ABSTRACT
Anthropophagy, understood as cultural cannibalism, is a multifaceted concept that was very popular in the arts, literature, philosophy, ethnology, history and anthropology in Europe from the late nineteenth century and well into the first half of the twentieth century, when it was adopted by Brazilian artists as one of their leitmotifs, leaving a permanent imprint on the discussion of translation in the country in the second half of the twentieth century. Following the premature death of the modernist anthropophagic movement in 1929, Oswald de Andrade revisited anthropophagy in the 1950s, this time from a theoretical perspective, linking it with his ideas of a social utopia. Anthropophagy represents a breach of taboo by simultaneously entailing love and hate towards its object, death and rebirth. It therefore requires to rethink the relationship between original and translation. Anthropophagic translation subverts the traditional hierarchy: the original is not beyond reach, but it is devoured; its survival is bound to a completely different form.
