The purpose of our work is to render a considerable part of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in Portuguese, so that the Brazilian reader can have an idea of who the great American poet was and what his poems convey. It is also intended to provide some information on his influence on the following generation of writers. In order to do this, we have divided the central part of our research in three chapters: chapter 2, Criticism and Context, contains a short account of the publishing history of the Leaves in the United States and its Brazilian editions. It also presents a critical review of the authors who have helped us to better understand Whitman and the Leaves, as well as a critical analysis of one major symbol in the Leaves, the calamus, or sweet-flag. In chapter 3, Re-creating Leaves of Grass Into Portuguese; we describe our method of creative translation, which can also be referred to as re-creation, or poetic re-recreation, which is different from literal translation. This chapter also presents our mentors in this type of translation, a discussion on the poetic aspects of Whitman’s verse, some authors who are literarily connected to Whitman and some examples of poetic re-creation. Chapter 4 contains the poems and books which we have been re-creating since 2006. In chapter 5, the conclusion, we shall analyze the result of our work and assess if it has been fruitful. We will give now more details of this research, of Whitman, of Leaves of Grass and creative translation.
As we will find in chapter 2, which we believe will help the reader to understand the whole matter, Leaves of Grass comprises the complete poetic works of Walt Whitman. The first edition was published by the poet in 1855 with only the title and a picture of Whitman on its cover. The 1855 edition contained the famous Preface plus twelve poems, which had no titles either. Whitman’s name appeared only in the middle of the poem that is known now as “Song of Myself,” in the passage that later became section 24 (there were no subdivisions either in the first edition), in a verse that read: “Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, a kosmos,” as we can see in a Brazilian edition of the 1855 edition by Iluminuras publishing house (WHITMAN, 2005, p.76). After a few changes over the years, Whitman finally arrived at the current and more poetic version of this line in 1881: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” (WHITMAN, 2002, P.45). In subsequent editions, the poet gave titles to all the poems, and inscribed his name on the cover. The fact is that every new book or cluster of poems that he wrote, he added them to the already published book, keeping the same general title. Whitman did that from the 1856 second edition until the 1891-2 last or final edition, which is called the “authorized” or “deathbed” edition, and which is the one that is used as the source of our creative translations.
Apart from the absence of the author’s name on the cover and of poem titles, the most striking literary fact[1] after the release of the first edition was that, among many people whom Whitman sent copies of his book, Emerson was the only one who personally answered him in writing, that is, by sending the poet the a letter that became famous in the History of American Literature, in which the poet-philosopher acknowledged Whitman’s poetic genius. Emerson, who was a great influence on Whitman, and would remain a friend for life, gave Whitman this “safe-conduct” into the literary world. Later, in section 2.5.6 there will be more information on the connection between these two poets and how some Emersonian ideas on poetry and poets are assimilated into Leaves of Grass, especially Emerson’s concept of “Language as fossil poetry” and the poet as “namer”, which is linked to Whitman’s role as American Adam in his book “Children of Adam”. In the same section we will discuss how Whitman’s poetry relates to William Blake’s at the spiritual level, and what there is of vision and prophecy in their writings. In section 3.4, when we discuss the catalogues, those long lists of people, professions, cities, countries and geographical locations, we will also refer to religiousness, since the Bible is one of the sources of this type of writing.
Also included in chapter 2, is a review of the criticism that has been of importance to us in researching the Leaves and the poet. Authors such as Ezra Pound, Harold Bloom, Gay Wilson Allen, Henry S. Canby, Ed Folsom, D. H. Lawrence and Fernando Alegría have been tremendously helpful in broadening our view of Whitman. These and many others are featured in section 2.4, with emphasis on their specific contribution to our inquiry. Then there is section 2.5, which examines the meaning and possible mythical origin of the use of the calamus, reed or sweet-flag as a major symbol of manly attachment in the Leaves, particularly in the “Calamus” cluster, in which it acquires a political meaning, representing comradeship, union (Calamus was a Greek mythological figure), and even nationality, which is an aspect that Whitman shares with the Romantics. By the way, whenever we find appropriate, we will point out what Whitman has in common with the Romantics and what aspects of Romanticism he rejected or surpassed. As a result of this approach to this literary movement, there will not be a specific section to discuss Romanticism in our dissertation. Moreover, we will examine other meanings and uses of the calamus or reed, such as musical instrument, a pen, a pipe and even as spice.
