REFERENCES

ALI, Manuel Said. Versificação Portuguesa. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2006.

ALLEN, Gay W. The Solitary Singer: a critical biography of Walt Whitman. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1955.

ALIGHIERI, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Available at: <http://www.divinecomedy.org/divine_comedy.html>. Acessed on April 20, 2007.

ANDRADE, Oswald de. Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar. São Paulo: Globo; Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1990.

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.

3.5 Oswald de Andrade, Fernando Pessoa, Aléxis de Tocqueville, Gilberto Freyre

Part 4

As we have mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, now we will try to provide a few hints on how Gilberto Freyre has helped us to understand Whitman and his Leaves better. In addition, how all these elements just mentioned are related. We will show, through Freyre’s view, the similarities between the Brazilian and American systems of slavery and patriarchalism. Finally, we will show the relation between Freyre and Whitman, and how poetry, society and culture are all interwoven. In order to do that, we will quote passages from the preface to The Masters and The Slaves (1984). In his preface, Freyre reminds the reader of some aspects of a typical Big House[1], which is “completed by the slave shed”, and “represents an entire economic, social, and political system”. It is a system of “production (latifundiary monoculture)”; of “labor ( slavery)”; of “transport (the ox-cart, the hammock, the horse)”; of “religion (family Catholicism)”; of sexual and family life (polygamous patriarchalism)”; and finally, of a “bodily and household hygiene ([…] the banana stalk, the river bath […])”, and of “politics (compadrismo)” (FREYRE, 1984, p. lxiii). “Compadrismo”, in this context, can be translated into English by a slang term: back-scratching, which defines a reciprocal beneficial relationship between people, in which land-owners exchanged political courtesy. Nonetheless, our purpose in alluding to these characteristics of the Big House, in the poetic context just described, is to emphasize the presence of the “banana stalk” (the other aspects are addressed by Oswald’s manifestos as well), which appears in the excerpts of poems quoted above, and especially because de Abreu lived on a farm as a boy, since his father and mother were both farmers. He lived on his mother’s farm in the nineteenth century at a time when slavery was a legal institution in this country. Also because around the Big House there usually were a lot of “parrot and birds cages” hanging all around the verandas. Probably there were thrushes in the cages, a fact that is pointed out by Freyre as a typical “local feature”, which surprised every foreign visitor. This custom is reflected in Oswald’s “Brazil wood Manifesto”:

The Brazil wood Poetry is a Sunday dining room, with birds singing in the reduced cage woods, a thin fellow composing a waltz for the flute and Maricota reading the newspaper. In the newspaper you can find all the present.

“The present”, or current events, was what both poet-journalists, Whitman and Oswald, portrayed in their writings.

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.

3.5 Oswald de Andrade, Fernando Pessoa, Aléxis de Tocqueville, Gilberto Freyre

Part 3

This, again, is a link between Oswald and Whitman, for absorption was a process that was carried on by Whitman for a long time before publishing his Leaves. Allen (1955, p.125) stresses that the poet “read with astonishing application”, and that he considered “reading as a creative activity”, proven by Whitman’s constant re-reading of “extracts from books and magazines” (p.126), collected and annotated by the young journalist. Canby (1943), another biographer of his, writes an entire chapter (III) on this subject in the life of the poet, who was given “a subscription to a circulating library” at the age of eleven by his bosses at a law office. At age twelve, the boy “was apprenticed in a newspaper and printing office”, for “printing, publishing and editing” had been chosen by or for him as a career. At that time, already “Ink was trickling into Whitman’s blood” (1943, p.19), and certainly it would trickle in and out of his veins forever, as he confesses in this leaf, “Trickle Drops”, from the “Calamus” cluster:

TRICKLE, drops! my blue veins leaving!

O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.

3.5 Oswald de Andrade, Fernando Pessoa, Aléxis de Tocqueville, Gilberto Freyre

Part 2

Synchronically, another poet, this time in Brazil, was using the same word used by Álvaro de Campos, concrete, to refer to his artistic work. We refer to Oswald de Andrade, a journalist, writer, playwright, and poet. Oswald[1], one of the leading figures in the 1922 Week of Modern Art, became a poet at the age of thirty-five. Like Pessoa and Whitman, he was not only an author, but also a thinker: he wrote literary criticisms, two theses (a literary and a philosophical one) and edited newspapers and magazines. Like Whitman, who, up to 1849 when he gave up practical politics, had been a member of the Democratic Party and then of the new Republican Party, Oswald was a political activist and became a member of the Brazilian Communist Party in 1931. According to Décio Pignatari, “after Machado de Assis, Oswald is our only thinker-writer”. Pignatari means writer of fiction, naturally[2]. However, it is in the field of literature that our interest rests: in his “Manifesto Antropófago”, published in “Revista de Antropofagia”[3], Oswald asserted, among other ideas, that they were “concretists”:

Tupi, or not tupi that is the question. […]

Against all the importers of canned conscience. […]

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.

3.5 Oswald de Andrade, Fernando Pessoa, Aléxis de Tocqueville, Gilberto Freyre

In this section we will address the subject of renewing the craft of poetry through the invention of free verse, and how some poets and writers relate to Whitman. From our standpoint, Oswald de Andrade, already mentioned in the previous section, is the writer who most closely resembles Whitman in Brazil, given his artistic, social and political attitudes. We will also refer to Fernando Pessoas’s literary relationship with Whitman, as well as Gilberto Freyre’s, who was an admirer of the American bard. We mention these authors in our thesis because they have helped us understand Whitman and his poetry better. We will try to contextualize them and their works properly.

Speaking of re-creating the poet’s basic tool, the language, we have to mention Oswald de Andrade, Mário de Andrade and the poets that took part in the Week of Modern Art in 1922 in São Paulo. They started their movement in opposition to the Parnassian school of poetry, which they called “office poetry”, because they thought that it was detached from the real life of the Brazilian people and from our natural environment. The modernist poets, especially Oswald and Mário de Andrade, conceived of our country as originally a land of happy and free people, Indians, subjugated by invaders, who, in a process of ritual cannibalism, would metaphorically devour the foreign culture and assimilate it into our own, creating thus a new form of art and culture, liberated from their moulds and pre-fabricated forms. In this sense, we might view the modernist poets not only as artists who promoted a linguistic revitalization of our language, but also as poets who, through this process, made modern artists from other countries better understood here.

One of the key elements in modernist poetics was the invention of free verse, which released poets from “traditional metrical laws” and stanzaic forms. Poets were then free to mix and vary these traditional forms according to their poetical skills, and also according to the themes and tones used in their writing. Their relation to Whitman is by the fact that he is viewed as one of the inventors of free-verse, together with Arthur Rimbaud[1]. Trevisan[2], a Brazilian philosopher, poet, essayist, and translator, makes this statement in his book A Poesia, Uma Iniciação à Leitura Poética (Poetry, An Initiation Into Poetic Readership, 2001, p.207). He writes that Whitman’s 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass was characterized by the “novelty” of verses without a fixed number of syllables and the use of anaphora, as in: “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore; / Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly: / Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.”, from section 11 of “Song of Myself” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.197). Trevisan also reminds us that anaphoras are a usual figure in biblical verses, besides parallelism and enumerations (p. 209), which agrees with our argument in the previous section on this aspect of Whitman’s poetry. Another example of poem that presents anaphoras is “To a Common Prostitute”, from “Autumn Rivulets”:

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.

2.5.6 “Language is fossil poetry”: poetic function, Emerson, Blake, mediums, Adam

In this chapter we are discussing themes in or related to Leaves of Grass. We shall address now the following subjects: the “poetic function” of the language, which is part of the “Scheme of verbal communication” (discussed in the next chapter, in section 3.2, “The method”); how this function relates to Emerson’s idea of poetry, and how his conception will lead us to another poet, William Blake, and then to religiousness and the mythical figure of Adam, as well as the connection between these topics and Whitman. The fact is that the poetic function has a preponderating position in poetry or in creative prose, such as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, because this is the function where the language is turned upon itself, where the writer searches for the most beautiful or precise configuration possible to express an emotion or an idea. On the other hand, we can not deny the apparently opposite factor, by which we mean the appearance or existence of poetic constructions that show up in a given language, which is inherent to Emerson’s idea that “Language is fossil poetry”, or the creation of proto-poets long forgotten, as we will see in a quotation below. In both cases, modern poetry and “fossil poetry”, the poetic function is the primary linguistic factor under focus. So, this idea of poetry appearing naturally in common speech had been expressed by Whitman’s Master[1], Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet and essayist (1803–82), who was born in Boston and attended Harvard College and Divinity School.[2]

Before we present some of Emerson’s ideas, let us take a brief look at his life and works. Through his essays, poems, and lectures, the “Sage of Concord” (he later lived in Concord, Massachusetts) established himself as a spokesman of transcendentalism and as a major figure in American literature. Transcendentalism was a philosophical and literary movement that thrived in New England from 1836 to 1860. It originated among a group of intellectuals who developed their own faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world. They were inspired by Kant and English authors such as Carlyle, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Emerson believed that the “moral law” was the “transcendental law, through which man discovers the nature of god, a living spirit.” The ideas of transcendentalism were expressed by Emerson in essays such as “Nature” (1836), “Self-Reliance,” “The Poet” and “The Over-Soul” (1841), and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden (1854), “the revelation of the simplicity and divine unity of nature”. The movement began with the meetings of a group of friends in Boston and Concord to discuss philosophy, literature, and religion. Thoreau, like Emerson, lived in Concord and attended Harvard College, which they paid by doing chores, given their scarce livelihood. Later, both became lecturers. Both, too, were the first persons to recognize Whitman’s poetic genius from the beginning. Thoreau is also the author of “Civil Disobedience”, “the origin of the modern concept of pacific resistance”.

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.

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.

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.

UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL

INSTITUTO DE LETRAS

PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM LETRAS

LITERATURAS DE LÍNGUA INGLESA

Doutorando: Gentil Saraiva Junior

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.

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

Dear readers,

my resumé page shows that I have been doing a

doctorate in poetic translation since 2005.

The good news is that I have finished it,

and got my Ph.D.

I have got an A with honors!

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.