2.3 What we have done and what we intend to do
2.3 What we have done and what we intend to do
We have re-created a series of poems from Leaves of Grass into Portuguese and we are re-creating another group of poems now. Re-creating here means the artistic translation of poetry, which is different from literal translation in the sense that we want to reconstruct poetic elements, such as rhythm and sound, and their close relationship with their meaning (methodology and examples are provided for in chapter 3). After we accomplished the re-creation[1] of three books that are part of the Leaves, “Song of Myself”, “Children of Adam” and “Calamus”, in our Master’s thesis, a study completed in 1995 and available at the UFRGS library, we resumed our task of bringing Whitman’s poetry into our language. 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, which are: “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”. In numbers, this means something around 99 pages of poetry done in our previous work and 188 pages of the projected work now, from a total of 491 pages of poetic texts. We are using Whitman poetry and prose (1996) as our source, which contains the 1991-92 authorized edition, the one recommended by the poet himself. In chapter 5 we will explain if and what we have achieved of this projected work, how we have done it and whether the result is according to what we have proposed to do.