Chapter 3 is dedicated to our translatorial method, a study of poetic elements, such as rhythm and meter, and an examination of Whitman’s verse. Our method of creative translation is defined at the beginning, in section 3.2, where we summarize the set of ideas that has guided us in our task. In short, we might describe our method as the reconstruction or re-configuring of the original text in the target language in a way that both the meaning and its poetic elements and linguistic properties are maintained, as well as its atmosphere and diction. Naturally, our presentation in chapter 3 is more extensive and detailed, and it shows how we have put this concept of translation together. There we also mention and quote our mentors in this field of activity, what we have learned from them and how we use this knowledge in our work. As we can not cite all the translators who helped us in some way, we have decided to include in our research only the most immediately representative, to us, of what might be called today a Brazilian translation school. Although critics might complain that we have neglected many important scholars in this area, such as Paulo Rónai or Lawrence Flores Pereira, we have decided to narrow a little our focus for theoretical reasons. It does not mean that we are not aware of their work, especially Professor Pereira’s, whose translations of T. S. Eliot’s poems (2005), Antigone (2006) and Hamlet (2007) are outstanding and have been a model to us. However, our choice of authors forces us to keep our attention on them.
Thus, the poet translators whose concepts we have followed most closely here are Haroldo and Augusto de Campos (whom we have to refer to by their first names to avoid misunderstandings), plus Décio Pignatari, who, along with the Campos brothers, started the Concrete Poetry movement in the 1950’s and renewed our poetry from then to the present. Ezra Pound, as their chief influence, is definitely part of the history of literary translation, or more specifically poetic translation, in the Western world and must be on any one’s curriculum. We also mention Odorico Mendes, who was revived by the Concrete poets, since the Concrete poets were following Pound’s path of searching for the living parts of the culture in order to integrate them into the current literary movement. Actually, there are other translators who appear in our work, in sections 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9, in which we compare our re-creation of passages from Leaves of Grass and the works of other poets to their translations. In this case, we do not discuss their theoretical view on translation, only their practical results. In this sense, it is not appropriate to relate them to the Concrete poet-translators’ concepts and activities, particularly for the reason that the Concrete poets depart from a different idea of translation. As suggested by Pound, we have just compared results to verify what works best.
As for the poetic elements and Whitman’s verse, we refer in section 3.3 to what we have learned from Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Pound, especially about directness in language and poetic and linguistic correlations that exist between words in a text. When we deal specifically with verse, and in particular with Whitman’s verse, we study parallelism, enumeration, catalogues and meter and the differences between their expression in English and Portuguese due to the intrinsic linguistic properties of each language (section 3.4). In section 3.5, we compare Whitman’s career and production as a man of letters to Oswald de Andrade’s career, which includes his political activity as de Andrade is one of our most combative writers. This is due to our view of Whitman as an author whose attitude and writings are closer to the kind of attitude towards nature, society and industrialization presented by Modernist poets than to most American and Brazilian poets of the nineteenth century. For this reason, we have included in this part of our research the contribution of Fernando Pessoa, speaking as his heteronym Álvaro de Campos, to the spread of Whitman’s reputation as a poet who has inspired many other poets and writers in many different countries. Later in this chapter we shall dedicate some words to some of these poets, as a homage we pay to them. Still in section 3.5, we bring the word of Gilberto Freyre and Aléxis de Tocqueville to help us furnish a portrait of the social and political situation in the United States during the years around the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, mainly from 1849 until the end of the American Civil War. This situation was important because it prompted a major shift in Whitman’s life and career, since he resigned politics in 1849, after many years of involvement in political parties, to dedicate his efforts to creating his poetic works.
After that, in section 3.6, we discuss Longfellow’s poetry, which is placed here as a counterpoint to Whitman’s, that is, as a voice that occurred simultaneously, but was independent in form and rhythm. Specifically, Longfellow represented traditional poetry, writing in poetic forms that had been used for centuries, while Whitman was the poet of current times, creating a type of poetry that mirrored the modern time in which he lived. Longfellow was also the most popular poet of that time; he was respected by Whitman and even visited the poet in Camden in 1879, a fact that was remembered with pride by Whitman, who was known for his cultivation of many devoted friends.
