Translation and South-South Exchange

Abstract

This essay considers translation as a tool of solidarity, collaboration, and knowledge circulation within the Global South through the case of Angolan intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990). Best known as a poet, critic, and founding member of Angola’s Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), Andrade was also an editor, translator, and cultural theorist whose essays chronicled Lusophone Africa’s literary and political development. His wide-ranging work in Portuguese and French documented oral traditions, theorized Negritude, and insisted on the cultural dimensions of anticolonial struggle. At the same time, his anthologies and translations foregrounded multilingual exchange—circulating texts in Portuguese, French, Kimbundu, and Cape Verdean Kriolu—to resist colonial hierarchies and build communities of recognition among colonized and decolonizing peoples. The essay reflects on the challenges of translating Andrade’s writings for the Critical South series, cotranslating fourteen essays from Portuguese and French into English. Drawing on Andrade’s own translation practices, it highlights strategies for preserving opacity, acknowledging multilingual registers, and capturing the political charge of seemingly minor linguistic choices. Ultimately, the essay argues that translation, when understood as a practice of relation and solidarity, can expand the circulation of Lusophone African thought while modeling the forms of South-South connection that Andrade himself envisioned.