Before giving examples from Leaves of Grass, we must pay a tribute to another poet who is always a source of hard and inventive work for any translator: Emily Dickinson (1830–86), who died at the age of 55, an American poet who was practically unknown during her lifetime. She lived almost all of her secluded life in Amherst, a town in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States. Her poetic craft produced 1775 poems, but only ten of them were published during her lifetime. Augusto de Campos (1986, pp.108-9), who re-created ten of her poems, included in the book The Anticritic, believes her poetic revolution is more radical than Whitman’s. This is perhaps the reason why the Concrete poets never translated the latter. Campos compares Dickinson to Whitman, Emerson and Poe, and states that the “density of her poetic language” makes her more modern than the other poets, for her “concentration of thought”, “syntactic disruption” and her liberation from formal punctuation, characteristics of twentieth century poets. Bloom calls this feature of her poetry “formidable intensity” (1995, p.273), and says that, according to one of his requirements for including an author in the Canon, “strangeness”, Dickinson can be placed next to Dante, Milton and Whitman. Thus, we offer here the result of our work over poem XI from Complete Poems, Part One: Life[1] (published in 1924; actually, the complete edition of her works was done only in 1954). The main objective, aesthetically, was to bring the whispering atmosphere into our language, the S sounds, and her sharp notions sculpted on precise sentences that convey her knowledge of long observations of society from afar.
XI
Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest mad-
ness.
‘T is the majority
In this, as all, prevail.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, – you’re straightway dan-
gerous,
And handled with a chain.
OUR RE-CREATION:
XI
Muita demência é diviníssimo
Senso pra um olho discernente;
Muito senso demência in-
tensa.
Nisso, como em tudo, a
Maioria prevalece.
Consente, e tu és são;
Duvida, e já és da-
noso,
E preso num grilhão.
.
Although Campos says that Dickinson’s poetic revolution was more radical than Whitman’s, we must not forget the other aspects of his genius, as Freyre reminded us in his conference “Comrade Whitman” about the fact that in Whitman the poet, the man and the politician can not be separated. Perhaps Dickinson’s capacity for breaking the limits of conventional language was really more brilliant than Whitman’s, and surely her disposition to lead a solitary life was greater, but the other aspect or aspects of a public figure were lacking in her. We could say that Whitman’s position in society, that is, literarily, personally and politically, is the opposite of hers, because he was a public person, he was in touch with the movements of the world. He was a person in the world, an observer who was close to it, taking part in it, as he sings in section 4 of “Song of Myself”: he was “Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.”; he was playing the game of the world, but at the same time he was critically observing it, and reasoning about it, and not being a mere naturalistic observer who was just portraying it from outside, while she was an observer who was literally invisible to the world, although definitely not a naturalistic one, either! However, like the lady in section 11 of “Song of Myself”, with “Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.”, who “[…] hides, […], aft the blinds of the window.”, and who stays “stock still” in her room, being just the “unseen hand” that passes over the body of the world, watching the world as a voyeur does, she never left her position as such. She never left the position behind the curtains to go there to touch and see the world in motion, feeling all its odors, sorrows and joys, being in close contact with the stuff that makes the world, sharing in it and actively taking a stand in it.
We could say then that they both did similar works in literature, both were revolutionaries. However, while one carried out a public revolution, the other did a private one. One fought openly on the field. The other did it from behind the trenches of privacy. Both are coherent in their behavior. Traditionally, they can be seen as archetypes of the human Male and Female. Nevertheless, they still are the two greatest geniuses of North American poetry, and still remain two great literary mysteries and endless sources for literary students. As Professor Warren[2] points out about Whitman’s revolution in the following passage:
The poems Whitman published from 1938 to 1850 are mainly exercises in iambic tetrameter quatrains, with rhymed second and fourth lines. Archaisms and conventional poetic formulas dominate the diction, especially in the earliest poems. [...] With very little warning, then, the 1855 Leaves marks an abrupt departure from Whitman’s previous style and an absolute discontinuity with the traditions of English verse. (WARREN, 1997, p.46)
This discontinuity has been shown by us when we compared Whitman’s style to Longfellow’s, indicating the poetic re-molding performed by the first, departing from the mellowness of traditional songbirds. Naturally, this withdrawal from traditional forms had its basis on them, which became, now transformed, made new, adapted to a new era, the alchemy of old poetry into modern singing. Dickinson followed the same procedure. Though she has her own way into poetry, as Bloom (1995, p.276) puts it: “Literary originality achieves scandalous dimensions in Dickinson, and its principal component is the way she thinks through her poems.”, for her originality is “cognitive” (1995, p.272). Regarding this aspect she can be compared to Shakespeare, Dante, Blake and Whitman. Although “Her own obvious affinity is with Emerson’s poetry, but her immediate precursors, like his, are the English High Romantics, and her underground affiliations are surprisingly Shakespearean.” Like Whitman, she has a relationship with the past, which she does not deny. It is rather the other way around, for “The immense legacy of the male tradition was a singular advantage for her, since she had an original relation to that literary cosmos” (1995, p.276). This attitude toward the past is shared by Whitman, which is signalized by Warren in this passage:
The model of revolutionary style reveals a more varied and complex sense of Whitman’s relationship to tradition than the totalizing critical narrative suggests. [...] “Song of Myself,” although utterly revolutionary in style and theme, also pays ample tribute to the past. (WARREN, 1997, p.47)
[1] Bartleby website offers 597 poems by Emily Dickinson, including this one, at: <http://www.bartleby.com/113/>. Accessed on June 10, 2007.
[2] WARREN, James Perrin. “Reading Whitman’s Postwar Poetry”. In: GREENSPAN, Ezra. The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman. Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.46. (James Perrin Warren is Assistant Professor of English at Washington and Lee University.)