We have been reading, studying and translating Leaves of Grass for around twenty years now. During this time, we have been not only studying and translating poetry, but also developing a system of translation as well. Our translatorial method, which we describe in chapter 3, has been applied to various poetic works. Thus, we have improved our translating skills and have practiced them on texts which can be defined as difficult, that is, attractive to a translator, as we state in section 3.2. So, before tackling Whitman’s songs, we spent some time learning how to re-create poetry. Samples of this work are shown in sections 3.7, in which there are examples of re-creations from Leaves of Grass, which are compared to other translations published in Brazil; in section 3.8, we offer the reader instances of creative translations of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and James Joyce’s and Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and in 3.9 there are more passages from Leaves of Grass. All these renderings are followed by comments or explanations on technical details or choice of words performed by us.
In chapter 4, we will find the result of our efforts: the poems, re-created in our tongue according to our idea of re-construction of content and form, of re-building the poetic elements that are the structure that carry the meanings. After we accomplished the re-creation of three books that are part of the Leaves, “Song of Myself”, “Children of Adam” and “Calamus”, in our Master’s thesis, a work that was completed in 1995 and which is available at the UFRGS library, we resumed our task of bringing Whitman’s poetry into our language. We have chosen the following books and poems to work on this time: “Inscriptions”; “Starting from Paumanok”; “Salut au Monde!”; “Song of the Open Road”; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; “Song of the Answerer”; “Our Old Feuillage”; “A Song of Joys”; “Song of the Broad-Axe”; “Song of the Exposition”; “Song of the Redwood-Tree”; “A Song for Occupations”; “A Song of the Rolling Earth”; “Youth, Day, Old Age and Night”; “Birds of Passage”; “A Broadway Pageant”; “SEA-DRIFT”; “Memories of President Lincoln”; “Passage to India” and “The Sleepers.” Finally, in section 5, we will analyze critically the re-created poems in our language, quoting passages, in order to verify whether we have achieved the desired results. Apart from these five chapters, there is a reference section with all the publications and authors that have contributed to our research and an annex with the text of “Origins of Attempted Secession” (WHITMAN, 1996, pp.1018-24), since this document clarifies Whitman’s political view on the United States of his time and is mentioned in section 3.5. We must also warn the reader about some technical details of our thesis. Many of our sources are books published in Portuguese, because the authors are from Brazil. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Portuguese are our own. Another necessary notice is about biblical quotations. They are taken from The Holy Bible: King James Version (2005), 1611 Edition, and the language has not been updated. A final warning is about chapter 4, which contains the poems: we have chosen to use spacing between the lines according to the format of the poems in English, instead of the regular spacing applied to the other chapters. As Whitman’s poetry and prose are entirely available on the internet nowadays and his printed works are quite cheap and available in Brazilian bookstores, we have not considered it necessary to include the original text in our research.
As we have stated above, we shall provide a few words here about some poets who are in some way connected to Whitman or who had something in common with Whitman. This is a way of honoring them and an explanation for the quotation at the beginning of our work: “Artists are the antennae of the race” (POUND, 1987, p.81), that is, the people who are able to anticipate what is coming. In section 3.3 we will address Pound’s ideas on poetry and criticism in more depth and section 2.4 brings the poem “A Pact”, which Pound wrote to Whitman when he felt that he was “old enough” to appear before his “father”. We will need to quote Pound’s own explanation about his statement, because it conveys an alert that is still valid today, as it has always been in all societies:
A graver issue needs biological analogy: artists are the antennae; an animal that neglects the warnings of its perceptions needs very great powers of resistance if it is to survive.
Your finer senses are protected, the eye by bone socket, etc.
A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives.
There is probably no use in telling this to people who can’t see it without being told.
Artists and poets undoubtedly get excited and ‘over-excited’ about things long before the general public.
Before deciding whether a man is a fool or a good artist, it would be well to ask, not only: ‘is he excited unduly’, but: ‘does he see something we don’t?’
