5 CONCLUSION (Part 8 )

“Our Old Feuillage,” published in 1860 (but probably written in 1856), was composed by Whitman to be the “National Poem,” as declared by himself (WHITMAN, 2002, p.145). It is a catalogue of scenes, places, people, and atmospheres of every part of the United States, a collection, a “bouquet” of the American foliage, which should be bound together to form one single national identity, as he sings at the end of the poem. The poem indeed looks like a dense forest of words, sounds, meanings, all growing thick together: it is four and a half pages long, with no subdivisions, and verses that are longer than usual, most of them with two, and many of them with three, four and even five lines.

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WHITMAN:

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5 CONCLUSION (Parte 7)

Now an excerpt from “Song of the Answerer,” or the “Poem of the Poet” as its original title indicates, naming the poet as the answerer. Once again, the poet is giving his message of death, faith, eternal life, which shows the way to transcend our physical life on this planet. The passage below, from section 1, portrays in the first part Whitman’s flowing percussion, even when describing a daily scene, and, in the second part, the poet’s simplicity, by which he could be taken for anyone, as he always preferred to be called, “one of the roughs.”

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WHITMAN:

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5 CONCLUSION (Parte 6)

This is a very famous part of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, one of the six elegies referred to in section 2.4; it was published in 1856, and was the best poem of that edition. This poem depicts the poet’s crossing from Manhattan to Brooklyn at the end of a working day. It transcendentally portrays everyone’s crossing, not only from one side to other, but also a crossing of time and space, from material to immaterial toward eternity. In the part quoted below the poet talks to the river; the combination of sounds, marking the movement of the semantic units within the lines, mirrors the swinging movement of the water and the waves and the coming and going of the tide.

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5 CONCLUSION (Part 5)

We quote two passages from “Song of the Open Road.” Both show the main theme of this chant, which is the invitation to travel, because Whitman always liked to be in the open air, in direct contact with nature. In this poem he can combine this love for nature with his desire for vastness and the search for the unknown; especially in search of the great comrades, the “great Companions, and to belong to them.” But there is also the symbolism of the road, for it represents the roads of the universe that are traveled by the souls, and that everything that is experienced on the roads of the earth is all designed to the progress of the souls, which includes religion. For this reason, the first quotation below sounds like a biblical speech. The second, the last stanza of the poem, is the part where the poet offers his hand, his love and the invitation for the reader to travel with him.

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5 CONCLUSION (Part 4)

Now a passage from section 4 of “Salut au Monde!,” with the use of anaphoras, the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of verses (see section 3.5) and a catalogue of geographical features. This poem appears early in Whitman’s poetic life, in 1856. It counterbalances, from the beginning, his effusive nationalism and shows that he had a world vision as well, with high regard to other countries, peoples and cultures. This poem is in a way connected to “Passage to India,” which expands it and searches for transcendence from materials, inciting the soul to travel to more than India on to “the seas of God” towards the spiritual dimension.

WHITMAN:

I see plenteous waters,
I see mountain peaks, I see the sierras of Andes where they range,
I see plainly the Himalayas, Chian Shahs, Altays, Ghauts,
I see the giant pinnacles of Elbruz, Kazbek, Bazardjusi,
I see the Styrian Alps, and the Karnac Alps,
I see the Pyrenees, Balks, Carpathians, and to the north the Dofrafields, and       off at sea mount Hecla,
I see Vesuvius and Etna, the mountains of the Moon, and the Red           mountains of Madagascar,
I see the Lybian, Arabian, and Asiatic deserts,
I see huge dreadful Arctic and Antarctic icebergs,
I see the superior oceans and the inferior ones, the Atlantic and Pacific, the        sea of Mexico, the Brazilian sea, and the sea of Peru,
The waters of Hindustan, the China sea, and the gulf of Guinea,
The Japan waters, the beautiful bay of Nagasaki land-lock’d in its            mountains,
The spread of the Baltic, Caspian, Bothnia, the British shores, and the bay          of Biscay,

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5 CONCLUSION (Part 3)

Now we quote the initial stanza from “Starting from Paumanok” that shows a typical whitmanian construction, that is, a long series of sentences with the subject appearing only in the last line of the passage. This is a type of poetic piece that must be enjoyed as a whole, to see how the poet creates his spiral construction towards the final climactic action performed by the “I”. This poem, as it appears in a foot-note in chapter 4, was the opening poem of Leaves of Grass in 1860, and its title then was “Proto-Leaf”; it contains the poet’s main themes, such as Love, Democracy, Religion (see part 10), as well as comradeship, catalogues of the nation and the soul.

