All about Walt Whitman

3.3 Augusto de Campos, Pignatari, Pound: more lessons in poetic re-creation

To continue our discussion on the poetic aspects of language, we shall now present some of the knowledge in this field that we have acquired from Augusto de Campos (recalling a lesson from Emerson), Décio Pignatari, and Ezra Pound and how they relate to Whitman. Emerson, like Whitman, being a poet, philosopher and critic, practiced the metalinguistic and poetic function of language to a high degree. He received tribute from the concrete poets for his masterful articulation on both levels of language, especially the metalinguistic. Whitman himself and the poets in Brazil echoed his idea of every day language as “fossil poetry.” For instance, Augusto de Campos[1] (1986, p.101) reminds us of this by quoting Emerson, when he finds solutions for a re-creation of an Omar Khayyám’s “rubai”[2] from English to Portuguese. Augusto de Campos used Edward Fitzgerald’s English translation of the Rubaiyat as his source. So, while digging up the language to find new meanings for old words, or hidden meanings in these words, like a philologist excavating “linguistic mines” in search of “fossil poetry”, he remembered Emerson’s comment on language, which is why he mentions the American poet in his book.  In another section of his book O Anticrítico (The Anticritic, 1986, p.41), he presents one of his philological findings, the anagram SCIENS / NESCIS: “knowing” / “not knowing”, which indicates that one word is in the other. This pair of words was repeatedly used in the “Mandate Sermon”, inserted in Latin sentences, by Father Antonio Vieira (1608-1697), a Portuguese / Brazilian Jesuit, writer and pulpit-orator. This fact had never been noticed by anybody before.

In fact, in his anti-critical book, Augusto mentioned the anagram to mean that many times critics only see the signified (the meaning), but they are not capable of perceiving the signifier, because they are “blind” to the form of the content, being thus oblivious to the fact that poetry is made of words, and that words have a history and have connections beyond what the automatic hurried eye can realize. It means that words are more meaningful when there is a deep link between signified and signifier, content and form, one supporting the other. As poetry is made of words, a poet basically deals with words to express feelings, emotions and thoughts with a profound awareness of what he feels and thinks, which he expresses in writing. Nonetheless, a poet can never forget that his medium is the collection of words called the linguistic code. At this point, we must also mention that this concept of “poetry made of words, not ideas” (CAMPOS, 1977, p.141), which is so dear to the Concrete poets, was borrowed from the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the author of Un Coup de Dés, which was translated into Portuguese, along with a collection of other poems, by them. The book, simply entitled Mallarmé, also presents critical reviews and detailed information on their process of poetical re-creations of Mallarmè’s poems by the Concrete trinity[3]: the Campos brothers and Décio Pignatari (1980). Pignatari was responsible for the re-design of “L’après-midi d’un faune” (“A Faun’s summer afternoon”) in our tongue. In fact, language designer was exactly the term used by Pignatari (CAMPOS, 1977, p.142) to characterize the poet, comparing him to an “industrial designer” trying to find the best configuration for a projected object, which is similar to the poetic function of the language, where it “turns” to itself, focusing on the “sensitive structure of its message.”, or the object to be produced.

