in Brazilian ethnomusicology. And this renown was in no small part thanks to the book that is translated in the pages ahead. Feitiço decente had been published six years earlier (in 2001), making waves right off the bat. The book was celebrated first and foremost as a scholarly milestone in samba and Brazilian popular music research. We can see this enthusiastic reception, for instance, in popular music historian Marcos Napolitano’s 2002 book review: “Sandroni’s work is obligatory not only for those who study samba from the first three decades of the twentieth century, but also for all popular music scholars.”32 The work was, moreover, viewed as a watershed publication for Brazilian ethnomusicology. In 2003 it was one of the three books33 singled xix This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword out by the late Brazilian ethnomusicologist Elizabeth Travassos, a luminary and pioneer in her own right, as exemplary of one of the “directions of Brazilian ethnomusicology . . . attest[ing] to the growth of the discipline in Brazil.”34 But the book reverberated outside of Brazil, too, as Uruguayan music scholar Ernesto Donas makes clear in his laudatory 2006 review: “In all, Feitiço decente impels Brazilian (and I venture to say Latin American) ethnomusicology from its merely descriptive stage to a more analytic phase.”35 Yet by the time I first corresponded with Sandroni in 2007, his reputation within the ethnomusicology community was not based solely on this important book. Indeed, he had already racked up quite a few accomplishments. After defending his PhD dissertation in musicology at the Université de Tours in 1997, Sandroni returned from Paris to take a visiting position—which later became the permanent position he still holds today—in the Department of Music of the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE), located in Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco. Although Sandroni was certainly not the first Brazilian to get a PhD and teach ethnomusicology courses in Brazil,36 he has been a steadfast advocate for Brazilian ethnomusicology, even serving as the first president (2001–2004) of Brazil’s main professional ethnomusicology organization, the Associação Brasileira de Etnomusicologia. Over the next few years, in addition to his institutional work at the national level, he played a crucial role in helping to create the graduate program in music at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba (in the nearby city of João Pessoa). Suffice it to say, he was—and continues to be—a leading figure in shaping Brazilian ethnomusicology (as a named, institutionalized, and national discipline) from its earliest stages. But more was to come. Not long after arriving in Recife, Sandroni began work on what would be his next big ethnomusicological splash: a restudy of a seminal fieldwork project by famed proto-ethnomusicologist Mário de Andrade (1893–1945). In 1938 Andrade, then head of São Paulo’s Department of Culture, created the Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas (that is, the Folk Research Mission), sending a group of researchers to document—via sound recordings, film, and photography—musical traditions in the states of Pernambuco, Paraíba, Maranhão, and Pará. Sandroni decided to return to several of the cities originally visited by the Missão and seek out the original performers or their descendants, sharing with them the Missão’s recordings and also making new recordings,37 which were released in 2004 as a two-CD set (with detailed liner notes) titled Responde a roda outra vez: Música tradicional de Pernambuco e da Paraíba no trajeto da Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas de 1938.38 It was an exciting and well-conceived (and well-received) project, resulting in a beautiful collection of field recordings. What’s more, it seemed to offer a clear lesson in thinking beyond the ivory tower (something not uncommon in Sandroni’s work generally) not only in the deliberate attempt to repatriate xx This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword the Missão’s recordings but also in the idea of producing a CD rather than, say, an academic book. Finally, if we consider this CD project as having been ethnomusicological (as I believe most, including Sandroni, feel is the case), it appears to make a clear—albeit implicit—statement about the important place of Mário de Andrade in the history of Brazilian ethnomusicology, despite the fact that he died before the term “ethnomusicology” came into existence. We also find in Responde a roda outra vez, when viewed within the context of Sandroni’s oeuvre, the continuation of a career-long exploration of the multifaceted legacy of Mário de Andrade. In A Respectable Spell, for instance, readers will note the ease with which Sandroni navigates Andrade’s voluminous writings on music and Brazilian culture, mining them for hidden gems and unexpected inspiration, demonstrating an enviable familiarity with the modernist writer’s work (though this is not to say Sandroni is not equally familiar with the work of many of the other authors he cites; Andrade just casts a much longer shadow). But his interest in Andrade predates Feitiço decente; Sandroni’s first book, in fact, which was published in 1988, was