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.
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