3.9 Passages from Leaves of Grass

Thus, we shall begin now to quote some passages from Leaves of Grass, reminding ourselves and the reader of Whitman’s “abrupt departure” from traditional poetic forms. Even though we have brought here examples of creative literary works by Fitzgerald, Joyce and Dickinson, in terms of specific poetic invention we have to say that Whitman’s poetry takes a slightly different path, which is that of re-modeling traditional prosody and forms. What we mean is that, like him, we first learned how to write and translate poetry in the traditional way, and only after we had repeated exercises in this field, we started to work on the free verses of Leaves of Grass. So the kind of poetry shown earlier especially Fitzgerald’s and Joyce’s is not a common feature of the Leaves.

On the other hand, there are some features of the Leaves that certainly must be faced by any translators in order to re-create the content and revolutionary form of the original. The Leaves places two problems that become one: an illusory facility and a real difficulty. As it is a poetic work written in free, or blank, verse, which means the lines are not rhymed, apparently the translator’s work is softened. However, free verses are not exempt from some of the main elements of poetry: rhythm and meter. This is the illusory facility we have spoken of, since it looks like simple poetry, like a free flow of thoughts and feelings, without poetic or aesthetic elements that maintain it. We do not need to go too far in translation to realize the mistake. The brief examples of translations quoted above by Geir Campos, Ramos, Lopes and Meira are enough to show that it is not easy to grasp the aura of the Leaves, that distinctive quality that makes the Leaves so beautiful and inspiring, which makes the readers re-read it time and again. As the poet sings in section 4 of “I sing the Body Electric”, from “Children of Adam”, pointing to this ineffable, indescribable energy: “There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well; /All things please the soul—but these please the soul well.” He completes the idea in section 5, when he chants the Female: “This is the female form; / A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot; / It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction!”. What he says of women can be said of his poetry. It has attracted readers with this force, like a magnet. It is part of the translator’s job to grasp this energy that permeates the Leaves, so that we can inject it in the veins of the poems in Portuguese. Without it, the Leaves are dead.

Apart from this spiritual work of feeling or catching this pervading energy that circulates through the book like “[…] circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out” (section 9), we must be careful not to lose track of semantic content, besides the structural ones. We must do this because the only poetic feature that is not always present in Leaves of Grass is the rhymes at the end of the lines (tail or end rhyme). The other aesthetic elements are there, as shown by Whitman’s critics and biographers cited in this work. In this manner, what we have called an illusory facility becomes the second and same problem: the real difficulty to translate the Leaves. For the poet de-constructs the form and content of past and even contemporary poetry to achieve the new model according to his close view of the world, modulating into his poetry the voices and events of his time, bringing into it the world observed outside of his internal space, mixing his feelings and thoughts with those of the common men, the masses. These voices and masses are present in the Leaves via the catalogues, through the long enumerations of people, places and things, or simply of them, as in this passage from section 24 of “Song of Myself”:

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3.7 Leaves of Grass in Brazil

As unusual notes from an uncommon singer, we will offer in the body of our work the re-creation in Portuguese of the following books/poems from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “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”; “A Song for Occupations”; “A Song of the Rolling Earth”; “Youth, Day, Old Age and Night”; “BIRDS OF PASSAGE”; “SEA-DRIFT”; “MEMORIES OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN”; “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”; “Proud Music of the Storm”; “Passage to India”; “Prayer of Columbus”; “The Sleepers”.

Considering that the Leaves was published in England and translated into German (1870) and French still in the nineteenth century, and translated into Italian (Foglie di Erba, by Luigi Gamberale) in 1900 (and a reprint in 1907), and into Spanish in 1912[1], and into many other languages today, receiving acclaim and admiration from authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pessoa and Lorca, who are akin to Brazilian writers, it is a mystery why it has not received appropriate attention from Brazilian editors up to now. A few incomplete editions and a popular one are not enough. Moreover, if we take into account that Leaves of Grass was only properly published in the U.S. in 1881, we are doing to Whitman today in Brazil what his countrymen did to him in the past, that is, denying him his rightful place among us, especially for what Freyre has said about his being a personality akin to Hispanics and also to Brazilians. This is another reason to make us understand that he is needed in our land: real democracy is lacking in this tropical Republic, which was saluted by Walt Whitman in 1889 at its birth, just after he had received news of a new republic in the Americas (Brazil adopted the republican system on the 15^th of November, 1889), with a poem called “A Christmas Greeting” (From a Northern Star-Group to a Southern, in “Good-Bye My Fancy”.), translated by us and inserted in our previous work[2]:

WELCOME, Brazilian brother–thy ample place is ready;

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2.2 Brazilian editions of Leaves of Grass

Compared to what happened in other nations, the Leaves has a short and small history in Brazil. The oldest edition is the famous Folhas das Folhas de Relva (Leaves from Leaves of Grass), a collection of poems and fragments translated by Geir Campos, published by Editora Brasiliense in 1983 (9th reprint in 2002; actually, the original edition was published by Editora Civilização Brasileira, 1964). After that, there is another edition by Imago Editora (2000), a literal translation of “Song of Myself” performed by André Cardoso. It is a bilingual edition, with a very careful translation, an honest work, without any pretentiousness. It is a very useful one to attentive (or inattentive) readers, for its fidelity to meaning. Then, there is a bilingual publication by Plano Editora, another selection of poems translated by Ramsés Ramos (2001). It is a literal translation, or almost that. Apart from these, there is another bilingual edition, this time a translation of the 1855 Leaves of Grass published by Iluminuras (2005), whose translator is Rodrigo Garcia Lopes, who is also a poet, journalist, and composer. This edition contains everything from the original edition: the preface and the twelve poems, which are accompanied by notes to the poems, a postface, and bibliography. In the postface, the translator gives detailed historical, economic, social and literary information on the United States of the nineteenth century, and discusses Whitman’s “basic procedures” of writing, such as borrowing words from other languages, parallelism, free verse, and catalogues. In short, it is a good homage to Whitman. Finally, there is a popular edition by Martin Claret publishing house of the complete text of the Leaves (Folhas de Relva, 2005), with an introduction by Luciano Alves Meira, the translator. Meira comments briefly on Whitman and the book, but nothing is said of the operation of bringing the whole Leaves of Grass into Portuguese, which must have been a tremendous and long effort.

