All about Walt Whitman

3.2 The method

Haroldo[1] de Campos, one of the most distinguished Brazilian poet translators, who, along with Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari, launched the Concrete Poetry Movement in Brazil in the 1950’s, states, referring to information conveyed through texts, that while “documentary and semantic information” or denotative information on things and events can be conveyed in various grammatical ways when translated.  Since the focus is on the meaning and not its forms, “aesthetic information” can only be transmitted in the form created by the artist[2]. In this manner, unlike denotative subject matter, “aesthetic information is equal to its original codification,”[3] which includes gesture, atmosphere, attunement (to bring into harmony with), and feelings related to lived contexts. Therefore, the “fragility of aesthetic information is […] highest” (CAMPOS, 1992, p.33), as it depends entirely on the particular form conceived by the artist and can not be arranged in any other way without a significant loss of beauty. As the “aesthetic information is inseparable from its realization“, it can not be disconnected from its original medium, which is, in this case, the specific language the literary work of art was written in.

The problem then appears when a translator needs to render a poetic text from one language into another. In order to be faithful to the meaning of the original, a translator must betray its original form, which is untranslatable, given the syntactical and morphological differences between languages. Thus, the more we are faithful to meaning, the less we are to form, which means that, in the case of poetry, beauty as it is produced by the form of the original will be lost in translation. This does not mean that everything will be lost, because sometimes a literal translation provides a perfect verse in the other language; but most of the time the poetic elements are not re-created. In this sense, from the point of view of literal translation, poetry is quite untranslatable, or at least its form. It occurs to us that this process is like transporting the soul of a poet to a foreign land without his body. It becomes a ghost, because we know that his spirit is there in the text, but we do not know where. So, when the reader is enjoying a great text in translation, the reader may experience the feeling that something is missing. Due to this, the translator, guided by the meaning or content of the original text, becomes a performer of tasks, for where the content points he must follow its tracks, providing means for the sense to manifest itself in another language. With regard to literal translation, this is what has to be done.

However, in this kind of work, when we take creativity into consideration, the translator’s work amounts to almost nothing. He might have an incredibly creative text on his hands, but he will be oppressed by its semantic information. In the sense that he might have something poetically beautiful, but at the same time he will have to express it in a long array of terms that will destroy the beauty as it is seen in the original language, especially when the text is in verse. Sometimes it can be metaphors that he will have to explain rather than re-create, or rhymes or rhythm. This happens even in prose. From our experience, literal translation means basically reading the original and writing down the text in the target language. Consequently, this type of translation involves little imagination and creativity. The translator does not have to create anything, for the task requires basically reading and interpreting. It is similar to translating technical texts, which involves research on specific jargon, such as Law or Medicine. Consequently, the purely literary aspect of the language does not have any effect in this part of the work. And the translator is overwhelmed by the original, for it allows him at most to be a good reader and linguistic researcher, or a scrivener, who copies a text into another language.

On the other hand, if we want to free the translator’s creative mind or imagination, we must avail him the possibility to interact with the text, which will enable him to establish a dynamic relationship with it. In this sense, he will be able to re-create the body of the original, so that when he brings the soul, it will be incarnated in its proper physical form. This physical structure, the poetic re-construction of the linguistic devices used to support the meaning, will show, virtually, where the embodiment of the poet’s soul, the materialization of his inspiration into words, was effected at every given moment. Therefore, the action that was impossible to do before, in other words: creativity, can now be achieved, and the translator is granted freedom of movement in his work. Thus, the freedom to re-create the linguistic and poetic/aesthetic beauty of the form of the original text not only does warm up the translator’s creative capacity, but also gives him the chance to even find out other correlations of meanings that might only appear when the translator digs deeply into the structures of the text, analyzing it bit by bit, de-constructing it and disassembling it to see its internal workings. In this operation he can learn how to create equivalent parts in the other language, which, when put together, will make the poem sound meaningful and harmonious, literally speaking, it becomes singable; this, of course, is a general statement, for there are cases when the texts intend to do the opposite in order to shock or amaze the reader.  Our main idea then is to re-create the form according to its original adequacy to its meaning. Therefore, we think that the component of untranslatability of poetic texts, already mentioned, which could at first appear as an obstacle, actually indicates the solution, which is represented by poetic re-creation.

