We have re-created a series of poems from Leaves of Grass into Portuguese and we are re-creating another group of poems now. Re-creating here means the artistic translation of poetry, which is different from literal translation in the sense that we want to reconstruct poetic elements, such as rhythm and sound, and their close relationship with their meaning (methodology and examples are provided for in chapter 3). After we accomplished the re-creation[1] of three books that are part of the Leaves, “Song of Myself”, “Children of Adam” and “Calamus”, in our Master’s thesis, a study completed in 1995 and 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”; “SEA-DRIFT” (“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”); and “Passage to India”. We intend to include more poems in our project, which are: “A Song for Occupations”; “A Song of the Rolling Earth”; “Youth, Day, Old Age and Night”; “Birds of Passage”; “Memories of President Lincoln”; “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”; “Proud Music of the Storm”; “Prayer of Columbus” and “The Sleepers”. In numbers, this means something around 99 pages of poetry done in our previous work and 188 pages of the projected work now, from a total of 491 pages of poetic texts. We are using Whitman poetry and prose (1996) as our source, which contains the 1991-92 authorized edition, the one recommended by the poet himself. In chapter 5 we will explain if and what we have achieved of this projected work, how we have done it and whether the result is according to what we have proposed to do.
[1] We translate the terms “recriação” and “re-criação” in English as “re-creation” or “re-creating”, always with a hyphen, since the word “recreation” in English, without a hyphen, refers to activities that refresh, amuse, divert and stimulate people, and not as an act of translating poetry or making something. Literarily speaking, re-creating a poem seems more like co-creating the piece, for the translator needs to create again the original text in consonance with it, not only to create something from or based on it. Actually, the word “re-create” was used by Whitman himself to describe how he was writing his own poetry, as he wrote in a review titled “Walt Whitman and his Poems” (The United States Review 5; September 1855: 205-12): “He must re-create poetry with the elements always at hand.” Available at: <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/reviews/leaves1855/anc.00176.html> Accessed on 2008-08-14.