As for the other nations, it was published in England and translated into German (1870) and French still in the nineteenth century. It was translated into Italian (Foglie di Erba, by Luigi Gamberale) in 1900 (with a reprint in 1907); and into Spanish in 1912[1]. It received acclaim and admiration from authors such as José Marti, Jorge Luis Borges, Pessoa and Lorca a long time ago and it has not received appropriate attention from Brazilian editors until today. There are in Brazil, up to the present, only the above mentioned few incomplete editions and the popular one, which are not able to completely re-create the atmosphere of the original, with its length of breath, flowing rhythm and unfolding images. These details are thoroughly dealt with in chapter 3, section 3.7, where we compare these translations to our own.

The editorial problems faced by Leaves of Grass in Brazil are similar to the hardships Whitman underwent in his own country concerning the publication of his books. Leaves of Grass was only properly published in the U.S. in 1881, which means that it took a long time since the first edition, in 1855, for the publishing houses to turn their attention to Whitman. This means that the author had been financially responsible for all the previous editions of the Leaves. His reception in both countries shows hostility from the critics and public (TREVISAN, 2001, p.207). However, the situation here seems to be worse, for a long time has elapsed since then and other countries have given him adequate attention, while we still fail in accomplishing the same task.

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1 INTRODUCTION

The purpose of our work is to render a considerable part of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in Portuguese, so that the Brazilian reader can have an idea of who the great American poet was and what his poems convey. It is also intended to provide some information on his influence on the following generation of writers. In order to do this, we have divided the central part of our research in three chapters: chapter 2, Criticism and Context, contains a short account of the publishing history of the Leaves in the United States and its Brazilian editions. It also presents a critical review of the authors who have helped us to better understand Whitman and the Leaves, as well as a critical analysis of one major symbol in the Leaves, the calamus, or sweet-flag. In chapter 3, Re-creating Leaves of Grass Into Portuguese; we describe our method of creative translation, which can also be referred to as re-creation, or poetic re-recreation, which is different from literal translation. This chapter also presents our mentors in this type of translation, a discussion on the poetic aspects of Whitman’s verse, some authors who are literarily connected to Whitman and some examples of poetic re-creation. Chapter 4 contains the poems and books which we have been re-creating since 2006. In chapter 5, the conclusion, we shall analyze the result of our work and assess if it has been fruitful. We will give now more details of this research, of Whitman, of Leaves of Grass and creative translation.

As we will find in chapter 2, which we believe will help the reader to understand the whole matter, Leaves of Grass comprises the complete poetic works of Walt Whitman. The first edition was published by the poet in 1855 with only the title and a picture of Whitman on its cover. The 1855 edition contained the famous Preface plus twelve poems, which had no titles either. Whitman’s name appeared only in the middle of the poem that is known now as “Song of Myself,” in the passage that later became section 24 (there were no subdivisions either in the first edition), in a verse that read: “Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, a kosmos,” as we can see in a Brazilian edition of the 1855 edition by Iluminuras publishing house (WHITMAN, 2005, p.76). After a few changes over the years, Whitman finally arrived at the current and more poetic version of this line in 1881: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” (WHITMAN, 2002, P.45). In subsequent editions, the poet gave titles to all the poems, and inscribed his name on the cover. The fact is that every new book or cluster of poems that he wrote, he added them to the already published book, keeping the same general title. Whitman did that from the 1856 second edition until the 1891-2 last or final edition, which is called the “authorized” or “deathbed” edition, and which is the one that is used as the source of our creative translations.

Apart from the absence of the author’s name on the cover and of poem titles, the most striking literary fact[1] after the release of the first edition was that, among many people whom Whitman sent copies of his book, Emerson was the only one who personally answered him in writing, that is, by sending the poet the a letter that became famous in the History of American Literature, in which the poet-philosopher acknowledged Whitman’s poetic genius. Emerson, who was a great influence on Whitman, and would remain a friend for life, gave Whitman this “safe-conduct” into the literary world. Later, in section 2.5.6 there will be more information on the connection between these two poets and how some Emersonian ideas on poetry and poets are assimilated into Leaves of Grass, especially Emerson’s concept of “Language as fossil poetry” and the poet as “namer”, which is linked to Whitman’s role as American Adam in his book “Children of Adam”. In the same section we will discuss how Whitman’s poetry relates to William Blake’s at the spiritual level, and what there is of vision and prophecy in their writings. In section 3.4, when we discuss the catalogues, those long lists of people, professions, cities, countries and geographical locations, we will also refer to religiousness, since the Bible is one of the sources of this type of writing.

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Alan Trachtenberg writes about Whitman’s influence on modern poets in his essay “Walt Whitman: Precipitant of the Modern” (GREENSPAN, 1997, pp.194-207).
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