In fact, the Concrete poets also discussed the idea that the form of the original text “postulates the impossibility of translation”, or the “thesis of untranslatability […] of creative texts” (CAMPOS, 1992, p.34). What is meant by “creative texts” in this case is great poetry, or inventive poetry by already canonized poets, such as Homer, Dante, Provençal poets, Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Pound and the Concrete Poets themselves in Brazil. Also, poetry by poets of the past and present that the translator’s attentive eye may find, and some cases of exceptional prose, by writers (1992, p.34) such as James Joyce (Ulysses, Finnegans Wake), or some Brazilian writers such as Oswald de Andrade (Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar, Serafim Ponte Grande; novels mentioned by Haroldo de Campos as “invention-novels” (1977, p.168), Mário de Andrade (Macunaíma, defined (CAMPOS, 1992, p.173) as a “pan-folkloric arch-legend”), Guimarães Rosa (Grande Sertão Veredas, translated into English as The Devil To Pay in the Backlands; Haroldo defines its language as “the movable stage for the metaphysical struggle between man and Evil” (1992, p.59), so ample are the linguistic resources provided by the author), and Paulo Leminski (O Catatau).[4]

This concept of creative or inventive texts was set by Ezra Pound (1885-1972) in his book ABC of Reading (1987, pp.39-40), in which he establishes the six “classes of persons” who create literature, the two first being (1) “Inventors” (“Men who found a new process,”) and (2) “masters” (“Men who combine a number of such processes, and who use them as well as or better than the inventors.” The others are: (3) “diluters”, the next in line and who do not “do the job quite as well.”; (4) “Good writers without salient qualities.”; (5) “Writers of belles-lettres […] who specialized in some particular part of writing”; and (6) “The starters of crazes”. We will see, in the last section of this chapter, 3.7, examples of the “proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters”, which for Pound is “the method of contemporary biologists, that is, careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another” (POUND, 1987, p.17).  In this case, the method is applied to re-creation of poetry, that is, comparison of different translations of the same text.

Based on the problem posed by literal translation, which implies aesthetic loss, we agree with Haroldo when he advances the “thesis of untranslatability […] of creative texts”. As a result, the “impossibility […] of translation of creative texts” seems to “engender”  “[…] the possibility […] of re-creation of these texts” (CAMPOS, 1992, p.34), if we want the translator to exercise his creative mind and free his poetic imagination. In this manner, our purpose here, the re-creation of poetry, or more specifically the re-creation of some books and poems from Leaves of Grass into Portuguese, is actually contrary to literal translation, which is the sole translation of meaning or content in any form provided by the translator into the target language. We believe that re-creating a poetic text in a different language will re-construct its aesthetic information in the other language. The meaning will be transmitted, and so will its “physicality, its very materiality (phonic, visual properties),” and its prosody (from Greek pros?idi?, or song sung to music; accent: pros-, pros- + ?id?, ode / song; or how the poem sounds, its tone, pitch of voice, its “phonic environment”). Other poetic elements will be re-recreated or re-constructed as well, such as meter: measured arrangement of words in a poem; rhythm: the pattern or flow of sound created by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in accentual verse as we have in English, or of long and short syllables in quantitative verse (based on the duration of syllables) as in Greek or Latin poetry; or the syllabic patterns, combined with accents, in Portuguese; in a broader sense, the movement of images, thoughts and ideas in a poem characterized by a correlative flow in syntactical structure grammatically marked by a “frequent repetition at regular intervals” (ALI, 2006, p.29) of certain linguistic/poetic patterns or elements. Ali, in his classic book Versificação Portuguesa (Portuguese Versification), observes that this “reiteration”, or frequent repetition, is an “essential condition” (p.29) of the concept of rhythm. There are also rhyme: correspondence of sounds in lines of verses, at initial, medium or terminal positions; alliteration: repetition of sounds, especially consonant sounds; and assonance: repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds; in short, its poetic structure. What we mean is that this type of work is quite different from literal translation, since literal translation transposes the meanings, the significance, the content of a text from one language into another. As we have said above, we will bring some examples of re-created texts and discuss more closely the technical details of our work at the end of this chapter.