also a study of Mário de Andrade’s life/work. In Mário contra Macunaíma (Mário against Macunaíma),39 a revised version of his master’s thesis in political science, Sandroni focuses on the political side of Andrade (who, it is worth repeating, ran São Paulo’s Department of Culture from 1935 to 1937). In some ways, then, we might even interpret Sandroni’s own more “activist” work as following in Andrade’s heavy footsteps. In 2000 Sandroni founded the Associação Respeita Januário, a nonprofit organization that still today supports local musicians and traditional music of northeastern Brazil through various research projects and activities. Thus, Sandroni’s involvement with intangible cultural heritage clearly began well before heading the project that led to UNESCO’s 2005 decision to inscribe samba de roda on its III Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. I have just presented all of this information not only to give readers a sense of Sandroni’s incredible versatility and experience. The biographical sketch was also designed to substantiate the fact that by 2007, when I first contacted Carlos Sandroni, he was a well-established samba scholar and professor of ethnomusicology, and also one of the most prominent and respected voices on intangible heritage in Brazil. (He has since embarked on countless other important projects, with a continued devotion to strengthening Brazilian ethnomusicology through his work, publications, vision, and teaching.) Two years later, Sandroni and I met in person, again to talk about samba de roda. And a few years after that, we conducted a two-day fieldwork trip together in Bahia. Consequently, what started out as a cordial dialogue between a young student and a welcoming senior scholar developed into a far more robust dialogue focused no longer only on samba, but also on ethnomusicology, research, writing, language, and life experiences. xxi This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword In terms of a working relationship regarding Carioca samba, however, our dialogue began in earnest when I moved to Recife in 2013. By chance, my wife decided to get her master’s degree in the theory of literature at UFPE, the university at which Sandroni had begun teaching a decade and a half earlier. When my wife and I first arrived in town, Sandroni, showing his usual generosity, not only took a night to show us around Recife but also put me in touch with UFPE faculty members in music and anthropology and people connected with his nonprofit. In the meantime, he also asked me to revise something he had written in English, and then later to translate a couple of short sambista biographies, which led to other larger projects. I was of course quite familiar with his work and had a sense of him as a person, but this was the first time I had really begun thinking of the sound of Sandroni’s scholarly voice. His scholarly writing is not a far cry from how he comports himself: poetic but clear, erudite without being pedantic, deliberate but not tedious, confident without the customary arrogance, deeply knowledgeable but unafraid not to know something. Here is the point of this slightly autobiographical tangent: the dialogic translation we employed in A Respectable Spell was only possible because of our prior dialogues, as they facilitated our communication and ability to interact in a rigorous, honest, and unhesitant way. Furthermore, after so many years of different types of dialogue, I have gradually developed a sense of what Sandroni’s academic voice might sound like in English. And it’s different, I think, from Sandroni’s actual voice in English, a language in which he expresses himself well. (He has lived in the United States for short periods, having spent semesters teaching at Indiana University and the University of Texas, Austin.) So, when I was contacted by the University of Illinois Press, at his request, to translate Feitiço decente, I felt quite ready to take on the challenge. And this was especially the case as I knew that Sandroni would help ensure that my translation—my “intimate” reading—would be as close to accurate as possible. A Final Thought on Translation and Its Decolonial Spark I hope you are ready, dear reader, to be submerged into roughly 150 years of Brazilian popular music history. As you turn the book’s pages, you will learn about lundu, modinha, maxixe, and countless other musical genres. And soon enough, you will find yourself before the book’s central focus: the samba(s) practiced in Rio’s private homes, public festivities, and recording studios. Along the way, you will learn about people—performers, composers, journalists, matriarchs, poets, scholars—and the social contexts in which they lived and exercised their roles. xxii This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword Moreover, although the Brazilian context is always the focus, there are nevertheless more abstract “theoretical” lessons we might extract: sounds (and rhythms in particular) can be coded racially and ideologically; words can aggregate and shed meanings depending on social and historical context; and methodological eclecticism can produce tremendous fruits. A Respectable Spell offers a glimpse of an approach to music, ethnomusicology, and Brazilian culture that is