5 CONCLUSION (Part 8)
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.
5 CONCLUSION (Parte 7)
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.”
5 CONCLUSION (Parte 6)
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.
5 CONCLUSION (Part 5)
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.
5 CONCLUSION (Parte 4)
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.
5 CONCLUSION (Part 3)
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.
5 CONCLUSION (Part 2)
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:
5 CONCLUSION
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):