WHITMAN:

Starting from Paumanok

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5 CONCLUSION (Part 2)

We shall now provide examples of poetic re-creations from Leaves of Grass so that the reader might judge our work for themselves. We will also add some comments on each poem, in order to situate the reader. For that purpose, we will also provide the original text, and when available, another translation of the same passage for comparison. We begin by quoting stanzas from the poem “Eidólons,” from “Inscriptions.” This is an example of poems in which Whitman uses regular meter. “Eidólons” is an image, a phantom, an appearance, to indicate that above or behind it the real being exists, the soul, our eternal reality. This first stanza below is made up of the following combination: a line of six syllables, then one of five plus one of six again, with a pause between them, then one of eight syllables with one of ten between parenthesis, and ending with one of four. The other verses naturally fell within the natural rhythms of our language, especially verses of six and ten syllables:

STANZA 3:

WHITMAN:

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5 CONCLUSION

We must begin this chapter by remembering what we stated in section 3.2, where we declared that our purpose is to re-create some books and poems from Leaves of Grass into Portuguese according to our theory and practice of creative translation, which was exposed in that part of our research. After establishing our methodological approach to the texts, we defined the corpus that would be subject of it, as it can be seen below, a passage from section 2.3 (and repeated in section 3.7):

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, such as: “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”.

Now we shall explain what happened to our proposition in the course of our studies, whether they have been realized and whether there were changes, and finally whether our dream has come true, that is, if we have been able to bring into our language a considerable amount of Whitman’s poetry in a reasonable poetic re-creation. First of all, by comparing the list above to the list of poems at the Table of Contents we can see that there have been changes. The first one is the order in which the poems appear at the Table of Contents, which is the order they appear in Leaves of Grass; naturally, we refer to the 1891-92 edition, also known as the “deathbed” edition. Thus, after “Song of the Redwood-Tree”, the correct order is: “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.” The second change is in the choice of poems. We have decided to include the complete “Sea-Drift” cluster, since it is a very important book in the poet’s life, where he confesses his desperation and faith in recovery (see section 2.5.2 for more information on these poems). Another reason for this is Bloom’s indication of Whitman’s six elegies mentioned in section 2.4, which include “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.” For the same reason we have included “The Sleepers,” so that we pay homage to Bloom and provide the reader the opportunity to read all six elegies in Portuguese (“Song of Myself” was re-created for our Master’s thesis). In the same line of reasoning, as we have decided to re-create “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” we have chosen to translate the complete “Memories of President Lincoln,” so that we could all enjoy “Oh Captain, My Captain” and the other poems of this group as well.  As our work has increased a lot with these additions, we have decided to exclude for the present research these three poems: “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” “Proud Music of the Storm,” and “Prayer of Columbus.” Not other criterion was used for this exclusion except for availability of time, under the circumstances mentioned above.

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4 THE POEMS

This section contains the books and poems from Leaves of Grass on which we have been working up to now. After much re-working, we believe they are now ready to be presented to public appreciation. As we know, a translator’s work is never finished, for every time we revise the texts we find new errors that were invisible before. However, we can at least present the text now at its current final version. Naturally, they will be re-worked whenever we go back to them, as we have done with the books translated for our Master’s thesis. As we continue our work, we will also add new foot-notes and comments when we think they are convenient or necessary to a better understanding of their content. By the way, the poem “Do Berço Infindamente Embalando” (“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”) had appeared as an annex in our Master’s thesis (SARAIVA, 1995, p.162), since it was referred in that work as an expression of Whitman’s love for opera, of which this poem is an example. The poet himself said that he was greatly indebted to opera, and even stated that he would not have written Leaves of Grass without having been “saturated” by this musical experience. Consequently, there are traces of this experience in his poems, especially in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”, which formally is an aria. Whitman especially admired Marietta Alboni (1826-1894), “the greatest coloratura soprano [and contralto] in the history of opera”, whose performances in New York were all attended by him; Geremia Bettini, the tenor; and Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), the composer. Naturally, as an opera lover, he loved Gioachino Rossini, too (1792-1868), who was Verdi’s master. In his New York years, the poet was driven to tears by these wonderful artists, a fact that he remembered with joy in his old age (ALLEN, 1955, pp.113-5). As a matter of fact, these artists are mentioned by Whitman in another poem, “Proud Music of the Storm”, which resembles an “operatic overture” (a prelude), in which Alboni is depicted as “The lustrious orb, Venus contralto, the blooming mother, / Sister of loftiest gods” (WHITMAN, 2002, pp.339-45). As we have proposed in the Introduction, we have been able to re-create this poem as well. Actually, all the SEA-DRIFT cluster has been re-created.

