5 CONCLUSION (Part 19)
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:
5 CONCLUSION (Part 15)
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.
5 CONCLUSION (Part 10)
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.
5 CONCLUSION (Parte 6)
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.
5 CONCLUSION (Part 2)
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:
3.9 Passages from Leaves of Grass
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.
3.7 Leaves of Grass in Brazil
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”.
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”:
