Text of the Federal Constitution will receive a version in indigenous language

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Brazil began to make the first translation of the Constitution into nheengatuthe general language of the Amazon, in a “dividing” initiative of high symbolic and political value, according to the project coordinator and president of the National Library, Marco Lucchesi.

“The Brazilian Constitution is a response to the military dictatorship. It is a long composition and in continuous updating. A passport full of seals and stamps that were necessary to reach the democratic form, in a moment of great tension”, said the Italian-Brazilian scholar, of Tuscan origin.

“For many years it was said that Brazil was a country of only one language. Obviously, an ideological provocation, an attempt to annul enormous wealth: an inheritance of thousands of languages, as is also attested by the work of the anthropologist José Ribamar Freire Bessa, the “Babel River”.

This initiative, Lucchesi points out, marks a “reconquest of languages ​​threatened by the genocide of the last 500 years. “It is a way of turning on the lights of that area that has always been considered dark, non-existent and monoglot. It is the demonstration that it is, instead, a matter of light, of languages, of freedoms, part of the great polyphony of this nation”, he points out.

The project, destined to have new impulses, was born by the will of the president of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) and the National Council of Justice (CNJ), Rosa Weber, during a trip to the Javari Valley, in the Amazon, where they were assassinated last year the indigenista Bruno Pereira and the British journalist Dom Phillips.

On the trip he met members of indigenous peoples such as the Marubo, Kanamari, Korubo and other ethnic groups with more recent contact. And at one point the need to facilitate communication between the two worlds was perceived.

The language chosen for the translation of the Constitution was Nheengatu, “a kind of Amazonian Esperanto, born from the experiences of indigenous populations, and capable of conversing with Portuguese, of which they have several words in common.” An “Italian from the jungle for its sweet sound and vocal richness”, according to Lucchesi. A language that, in the 19th century, fell in love with the Borgota explorer Ermanno Stradelli, who dedicated a precious encyclopedic vocabulary to it.

The presentation of the project, in which 15 translators, a group of linguistic specialists and a 24-hour legal consultation of the CNJ work, is scheduled between August and September, in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the Amazon, where nheengatu is an official language , still widely spoken.

The document will then be kept in the National Library, as a “memory” of the country. And along with this project, others are flourishing. The CNJ, in recent months, has already translated the criminal regulations for custody hearings into 15 languages. Meanwhile, in Mato Grosso, work is underway to translate the Maria da Penha Law into various local languages.

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