In order to produce a beautiful object, Augusto de Campos has given the following lesson on the poetic function of the language: when translating, we must do version, not inversion[4] (1986, p.17), which is the act of grasping the essence of the original text in order to re-create it in an adequate and direct way without turns and twists of the mind. That is, the re-created text needs to be simple or complex according to its original arrangements of elements, especially when it comes to grammar. We must not change the original array. We must not make it more difficult or easier to please one or another type of reader. In particular, this idea applies to the Portuguese language, due to the fact that in our language we can invert the position of the subject and the verb (the main verb), which makes it very easy to produce terminal rhymes when translating poetry. The problem is that this is a source of mental laziness for literary laborers, because they do not use their capabilities to the full (In Portuguese, verbs are arranged in three inflectional groups, or “conjugations”; when we look at the infinitive forms it becomes clear to us how easy it is to rhyme verbs of the same group at the end of a line: the first group ends in –ar: amar, falar, cantar / to love, to speak, to sing; the second group ends in –er: correr, tremer, ferver / to tun, to tremble, to boil; and the third group ends in –ir: sentir, partir, dormir / to feel, to leave, to sleep. If there is any difficulty, we only need to insert an infinitive form in the verse, put it at the end of the line, and look for verbs within the same group, rhyming verbs with verbs.). So he advises people who are interested in this activity to remember that they must resist the temptation to resort to this old-fashioned procedure. The “prevalent criterion” is “directness of language”, although sometimes it is necessary to make some grammatical “dislocations” which are present even in the original texts. However, we should not make that a rule. The norm should be the other way around, despite the sometimes tiring effort a translator must make to find satisfactory poetic solutions. When re-creating Dante’s Canto V from “Inferno”, he found out that other translators had made many unnecessary inversions, destroying the beauty of Dante’s aesthetic “cathedral” and straight sentence structure: “e caddi come corpo morto cade”, in Augusto de Campos’ poetic transposition, naturally became “e caí como corpo morto cai” (CAMPOS, 1986, p.35). Longfellow’s version of this verse reads: “And fell, even as a dead body falls”[5]. Our suggestion is: “And I fell the way a dead body falls”, which has more tension to it than Longfellows’, which is more rhetoric than rhythmic. This type of problem made Augusto re-create Canto V from the last verse to the first, to make sure that he would maintain Dante’s straightness of language. In reality, his attitude of criticizing other translators and even other critics by means of offering his own work as an alternative is what we consider to be his greatest lesson to us. One of the ways of doing that is by comparison, by allowing the reader to have access to various versions of the same text and assess freely the quality of these translations by using Pound’s suggested “ideogrammic method” (1987, p.96), as exemplified by our own work in sections 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9.

Due to the intricate mode of original configuration and “isomorphic” reconfiguration of texts, a translator can not be indifferent to what he chooses. Our subject of study will show our vision of the literary tradition. Our choice is revealing, both as an intellectual exercise and as an act of criticism. This means that our translatorial work is not separated from our view of poetry. Our capacity to do our job indicates which type of author we choose. This is a qualitative criterion and the translator-poet, to choose a first-rate author to work on, must be technically prepared and in tune with the best poetry of his time to carry on his task. This is what separates the textual operation defined here as re-creation, which involves “hard labor, devotion, erudition and patience” (CAMPOS, 1981, p.185), from literal translation.

In fact, when asked in an interview about the ample spectrum of the “translation school” created by the Concrete poets, which comprised creation, re-creation, and education[6], Haroldo de Campos said that “trans-creation of poetry from various latitudes and times” was their “preferential transcultural device”, but this activity was accompanied by a critical project to support it, and also criticism and theorizing. However, he emphasized that a “translator of poetry must master the poetic forms of his language”, besides learning other languages, naturally. The study of the “historical contexts” of the texts translated and the “critical discussions” then aroused should not be forgotten, although the translator should not try to re-produce the past in an untouched way, since it is impossible to envisage the past now without the synchronic lens of the present (CAMPOS, 1992, p.266).

As for translation as a type of criticism, which was advocated and practiced by the Concrete poets, it was inherited from Ezra Pound (1968, p.74-5), who was a poet and critic and exercised his criticism on poetry by translating the best poetry into his own language. He put into practice his theory of organizing knowledge so that his contemporaries or the next generation could rapidly find its living parts and not waste time with unnecessary matters. This is what moved Ezra Pound, “the greatest example of translator” of the twentieth century. The author of The Cantos ventured into the field of translation, searching for the best and living part of the literary tradition, in many different languages, this way subjecting his linguistic abilities to them, since he had to learn these languages in order to translate the poems. Therefore, he was putting his capabilities to the test of various “poetic dictions”, while collecting “material for his own poems”, in order to develop a theory of translation and to claim it as an “aesthetic category […] as creation” (CAMPOS, 2004, p.35).  This is what made him translate, for example: “Chinese poems (POUND, 2003, pp. 249-60), Japanese Noh Plays [the classical drama of Japan] […] (2003, pp.331-477); Provençal troubadours [such as Bernart de Ventadorn (2003, p.1127) and Arnaut Daniel (2003, pp.481-503)]; Guido Cavalcanti, the father of Tuscan poetry (2003, pp.197-227; pp.575-85); French symbolists [such as Laforgue (CAMPOS, 2004, p.36) and Rimbaud (POUND, 2003, pp.1134-7)]; [and] re-write [Sextus] Propertius (CAMPOS, 2004, p.36) […] and […] Sophocles” (POUND, 2003, pp.1066-1113), based on what he termed “criticism by translation” (POUND, 1968, p.74).

