Found in translation
The summer before Cassie Owens’s senior year of high school, her grandmother took her on a trip to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
“I fell in love with Brazil and the Portuguese language then,” Owens said. Portuguese wasn’t available at her Philadelphia high school, so Owens pounced on an intensive Portuguese language class in her first semester at Brown, and later spent a semester in Rio de Janeiro.
“Living in Rio, I learned a lot about myself as a student, as an American, as an adult, as a black woman, and especially as a speaker of Portuguese,” Owens says. “The experience was, in a word, invaluable.”
During her semester in Brazil, Owens discovered the unique speech and culture of the favelados (slum dwellers) and began to study their literatura periférica, a genre that spans poetry, drama, and journalism. Professor Dore Levy, whose graduate-level seminar on literary translation Owens took as a junior, noted that the semester in Rio “brought her to an amazing level of fluency in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese.
“In addition to various modes of lyric poetry,” Levy says, “Cassie attempted to translate some works of concrete poetry into English. Concrete poetry includes elements of visual as well as linguistic presentation. Even when Cassie’s translations could not perfectly convey the visuality of the original, her analyses of the challenges were of absorbing and inspiring interest to the rest of the class.”
Less than four years after taking her first class in Portuguese, Owens is earning a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature: translation. She won a Fulbright scholarship and will return to Brazil to continue her research on literatura periférica in the slums of Rio, where she plans to study the speech and culture of the favelados and interview writers of the genre “to capture what they see happening, in their own words.
“Language is so much more than spoken and written word,” Owens says. “[It is] the means by which we conceptualize our world. Color, locations, life forms, sentiments – we express or denote them all linguistically. I’m interested in translation because it deals with building bridges across all of these matters.”
Owens knows of no scholarship in English about literatura periférica and just a few examinations in Portuguese of individual texts and writers. The novel City of God (which became an Oscar-nominated film co-directed by Brown alumna Kátia Lund ’89) is the most famous example of the genre.
Owens is engaged by more than just the literature of the Rio slums. Favelas are havens for poverty, she says, that perpetuate social injustice: corrupt policing, substandard schools, poor services and utility infrastructure. Also, “Brazil has a lot more racial issues than it lets on,” she says, noting that it is home to the highest population of blacks outside Africa (the U.S. is second highest). “Being a black woman holds a lot of symbolism in Brazil, just as it does here.”
Translation has taught Owens as much about herself as about favela culture. “I wasn't a proud American before living in Rio; I was a proud African-American,” she says. “I saw that identity as independent of U.S. citizenship. I realized in Brazil that everything I love about my family and culture couldn’t have happened anywhere else but in the United States. As a human and as a scholar, I needed to embrace that which is as American as apple pie – or sweet potato pie – to properly navigate my status in the world and analyze cultural phenomena elsewhere.”
After completing her Fulbright-sponsored research, Owens plans to pursue a Ph.D. in comparative literature. “Cassie will continue her career as a brilliant translator of culture far beyond Brown,” Levy predicts, citing a passage from Owens’s blog, Make It Quick: “The common belief that idiom should be palliated in translation is wrong. They say it’s okay to make language sweet before translating it. I was never much for grinning up. … The trouble is that with idiom, meaning and context don’t always exist independently. When you strip an idiom down in attempts to essentialize its meaning, you gut it. The shine is gone. The vivacity ebbs and the color is drained. Idiom is applied specifically for its tonality.”
“This is a good description of what Cassie herself is like,” Levy says. “She reaches out for life, which is communication; and for her, language and life are essentially one. She reaches out to students and speakers of all languages who breathe with words and make language live and grow.”