Is his curious behaviour due to his feeling an oncoming earthquake, or smelling a forest fire which we do not yet feel or smell? (POUND, 1987, pp.82-3)
There is another ramification to Pound’s assertion above, which is the fact that artists as such are not in a position to falsify records. As they are the first to sense what is coming in a near future, they have to be true when conveying these findings to their readers, and the readers must also be alert to verify whether the artist is being true or not. The reading public must, then, respect the artists for their talent, but also demand from them their best. As a result, Pound is not only defending the artists, he is also placing them their responsibility. In section 2.5.6, the discussion about mediums and vision shows Whitman’s and Blake’s capacity for feeling “things long before the general public”, as well as the well-known ability of Whitman for prophesying (his own future actions, for example, like his work as a nurse during the War of Secession, which is described in “Song of Myself,” published years before the outset of the war), which has been proved to be true, as demonstrated by his biographers. This is another reason why Whitman is a poet who deserves more readership in Portuguese. When we live in a time that honors and studies Pound’s writings, the study of his literary father is even more needed. Pound wrote in a 1909 essay[2] that although he did not feel very well when reading some passages of Whitman, for their crudity of expression, sometimes he found himself writing in Whitman’s style. We mention this fact because Pound’s style does resemble Whitman’s, including when he is writing essays. For example, his ABC of Reading (1987), in general, and many other essays, with their frequent short statements instead of a text with a long course of reasoning, is similar to the style of “Song of Myself” with its ensemble of short passages, even though it is not reasonable to compare poetry to prose. However, this resemblance is a matter of substance, not form. Another obvious similarity is Pound’s The Cantos, written between 1915 and 1962, which is a “work in progress,” developed and published throughout the years in a like manner to Leaves of Grass. By the way, we are not even the first to point out this similarity, since Leminski, in his introduction to Folhas das Folhas de Relva, by Geir Campos (Leaves from Leaves of Grass, 2002, pp.7-12), suggests that “there is something in The Cantos that seems to breathe through the epic whitmanian lungs.”
As the themes of governance and economics are constant in The Cantos, it is not by chance that we have written these paragraphs about some poets who have devoted time to them, especially, in this introduction, Lorca and José Martí. To speak then of the decline of nations when they neglect their artists, we do not need to give examples other than the cases in the literary world, because we all know, especially in Brazil, what happens when specific groups of people take over a country, either due to economic, political or military reasons: immediate censorship or a ban on artists in general, and on poets, in particular. Nevertheless, it is possible that sometimes artists are rejected by society at large. The recent history of Brazil, for example, shows that the military forces took office in Brazil in a coup d’état in 1964, and remained in power until 1985. In 1968, the military government issued the Institutional Act #5, which restricted the political freedom in the country. Whitman and Pound suffered this type of problem in their own lives, like other poets such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Joyce, Lorca, Pessoa and Oswald de Andrade, as we will see in section 3.5. Whitman began to receive greater recognition in his country only after his death, as it happened to many others, as these words, by one of his biographers, on his death show: “It is safe to say that in his death Whitman received more newspaper space than he had during his whole life-time. […] Thus at his death Whitman’s life and works became more widely known and appreciated.” (ALLEN, 1955, pp.541-2). And when those in power no longer want to share in the collective life of the community and prefer to exert power over it, the artists are the ones who must leave the country or lose press space. Whitman was censored. Pound (1885-1972) was incarcerated in a U.S. detention camp outside Pisa for 25 days in an open cage before receiving a tent, where he seemed to have suffered a nervous breakdown. He had been arrested for cultural and propaganda activities against the Allied forces in Italy. After the war, Pound was taken to the United States to face charges of treason, but he was found unable to face trial by reason of insanity and he was sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he stayed from 1946 to 1958. After that, he returned to Italy, where he died in 1972. During all that time, he continued to write and translate poetry and was allowed to be in contact with friends and artists.
Another poet who loved Whitman and had an even sadder fate was Lorca, who was murdered at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. This Hispanic poet was one of Whitman’s admirers, and paid a tribute to the American poet in 1929, when he visited the United States and wrote a book called Poeta en Nueva York (A Poet in New York). Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet and dramatist who was killed by Nationalist partisans at the age of 38 at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, which was won by Francisco Franco (1892–1975), who was the dictator and later head of state of parts of Spain from 1936 and of all of Spain from 1939 until the end of his life in 1975. Franco’s regime placed a ban on Lorca’s works, which include Primer romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads, 1928), Poeta en Nueva York (1930, published in 1940, first translation into English in 1988, A Poet in New York); Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding, 1932) and La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba, 1936). In his book Poeta en Nueva York, Lorca wrote an “Oda a Walt Whitman” (“Ode to Walt Whitman”), to salute the American bard, referred to in his Ode as “Adán de sangre, macho, hombre solo en el mar, Viejo hermoso Walt Whitman.”
