3.8 Some examples of re-creation: Fitzgerald, Joyce, Dickinson
3.8 Some examples of re-creation: Fitzgerald, Joyce, Dickinson (Part 3)
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.
3.8 Some examples of re-creation: Fitzgerald, Joyce, Dickinson
3.8 Some examples of re-creation: Fitzgerald, Joyce, Dickinson (Part 2)
Now we will quote two poems by James Joyce[1], one from Chamber Music and one called “Ecce Puer”. Actually, Joyce is not famous for his poems, considered by some as minor work, or just a joke[2]. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish writer, definitely one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. His best known works are his novels Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939), and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). He is also the author of a short story collection, Dubliners (1914), some poems: “Ecce Puer”, “Gas from a Burner”, and “The Holy Office”, and two books of poems: Chamber Music (a collection of 36 poems) and Pomes Penyeach (thirteen poems[3]). Though neglected as second class literature when compared to his major works, we enjoy his poems and have almost finalized the translation of Chamber Music, from which we quote poem XVIII as homage to this great writer. We do think of them as small pearls, very well polished, and of soft lyricism. We tried to render them in our language as beautifully as possible, to maintain the tone and the concision of expression, and also the rhymes. In Portuguese, all verses have five metrical syllables (in English, they alternate between five and four), except for the last one, which has only three, like the original. Another aspect of the poem is the division of themes: the first two stanzas is the lover’s complaint about false friends; the other two describe his finding consolation at his Sweetheart’s bosom:
3.8 Some examples of re-creation: Fitzgerald, Joyce, Dickinson
3.8 Some examples of re-creation: Fitzgerald, Joyce, Dickinson (Part 1)
Naturally, no poet can achieve mastery over form without proper exercise, which means studying versification, past and present poetry, and writing and re-writing his works until finding the best form for the content he wants to convey. To revolutionize an artistic mode of expression, it is necessary to know previous and contemporary expressions of these arts and their artists, for the reason that we can not revolutionize something based on nothing, which would then be invention and not revolution. Whitman is an example of that; he knew the poetry he was re-forming. Except for occasions when we are so inspired that poems begin to form into our minds almost entirely ready to be put to paper and we only have to write them down, most of the time they need re-working. A translator who intends to re-create poetry the way we have described must follow the same course. He needs training in this field. Before we give examples from Leaves of Grass, we will show some re-creations done by us as a preparation to the Leaves.