His task as poet and translator, which is at the same time a “critical and pedagogical” work, brings to the public, be it lovers of poetry or poets, a wide range of “basic poetic products, reconsidered and vivified”. His motto was: “Make it New”, which meant to “give new life to the valid literary past via translation”. He seems to be echoing Whitman’s own words from the 1855 Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass: “Past and present and future are not disjoin’d but join’d. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be, from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.623). Although Pound was referring to poetic translation and Whitman to poetic creation, in a broader context both were working on the craft of poetry, for Pound was a poet as well, and was working for the benefit of poetry everywhere.

We must then be aware that Pound, in his undertakings, united his skills as poet, translator, critic and professor in a single act, using his capabilities to organize the literary knowledge of his time and of previous and ancient times in a way that his contemporaries and future generations could find most rapidly its living parts[7]. It was part of his method of viewing literature and culture at large as a “living organism”, where “translation is also a persona through which tradition speaks. In this sense, like parody, it is too a ‘parallel song’, a dialogue not only with the voice of the original [poem], but also with other textual voices” (CAMPOS, 1981, p.191). To show how Pound was interested in other fields of knowledge, it is worth mentioning that he borrowed the term “Paideuma” from Leo Frobenius, the famous German ethnologist and archaeologist[8], to define his work of organizing knowledge so that the current and future generations would not waste time with what is not the product of a fruitful creativity. Re-recreating foreign literature in English was a practical consequence of vivifying literary culture, arousing interest in a literary piece in different languages, injecting life in cultures, language, authors and texts long ignored or forgotten in the western world by mainstream criticism or authors (some of Pound’s works in this respect have been cited above). Pound was so keen on his re-creations that he sometimes even became a “traduttore/traditore” (translator/traitor) of poetry, to use the famous pun, a play on words that describes the “betrayal” of the original poetic form or significance in the translation of a poem.

Actually, this play on words is a figure of speech, paronomasia, which consists of using similar words or phrases with different meanings for rhetorical or poetical effect, whether humorous or serious (ex.: aero = of aircraft / arrow = pointed shaft; affect = to change / effect = result; ail = sick / ale = beer). It also designates the similarity between words from different languages that come from a common origin (cognates in different languages: night (English), nuit (French), Nacht (German, Dutch), noite (Portuguese) all meaning “night” and derived from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) nokt-, “night.”; star (English), astre or étoile (French), stella (Latin, Italian), estrela (Portuguese), from the PIE hst?r-, “star”). Another example is Whitman’s dear term, comrade/camerado, which he used in poems such as “For You O Democracy” and “The Base of All Metaphysics” from “Calamus”, to define the loving base for his dream of an “indissoluble” continent:

A comrade can be socially or politically close, a closeness that is found at the etymological heart of the word comrade. In Spanish the Latin word camara (Late Latin: camera), with its Late Latin meaning “chamber, room,” was retained, and the derivative camarada, with the sense “roommates, especially barrack mates,” was formed. Camarada then came to have the general sense “companion.” English borrowed the word from Spanish and French (camarade = roommate), English comrade being first recorded in the 16th century (Greek: kamar?).

(Available at <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/comrade>; accessed on April 17, 2007.)

The political use of the word around the world, up to current times, indicates the precision of his choice, which enriched his poetry, semantically speaking. But paronomasia is really used in poetry to refer, in its broadest sense, to a “correlation of sound and meaning” in passages where such similarities suggest new connections and create surprising effects in the poems. So, even when Pound was betraying the original in its literal meaning, especially if he did not do it consciously, but by “gross mistake”, even then he was so faithful to the tone of the original that he was capable of re-creating the pieces in a strong and lively way. It is an appropriation of the existing cultural or literary heritage.