difficult to find in English. Here I do not just mean Sandroni’s approach. I am also alluding to the approaches of towering figures like Mário de Andrade, Oneyda Alvarenga, and Edison Carneiro (among many others), from whom we have only to gain by moving their tremendous contributions from the academic periphery (in Brazil) to the academic center (in the English-reading world), even if we only get their ideas in fragments via Sandroni’s citations or interpretations. In this way, A Respectable Spell gives those who are unfamiliar with Brazilian music scholarship a point of entry, so to speak, from which to begin exploring its rich history, including a possibility for some engagement with Brazilian ethnomusicology (though doing so will require continued efforts from publishers like the University of Illinois Press).40 After all, although scholars from Brazil (and the Global South generally) tend to keep up with the scholarship coming from the United States and Europe, the inverse is rarely true. But of course, this has nothing to do with the quality or relevance of the scholarship produced in the Global South, in these cosmopolitan peripheries. Rather, it is yet another consequence of coloniality and the hierarchical position of the United States and Europe (and the resulting linguistic, cultural, epistemological, and racial superiority complex). A Respectable Spell also gives us a chance to “hear”—albeit in the “wrong” language—some of the thoughts and perspectives of those who are most marginalized within Brazil itself (for the South American nation, like everywhere in the Western Hemisphere, suffers from its own internal coloniality). Of particular importance in this regard are the voices of sambistas, nearly all of African descent, whose ideas and perspectives are meticulously sought out by Sandroni; the author ends up finding them primarily in published interviews, song lyrics, and musical recordings. More importantly, he takes seriously what these cultural agents say, not merely exposing their perspectives and analyses but giving their subjectivities weight, validity, and authority, generally following their lead in what is perhaps a decolonial approach to understanding a foundational historical moment in Carioca samba (and in Brazil generally). Herein lies a broader lesson concerning the need to invest our time and our money into translating works such as this. I am referring not to the patent importance of Feitiço decente itself but rather to its decolonial spark. That is, dormant in this or any translation of a work from the Global South is a more profound xxiii This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword decolonial potential, for it makes ideas, perspectives, and knowledge from the geopolitical peripheries available in the geopolitical center. Translations, as I see them, help peripheralized works penetrate the linguistic bubble from which the center exerts its power. In the most effective cases, then, translation would harbor the potential to ignite a decolonial fire. Thus, like samba in the first decades of the twentieth century, the value of translating a work from the Global South may primarily be in constructing a vehicle that helps the marginalized and oppressed receive some sort of acknowledgment from those in power. With any luck, then, our feitiço—the English-language “spell” that Sandroni and I have assembled here—will not only take hold of readers and carry them through the formative period of Brazilian popular music and the development of a “national” samba. Hopefully, it will also serve as an enchanted reminder of the brilliance, ingenuity, and agency that are relegated to the margins by the noxious spell of coloniality. Notes 1. Jiří Levý, “Translation as a Decision Process,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000), 148. In the original, the phrase is written in all caps. I have chosen to reproduce it here without such emphasis, as the formatting decision would appear out of place and be unnecessarily confusing. 2. Antônio Houaiss and Mauro de Salles Villar, Minidicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa (Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2003), 145. 3. Houaiss and Villar, Minidicionário, 238. 4. William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9, no. 1 (1985), 5; Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13, no. 1 (1987), 40. The term “fetishism,” for its part, appears to come from the French fétichisme, coined by Charles de Brosses in 1757 “by way of contrast to the term ‘polytheism.’” 5. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 185. 6. Pietz, “Problem of the Fetish, II,” 36. 7. Pietz, “Problem of the Fetish, II,” 40. 8. Pietz, “Problem of the Fetish, I,” 7. 9. Pietz, “Problem of the Fetish, I,” 5. 10. J. Lorand Matory, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 11. Matory, The Fetish Revisited, xiii. 12. Matory, The Fetish Revisited, xii–xiii. 13. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 183. 14. Ernesto Donas, review of “Feitiço decente: Transformações do samba no Rio de Janeiro (1917–1933) [Decent Enchantment: Transformations of Samba in Rio de Janeiro (1917–1933)] by Carlos Sandroni,” The World of Music 48, no. 1 (2006), 139. xxiv This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword 15. Pietz, “Problem of the Fetish, II,” 24. 16. Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 119; Cheré Dastugue Coen and Jude Bradley, Magic’s in the Bag: Creating Spellbinding Gris Gris Bags & Sachets (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2010), 7. 17. Vladimir Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: ‘Onegin’ in English,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000), 77. 18. Juliane House, “Overt and Covert Translation,” in Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 1, ed. Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, 245–246 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2010). 19. Without the input of my wife, Fabiana Campos, this would be a far poorer translation. She was an important interlocutor from the beginning to the end, and was especially essential to helping me pull apart the more idiomatic and complex phrases. I also want to thank Marc Hertzman, whose comments after a meticulous reading of the manuscript made the translation immeasurably better. I am moreover grateful to Jennie Gubner, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Francesca Negro, and Dan Sharp, whose help with particular words/phrases was crucial. Finally, Carlos Sandroni gave me access to three chapters of Feitiço decente that had been translated years ago by Susanna Sharpe; her work was a helpful resource for me as I mulled over translation decisions. 20. Angela Lühning, “Brazilian Ethnomusicology as Participatory Ethnomusicology: Anxieties Regarding Brazilian Musics,” in A Latin American Music Reader: Views from the South, ed. Javier F. León and Helena Simonett, 379–392 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016); “Temas emergentes da etnomusicologia brasileira e seus compromissos sociais,” Música em perspectiva 7, no. 2 (2014), 18–21. 21. Angela Lühning, Tiago Carvalho, Flávia Diniz, and Aaron Lopes, “Ethnomusicological Goals and Challenges in Brazil,” The World of Music 5, no. 1 (2016), 40. 22. Carolina Alonso Bejarano, Lucia López Juárez, Mirian A. Mijangos García, and Daniel M. Goldstein, Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 8. 23. Renato Ortiz, La supremacía del Inglés: En las ciencias sociales (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2009), 95–140. 24. Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998), 10; on the north-south relationship of translation, see also Richard Jacquemond, “Translation and Cultural Hegemony: The Case of French-Arabic Translation,” in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 1992), 139–140. 25. Sherry Simon, “Translation, Postcolonialism and Cultural Studies,” Meta 42, no. 2 (1997), 468. 26. Spivak, “Politics of Translation,” 182. 27. Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 7. 28. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, “Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals, and Vernaculars,” in Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London: Routledge, 1999), 2. 29. Rolando Vázquez, “Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Vio- xxv This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Translator’s Foreword lence,” Journal of Historical Sociology 24, no. 1 (2011), 32; see also Mignolo, Idea of Latin America, 144. 30. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 255. 31. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 293. 32. Marcos Napolitano, “Feitiço decente,” História: Questões & debates 36 (2002), 332. 33. The other two works mentioned by Travassos were Glaura Lucas’s Os sons do Rosário: O congado mineiro dos Arturos e Jatobá (Minas Gerais: Editora da UFMG, 2002) and Suzel Reily’s Voices of the Magi: Enchanted Journeys in Southeast Brazil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 34. Elizabeth Travassos, “Esboço de balanço da etnomusicologia no Brasil,” Opus 9 (2003), 76. 35. Donas, review of “Feitiço decente,” 139. 36. See the list of ethnomusicologists, including the dates they obtained their PhDs and when they began teaching in Brazil, in Lühning, Carvalho, Diniz, and Lopes, “Ethnomusicological Goals and Challenges,” 32–33. 37. Carlos Sandroni, “O acervo da Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas, 1938–2012,” Debates 12 (2014), 55–62. 38. Responde a roda outra vez: Música tradicional de Pernambuco e da Paraíba no trajeto da Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas de 1938. Audio collection edited by Carlos Sandroni, Maria Ignez Ayala, and Marcos Ayala. Recife and João Pessoa: Associação Respeita Januário/Coletivo Meio do Mundo, 2004, compact disc. The translated title is The Ring Responds Again: Traditional Music of Pernambuco and Paraíba along the Path of the Folk Research Mission. 39. Carlos Sandroni, Mário contra Macunaíma (São Paulo: Vértice, 1988). 40. The University of Illinois Press is also responsible for the important essay collection A Latin American Music Reader: Views from the South, edited by Javier F. León and Helena Simonett (2016). Also worth acknowledging are important efforts such as the Society for Ethnomusicology’s “Ethnomusicology Translations.” xxvi This content downloaded from 204.13.77.4 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 13:52:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms