5 CONCLUSION (Part 19)

“Memories of President Lincoln” was composed in the weeks after Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, and was published together with Drum-Taps that same year. Everything that Whitman presents in the poem “When Lilacs…” actually took place: the “great star”, Venus, excessively low in the sky, the lilacs blooming at every dooryard, the bird singing, the processions throughout the United States, the coffin being taken to many cities, the cloud over the President after his second inauguration, as he appeared on the Capitol portico (seen or heard and recorded by Whitman), the atmosphere of fear. Everything was uncommonly strange during that month. In The Solitary Singer (1955, chapter VIII), Allen portrays this period in the life of Washington, Whitman and the Nation in great detail as well as Whitman does in the poem. As for our work in this section, we do not intend to present any passages from “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d;” we only want to stress the extreme difficulty to re-create its title, which in Portuguese became too long: “Da Última Vez Que Lilases Floriram no Pátio.” However, it is one that mirrors the original, which is also made up of two sound/sense units. In English they are divided or separated by “in,” and in Portuguese by “Que,” which also begins the second part. We tried many variables, but it was very hard to find one that carried all the meaning and at the same time sounded well. As it is a sad and sweet elegy, it must be read in a smooth and calm tone. In this way, we may feel the sounds echoing in each other through the line. In this way, the title can sound very well in Portuguese, because it carries in itself the tearing apart, the grieving and the tiredness of the nation portrayed in the poem. On the other hand, we shall present two stanzas from “Oh Captain! My Captain!,” which is a very rare piece in Whitman’s poetry, mostly written in iambs (verses with short/unstressed syllables followed by long/stressed syllables), and dedicated to the same person addressed in “When Lilacs…” Naturally, we did the best to maintain the beating pulse and rhymes of the original, and, in comparison to it, we may say that the result is fairly good:

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WHITMAN:

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5 CONCLUSION (Part 15)

The next poem, “Youth, Day, Old Age and Night,” must be quoted in full, since it has only four lines. This short poem is what was left of the poem “Great Are the Myths” from the 1855 edition, which was excluded from Leaves of Grass in 1881. Though short, it is a beautiful poem that sounds very well in Portuguese with its graceful and peaceful acceptance of old age.

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WHITMAN:

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5 CONCLUSION (Part 10)

“Song of the Broad-Axe” presents a great introductory stanza and the persistent use of anaphoras (see section 3.5). It was published in 1856 and underwent much revision, but the first six lines have remained untouched ever since. In relation to the axe mentioned in the title, Whitman’s points to his uselessness in the hands of European headsmen, while praising its use in the hands of woodcutters and lumberjacks in America (terms used to refer to this occupation before the invention of chainsaws and similar equipments). As a result of this work, there would be wood for building houses, furniture, etc. The middle part of section three is a self-reference, since he also worked as a carpenter in his youth. We will quote the first part of the poem and a passage from section 2 to illustrate the use of anaphora. Part of this poem, published in 1856, was later excluded by the poet. This part, titled “His Shape Arises”, is quoted in section 2.5.2.

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5 CONCLUSION (Parte 6)

This is a very famous part of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, one of the six elegies referred to in section 2.4; it was published in 1856, and was the best poem of that edition. This poem depicts the poet’s crossing from Manhattan to Brooklyn at the end of a working day. It transcendentally portrays everyone’s crossing, not only from one side to other, but also a crossing of time and space, from material to immaterial toward eternity. In the part quoted below the poet talks to the river; the combination of sounds, marking the movement of the semantic units within the lines, mirrors the swinging movement of the water and the waves and the coming and going of the tide.

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5 CONCLUSION (Part 2)

We shall now provide examples of poetic re-creations from Leaves of Grass so that the reader might judge our work for themselves. We will also add some comments on each poem, in order to situate the reader. For that purpose, we will also provide the original text, and when available, another translation of the same passage for comparison. We begin by quoting stanzas from the poem “Eidólons,” from “Inscriptions.” This is an example of poems in which Whitman uses regular meter. “Eidólons” is an image, a phantom, an appearance, to indicate that above or behind it the real being exists, the soul, our eternal reality. This first stanza below is made up of the following combination: a line of six syllables, then one of five plus one of six again, with a pause between them, then one of eight syllables with one of ten between parenthesis, and ending with one of four. The other verses naturally fell within the natural rhythms of our language, especially verses of six and ten syllables:

STANZA 3:

WHITMAN:

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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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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.

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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,

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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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