If there is an aspect of Romanticism that was shared by Whitman without the shadow of a doubt, it must be the love for music. We have discussed Whitman’s relation or reaction against some Romantic features, such as morbidity and its lack of involvement with social problems, yet, in the field of music, the situation is exactly the opposite. Not that Whitman agreed with the Romantics that music was “the most romantic of all arts” (SCHENK, 1979, p.201), but because he believed in the “music’s power to stir up” feelings and emotions, that is, music had for him an “incomparable appeal to the emotions”, even though the Romantics “in general preferred to live as it were in the past or the future” and “music constituted the sphere in which the present could be best experienced in a kind of enchanting dream” (1979, pp.231-2). The following passage from section 26 of “Song of Myself” will illustrate the point:

I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)

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3.9 Passages from Leaves of Grass

Thus, we shall begin now to quote some passages from Leaves of Grass, reminding ourselves and the reader of Whitman’s “abrupt departure” from traditional poetic forms. Even though we have brought here examples of creative literary works by Fitzgerald, Joyce and Dickinson, in terms of specific poetic invention we have to say that Whitman’s poetry takes a slightly different path, which is that of re-modeling traditional prosody and forms. What we mean is that, like him, we first learned how to write and translate poetry in the traditional way, and only after we had repeated exercises in this field, we started to work on the free verses of Leaves of Grass. So the kind of poetry shown earlier especially Fitzgerald’s and Joyce’s is not a common feature of the Leaves.

On the other hand, there are some features of the Leaves that certainly must be faced by any translators in order to re-create the content and revolutionary form of the original. The Leaves places two problems that become one: an illusory facility and a real difficulty. As it is a poetic work written in free, or blank, verse, which means the lines are not rhymed, apparently the translator’s work is softened. However, free verses are not exempt from some of the main elements of poetry: rhythm and meter. This is the illusory facility we have spoken of, since it looks like simple poetry, like a free flow of thoughts and feelings, without poetic or aesthetic elements that maintain it. We do not need to go too far in translation to realize the mistake. The brief examples of translations quoted above by Geir Campos, Ramos, Lopes and Meira are enough to show that it is not easy to grasp the aura of the Leaves, that distinctive quality that makes the Leaves so beautiful and inspiring, which makes the readers re-read it time and again. As the poet sings in section 4 of “I sing the Body Electric”, from “Children of Adam”, pointing to this ineffable, indescribable energy: “There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well; /All things please the soul—but these please the soul well.” He completes the idea in section 5, when he chants the Female: “This is the female form; / A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot; / It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction!”. What he says of women can be said of his poetry. It has attracted readers with this force, like a magnet. It is part of the translator’s job to grasp this energy that permeates the Leaves, so that we can inject it in the veins of the poems in Portuguese. Without it, the Leaves are dead.

Apart from this spiritual work of feeling or catching this pervading energy that circulates through the book like “[…] circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out” (section 9), we must be careful not to lose track of semantic content, besides the structural ones. We must do this because the only poetic feature that is not always present in Leaves of Grass is the rhymes at the end of the lines (tail or end rhyme). The other aesthetic elements are there, as shown by Whitman’s critics and biographers cited in this work. In this manner, what we have called an illusory facility becomes the second and same problem: the real difficulty to translate the Leaves. For the poet de-constructs the form and content of past and even contemporary poetry to achieve the new model according to his close view of the world, modulating into his poetry the voices and events of his time, bringing into it the world observed outside of his internal space, mixing his feelings and thoughts with those of the common men, the masses. These voices and masses are present in the Leaves via the catalogues, through the long enumerations of people, places and things, or simply of them, as in this passage from section 24 of “Song of Myself”:

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