All about Walt Whitman

2.2 Brazilian editions of Leaves of Grass

Compared to what happened in other nations, the Leaves has a short and small history in Brazil. The oldest edition is the famous Folhas das Folhas de Relva (Leaves from Leaves of Grass), a collection of poems and fragments translated by Geir Campos, published by Editora Brasiliense in 1983 (9th reprint in 2002; actually, the original edition was published by Editora Civilização Brasileira, 1964). After that, there is another edition by Imago Editora (2000), a literal translation of “Song of Myself” performed by André Cardoso. It is a bilingual edition, with a very careful translation, an honest work, without any pretentiousness. It is a very useful one to attentive (or inattentive) readers, for its fidelity to meaning. Then, there is a bilingual publication by Plano Editora, another selection of poems translated by Ramsés Ramos (2001). It is a literal translation, or almost that. Apart from these, there is another bilingual edition, this time a translation of the 1855 Leaves of Grass published by Iluminuras (2005), whose translator is Rodrigo Garcia Lopes, who is also a poet, journalist, and composer. This edition contains everything from the original edition: the preface and the twelve poems, which are accompanied by notes to the poems, a postface, and bibliography. In the postface, the translator gives detailed historical, economic, social and literary information on the United States of the nineteenth century, and discusses Whitman’s “basic procedures” of writing, such as borrowing words from other languages, parallelism, free verse, and catalogues. In short, it is a good homage to Whitman. Finally, there is a popular edition by Martin Claret publishing house of the complete text of the Leaves (Folhas de Relva, 2005), with an introduction by Luciano Alves Meira, the translator. Meira comments briefly on Whitman and the book, but nothing is said of the operation of bringing the whole Leaves of Grass into Portuguese, which must have been a tremendous and long effort.

As for the other nations, it was published in England and translated into German (1870) and French still in the nineteenth century. It was translated into Italian (Foglie di Erba, by Luigi Gamberale) in 1900 (with a reprint in 1907); and into Spanish in 1912[1]. It received acclaim and admiration from authors such as José Marti, Jorge Luis Borges, Pessoa and Lorca a long time ago and it has not received appropriate attention from Brazilian editors until today. There are in Brazil, up to the present, only the above mentioned few incomplete editions and the popular one, which are not able to completely re-create the atmosphere of the original, with its length of breath, flowing rhythm and unfolding images. These details are thoroughly dealt with in chapter 3, section 3.7, where we compare these translations to our own.

The editorial problems faced by Leaves of Grass in Brazil are similar to the hardships Whitman underwent in his own country concerning the publication of his books. Leaves of Grass was only properly published in the U.S. in 1881, which means that it took a long time since the first edition, in 1855, for the publishing houses to turn their attention to Whitman. This means that the author had been financially responsible for all the previous editions of the Leaves. His reception in both countries shows hostility from the critics and public (TREVISAN, 2001, p.207). However, the situation here seems to be worse, for a long time has elapsed since then and other countries have given him adequate attention, while we still fail in accomplishing the same task.

[1] In the first section of the “Introduction to Walt Whitman, Poemas, by Álvaro Armando Vasseur”, by Matt Cohen and Rachel Price, in which the authors discuss the presence of Whitman in Latin America and Spain, they state that “Only with Vasseur’s […] 1912 translation did Whitman become available and important to generations of Latin American poets, from the residual modernistas to the region’s major twentieth-century figures, including Peruvian vanguardist César Vallejo, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and the Argentine Jorge Luís Borges.” The text of the Spanish edition is available at <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/index.html>. Accessed on May 22, 2007.

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