When we re-create “creative texts”, also referred to by Haroldo as texts which are “full of difficulties”, in the sense that they are actually “seductive” (CAMPOS, 1992, p.35) to the translator for being polysemantic/polysemous, that is, full of poetic possibilities, there are still other aspects that play important roles in our task, such as the particular “poetic diction” of each poet/writer, their tones, their individual prosody and rhythm, and also of each passage. Re-creating a poetic text (poetry or poetic prose) involves a complex set of actions:

It is as though we disassembled and re-assembled the creating machine, that apparently intangible utterly frail beauty that offers us the finished product in a foreign language. And, which, however, reveals itself susceptible of an implacable vivisection that revolves its guts, to bring it again into light in a diverse linguistic body. This is why translation is criticism. (CAMPOS, 2004, p.42)

It is a way of apprehending the spirit of the artist materialized in his verses in order to discover the many possibilities of significance, as though we were speaking with his soul to decode all the messages inserted in the text. After that, when we are in possession of that meaning, we study the linguistic and poetic structures used to convey that meaning in the original language. Finally, we search in our own language the various possible ways to re-structure that meaning in our vernacular, but keeping in mind that our re-created poem is an “isomorphic re-project of the original poem” (CAMPOS, 1981, p.181). By the way, “Isomorphism”[5] is a very dear term to Haroldo. Although the term comes from the field of biology (Pound is mentioned above for his use of a biologist’s studying procedure), it is very useful in describing this process of re-recreation of poetic texts, for it gives an exact image, a mirror image, of the end-product. As we know that nature and life are a constant process of transformation, meaning that there is no end-product, rather a “work in progress”, which leads us to the idea that there is no end-product in poetry either, we must say that this expression is used here to refer to poetry as being an updated medium of conveying sense from one human being to another in an era of industrialization. So poetry is not apart from the progress of humanity, and similarly to the products of technology, it must be regularly modernized and updated. Thus, if conceived as a fine product of a man’s intellect made according to his time, it is necessary to re-create its aura, atmosphere, the strong gesture that is implicit in or beyond his words, the same way as we see the beauty and strength of nature, but we do not see what is beyond it, although we know that it is there, the invisible background that generates everything that exists, like the poet’s soul behind his verses. In section 3.4, we will discuss progress in Brazil in more depth and provide more information on author Oswald de Andrade.

In addition, in an article entitled “Comunicação na Poesia de Vanguarda” (“Communication in Vanguard Poetry”), Haroldo gives more information on this idea, and indicates that he borrowed the expression “creative transposition” (1977, p.143) from Jakobson[6] to define his own work of re-creating poetry as an act of “re-creation” or “trans-creation”, which is more precise in describing the movement of re-creation, as opposed to mere “transcription” of texts (“Trans” is a  Latin prefix / noun, meaning “across”, “beyond”, “on the opposite side”; e.g.:  transportation, transmission; the corresponding prefixes in Greek are “dia”, “between”: dialogue, diaphanous = transparent, and “meta”, change, as in metamorphosis = transformation, change of form).