Oswald de Andrade, who will receive more attention in section 3.5, had the circulation of his newspaper prohibited by the police in 1931 and suffered political persecution in 1932 (ANDRADE, 1990, p.iv; see the “Chronology” section). Finally, we must honor another great poet, José Marti, called the “Apostle of Cuban Independence” and a National Hero. He admired Whitman and attended one of the American poet’s lectures in 1887 in New York. “The web site of the Government of the Republic of Cuba[3]” provides the following information on José Martí, whose name does resemble “martyr”:
Working for independence from early adolescence, José Martí Pérez, (born in La Habana, 1853) suffered imprisonment and deportation during the Ten Years War. From his work with later conspiracies and revolutionary movements, he realized that the Cuban Revolution had to have new organizational and programmatic foundations. To this task, he devoted his work and his whole life.
Gifted with exquisite poetic sensibility and being a terrific and bright speaker, Martí also possessed a tremendous foresight and a profound political thought, enriched by the experience of the years he lived in Spain, the United States and other Latin American countries.
All his work for the union of the Cuban revolutionaries, mainly among the Cuban emigrates in the United Sates, had an important repercussion in Cuba, and became a reality in 1892, when the Cuban Revolutionary Party was founded. […]
The war started on February 24, 1895. Martí landed in Cuba with Máximo Gómez, General in Chief of the Liberation Army, and shortly after was killed in combat at Dos Ríos. Though Martí’s death was a terrible loss for the Revolution, the revolutionary movement became stronger and stronger […]
Allen supplies a beautiful account of Martí’s attendance of Whitman’s lecture in his biography of Whitman, The Solitary Singer:
[…] his New York friends arranged for him to give his Lincoln lecture in Madison Square Theater. […] [Andrew] Carnegie [1835-1919], the millionaire author of Triumphant Democracy (1886), wrote to J. H. Johnston, the chief organizer of this benefit performance: “When the Pall Mall Gazette raised a subscription for Mr. Whitman, I felt triumphant democracy disgraced. Whitman is the great poet of America so far.” Other notables, such as Mark Twain, […] attended the lecture, and a reception was given afterward at the Westminster Hotel, with an attendance of two hundred people. Apparently Whitman did not know that José Marti, a Cuban journalist then in exile because of his liberal political views, also heard the lecture and wrote a highly eulogistic account which spread Whitman’s fame throughout Latin America as the semi-divine author of Leaves of Grass. (ALLEN, 1955, p.525)
Apart from poets, like the ones already mentioned, we also resorted to writers in other areas of knowledge for help. This is the case of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker and historian, the author of Democracy in America, who, besides Gilberto Freyre, has provided us with the sociological basis for our analysis of the situation of the United States and Brazil in the nineteenth century. This is done in section 3.5, where we relate their work to the Brazilian writer and thinker, Oswald de Andrade, whom we consider to be the Brazilian equivalent of Whitman, given their personal characteristics: both are journalists, writers (Whitman wrote tales and a novel, too: Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate, which was published as an extra to a newspaper, The New World, in 1842), poets and sometime political activists.
In sum, what we truly believe is that our efforts to re-create a considerable part of Leaves of Grass in Portuguese might inject enthusiasm in our readers in order to increase Whitman’s readership in Brazil. Perhaps this action might even motivate new translators to try a new or better version for these texts or of other texts worthy of note. The fact is, when compared to Whitman’s reception in Latin-America in general, with the admiration of authors such as José Martí, Gilberto Freyre, Pablo Neruda, and Jorge Luis Borges, for example, we see that in Brazil there is a huge gap concerning Leaves of Grass. We do not know why this gap exists, but it is a reality. Maybe our undertaking will fill it or prompt others to help do it. If it serves any of these purposes, it will be worth having been attempted. Then, one day, Whitman might stand among us as an author common to us, such as many great authors have been. We hope that what has been written in the next pages will be of some value to our students, scholars and readers in general.
[1] We term it literary because, personally or emotionally, the most important fact was the death of his father, just five days after the release of the book. More information in section 2.5.6.
[2] Pound’s excerpts of this essay are quoted by Alan Trachtenberg in his article “Walt Whitman: Precipitant of the Modern” (GREENSPAN, 1997, p.194).
[3] Information available at <http://www.cubagob.cu/ingles/default.htm>. Accessed on July 26, 2007.