Thus, a translator, who might also be a “poet or writer”, according to Haroldo de Campos, should “configure” an “active tradition”, which will then lead him to a “living criticism” (1992, p.43). That is, the translator’s choice is closely connected to his intellectual capabilities, for a “stimulating pedagogy” will be a natural consequence of a good choice. The point here is that the functions of writing, translating, criticizing, teaching, and organizing literary knowledge are not separated. All these activities together are part of a poet translator critic’s job of trying to participate actively in the life of the literature of his country and time, creating this bridge between the past and the present. It is a textual dialogue between authors of different times and also of different places.

Whitman, the poet who did not “repel the past” and made the past a living force, also agrees with Pound when he writes that the “greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is”, which is linked to Pound’s idea inherited by the Concrete Poets that we must look for the best poetry in each age. A solid construction must be built upon a solid base, otherwise it will fall down. This is why a translator’s choice of an author, according to his idea of an “active tradition”, is a clear sign of his position as translator and critic of that tradition.

[1] Augusto de Campos is Haroldo’s brother. He is also a poet, critic and re-creator of poetry and inventive prose. He has re-created the works of authors such as Dante, Donne, E. Dickinson, Lewis Carrol, Gertrude Stein, etc, into Portuguese.  More detailed information (Portuguese/English) on this author and his works readily available at: <http://www2.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/home.htm>. Accessed on April 20, 2007.

[2] A “rubai” is a “quatrain”, a stanza that consists of four lines. In section 3.7, we will compare our re-creation of a couple of quatrains to Augusto’s.

[3] In the “Introductory note” to the second edition, Haroldo points to the fact that they had been working together for 20 years, and that it was this teamwork that had made it possible for them to face this challenge together. Working in teams was another characteristic of the group.

[4] Actually, the idea in Portuguese is “verter, não inverter”, but it is impossible to put this in English as verbs. So we used the pair of nouns: version / inversion. Pound (1968, pp.11-12) said the same about Yeats: “Mr. Yeats has once and for all stripped English poetry of its perdamnable rhetoric. He has boiled away all that is not poetic—and a good deal that is. He has become a classic in his own lifetime and nel mezzo del cammin. He has made our poetic idiom a thing pliable, a speech without inversions.”

[5] This translation was by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), an American poet. The Divine Comedy is available nowadays on the internet on many websites. The following web page is a very good one, because it provides translations of this work into many languages: <http://www.divinecomedy.org/divine_comedy.html>. Acessed on April 20, 2007.

[6] This was the pedagogical aspect of the movement, based on the idea that the problem of comprehension of modern poetry would be solved by education, which must update its techniques to make it easier for the student / reader to understand the growing complexities of current literature; in this case, new mass media technologies could help too (CAMPOS, 1977, p.153).

[7] Complete quotation on the second function of criticism (the first one is to “forerun composition”, which has no “use to actual composers”): “[…] The general ordering and weeding out of what has actually been performed. The elimination of repetitions. […] The ordering of knowledge so that the next man (or generation) can most readily find the live part of it, and waste the least possible time among obsolete issues” (POUND, 1968, p.75).

[8] In 1920, Frobenius founded the Institute for Cultural Morphology in Munich. In 1932, he became honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt, and in 1935, director of the municipal ethnographic museum. In 1897/1898 Frobenius defined several “culture areas”, cultures showing similar traits that have been spread by diffusion or invasion. With his term paideuma, Frobenius wanted to describe a Gestalt (A collection of physical, biological, psychological or symbolic entities that creates a unified concept, configuration or pattern which is greater than the sum of its parts.), a manner of creating meaning that was typical of certain economic structures. This was the concept of culture as a living organism. Ezra Pound corresponded with Frobenius in the 1920s, initially on economic topics. The story made its way into Pound’s Cantos through this connection. (Information available at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Frobenius>; accessed on: April 17, 2007.) (For more information on Frobenius and his work, see: <http://www.frobenius-institut.de/index_en.htm>)

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