Actually, this idea of “trans-creation” of inventive texts is based on a larger concept of the work of the poet translator as “trans-creator” of texts. It comes from the research and practice of the Concrete poets on language and on linguistic criticism, as they did not separate the work of the poet from that of the translator or critic. In the same article, Haroldo describes his “Scheme of verbal communication”, in which he gives us the “Factors and functions of language” (1977, pp.136-143). Briefly explained, the “scheme of communication” is as follows: a sender/emitter sends a message to a receiver/recipient; every message has its sender and  receiver/recipient; the message refers to “an object or situation”; naturally, for the message to be sent and understood by the receiver, there must be a “common code” between them and also a contact, a means of connecting them; then, we have in this context the six “factors” operating in the transmission of a message. Each of them originates a “linguistic function”. These functions can appear in various combinations depending on the situation.  What really matters to us here are the six functions mentioned: 1. the “emotive” or “expressive” function, because it expresses the emotions and reactions and attitudes of the sender. The sender is also characterized as a “codifier” of messages, since he uses a common code to emit his feelings/thoughts; 2. when the communication activity is “centered upon the recipient”, it is a “conative” function, which means that it expresses desire, volition, impulse towards the second person of speech, the “you”. It is also a kind of “magic or enchanting” function, as it exerts power over the other person; 3. the next function is a “cognitive” one, centered upon a context, a reference point. The message “denotes” (to denote is to mean something literally) concrete things or “conveys knowledge” about a “specific object”; 4. the “phatic function”, which means the expressions used to establish or interrupt communication rather than express ideas; in this function, expressions such as  “Hello”, “How are you”, “Alright”, “Okay” are used; 5. the “metalinguistic function”, where the important factor is the “code”, which “is the system that establishes a repertoire of signs [linguistic units linking the signifier, a group of letters, to its signified, the meaning attributed to the signifier] and its rules of combination”. The important fact here is that in this function the message is directed upon another message, like the entries in a dictionary. Also, if combined with the cognitive function, for example, this can be expressed through “literary criticism”, for in this kind of work the critic is analyzing a work of art in written form. Finally, function 6, which is the “poetic function”, where the message “turns to itself”, to its “sensitive aspect, to its configuration”. Then, in poetry and in creative/inventive prose, this function has a dominant position. When this function is combined with the metalinguistic function, they appear in contexts where the poet or writer is criticizing their own act of writing in creative texts. The theater within the theater in Hamlet (SHAKESPEARE, 1992, p.671; “The Mousetrap”, Act 3, scene II) is an excellent example of this. In that scene, Hamlet, as if he were Shakespeare himself, is discussing acting within the acting of the play, while the focus of the work of the dramatist is on “configuring” the “sensitive” aspect of language. The first line of the scene already shows the rhythm and alliterations of the poetic construct / conception (conception as the ability to form concepts or as creation, both apply in this context): “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue […]”. The bold type highlights the poetic function, to show how the work on language makes it different from its common use in the cognitive function, although sometimes it can naturally occur in normal daily conversation.

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[1] We will refer to the Campos brothers by their first names, to avoid confusion.

[2] Our own work is an example of the difference between these two types of transmission of data. For example, the description of our method of re-creating poetry that we are giving here is a way of organizing, translating and conveying “documentary and semantic information” concerning our work and the work of poet-translators, of which we give a summary. As the focus in this part of the work is on the content that we want to expose, we do it according to the form which is most suitable to an academic assignment. For this reason, our knowledge in this field, which has been primarily acquired in our mother tongue, Portuguese, is translated and presented in English. Conversely, the application of this knowledge or the theory put into practice follows the opposite direction: the re-creation of poetry is carried out from English into Portuguese. Therefore, it is not a case of which activity is better, but of knowing that each one has its own useful application.

[3] Examples of our work on the re-creation of the “original codification” from Leaves of Grass are given in sections 3.7 and 3.9, in addition to translations by other translators, for the purpose of comparison. Apart from these annotated examples, there is chapter 4, which contains the poems re-recreated in this research.

[4] In the article (1992, pp.218-9) “Uma Leminskíada Barrocodélica”, Haroldo calls Leminski  a “rhapsode”, to indicate that the frontiers between poetry and prose are “movable”, “rarefied”, subtle, when the prose is so  poetic that it seems to be the work of a poet. Leminski is not only a creative writer and poet, but also a great translator. His creative translations include Giacomo Joyce (JOYCE, 1985), Sol e aço (MISHIMA, 1985), Satyricon (PETRONIO, 1985) and Malone morre (BECKETT, 1986). Beyond his technical skills and wide imagination, artistically speaking, Leminski has the gift of surprise; he always knows how and when to take the reader by surprise with totally unpredictable rhymes, images, thoughts and combination of words.

[5] Isomorphism is similarity in form, shape or structure, but in organisms of different ancestry. As we are discussing poetic phenomena, it is interesting to notice that this term is used in Mathematics to define a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of two sets such that the result of an operation on elements of one set corresponds to the result of the analogous operation on their images in the other set. And it is also used to describe a close similarity in the crystalline structure of two or more substances of similar chemical composition. In terms of poetry, the poem in one language becomes the mirror image of the original. It has everything to do with the idea of re-creation, since Haroldo also calls this process “crystallography” (the scientific study of crystals) (CAMPOS, 1981, p.181).

[6] In Portuguese, the writings by Roman Jakobson appeared in a collection of articles: Lingüística e Comunicação. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1969.

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