The transitivity of Mbyá-Guarani textualities in Douglas Diegues and Josely Vianna Baptista

Abstract

The study focuses on works that translate and poetically explore “Mbyá-Guarani textualities”: the book Roça Barroca (2012) and the videopoem Nada é Fora do Lugar (2017), by Josely Vianna Baptista and Kosmofonia Mbyá-Guarani, an audiobook by Guillermo Sequera and Douglas Diegues, whose first edition was published in 2006 and a second in 2021. The works present translations into Portuguese of songs from the Mbyá-Guarani culture, mostly from communities in Paraguay. However, the first unfolds into a second part with poems by the author/translator in dialogue with the translated songs and appears again, in part, in the video poem in which overlaps of sounds, languages ​​and images are explored. The audiobook, in addition to critical texts by other scholars and writers on the Mbyá-Guarani culture, presents audios of both translated songs and other fundamental sounds of that culture, such as the flute, children playing in the water, etc. They are works of great complexity and, in this study, they are taken as transitive works. More specifically, it seeks to show how the work from the “Mbyá-Guarani textualities” imposes a certain transitivity, thought of as “ethnopoetry”, as a “transcultural” and “translingual” perspective, but also as the transit between fundamental elements such as poetry and music, orality and writing. In this way, with these works, spaces that previously did not exist for these fundamental but little known “Mbyá-Guarani textualities” and for the neglected ties between Brazil and Paraguay are erupted.