6 REFERENCES
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.
3.5 Part 4
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”:
3.5 Part 3
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:
3.5 Part 2
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”:
3.5 Part 1
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.
2.5.6 “Language is fossil poetry”: poetic function, Emerson, Blake, mediums, Adam
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]
1. Introduction
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.
My PhD Dissertation
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL
INSTITUTO DE LETRAS
PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM LETRAS
LITERATURAS DE LÍNGUA INGLESA
