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.

3.8 Some examples of re-creation: Fitzgerald, Joyce, Dickinson (Part 3)

Before giving examples from Leaves of Grass, we must pay a tribute to another poet who is always a source of hard and inventive work for any translator: Emily Dickinson (1830–86), who died at the age of 55, an American poet who was practically unknown during her lifetime. She lived almost all of her secluded life in Amherst, a town in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States. Her poetic craft produced 1775 poems, but only ten of them were published during her lifetime. Augusto de Campos (1986, pp.108-9), who re-created ten of her poems, included in the book The Anticritic, believes her poetic revolution is more radical than Whitman’s. This is perhaps the reason why the Concrete poets never translated the latter. Campos compares Dickinson to Whitman, Emerson and Poe, and states that the “density of her poetic language” makes her more modern than the other poets, for her “concentration of thought”, “syntactic disruption” and her liberation from formal punctuation, characteristics of twentieth century poets. Bloom calls this feature of her poetry  “formidable intensity” (1995, p.273), and says that, according to one of his requirements for including an author in the Canon, “strangeness”, Dickinson can be placed next to Dante, Milton and Whitman. Thus, we offer here the result of our work over poem XI from Complete Poems, Part One: Life[1] (published in 1924; actually, the complete edition of her works was done only in 1954). The main objective, aesthetically, was to bring the whispering atmosphere into our language, the S sounds, and her sharp notions sculpted on precise sentences that convey her knowledge of long observations of society from afar.

XI

Much madness is divinest sense

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.

3.2 The method

Haroldo[1] de Campos, one of the most distinguished Brazilian poet translators, who, along with Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari, launched the Concrete Poetry Movement in Brazil in the 1950’s, states, referring to information conveyed through texts, that while “documentary and semantic information” or denotative information on things and events can be conveyed in various grammatical ways when translated.  Since the focus is on the meaning and not its forms, “aesthetic information” can only be transmitted in the form created by the artist[2]. In this manner, unlike denotative subject matter, “aesthetic information is equal to its original codification,”[3] which includes gesture, atmosphere, attunement (to bring into harmony with), and feelings related to lived contexts. Therefore, the “fragility of aesthetic information is […] highest” (CAMPOS, 1992, p.33), as it depends entirely on the particular form conceived by the artist and can not be arranged in any other way without a significant loss of beauty. As the “aesthetic information is inseparable from its realization“, it can not be disconnected from its original medium, which is, in this case, the specific language the literary work of art was written in.

The problem then appears when a translator needs to render a poetic text from one language into another. In order to be faithful to the meaning of the original, a translator must betray its original form, which is untranslatable, given the syntactical and morphological differences between languages. Thus, the more we are faithful to meaning, the less we are to form, which means that, in the case of poetry, beauty as it is produced by the form of the original will be lost in translation. This does not mean that everything will be lost, because sometimes a literal translation provides a perfect verse in the other language; but most of the time the poetic elements are not re-created. In this sense, from the point of view of literal translation, poetry is quite untranslatable, or at least its form. It occurs to us that this process is like transporting the soul of a poet to a foreign land without his body. It becomes a ghost, because we know that his spirit is there in the text, but we do not know where. So, when the reader is enjoying a great text in translation, the reader may experience the feeling that something is missing. Due to this, the translator, guided by the meaning or content of the original text, becomes a performer of tasks, for where the content points he must follow its tracks, providing means for the sense to manifest itself in another language. With regard to literal translation, this is what has to be done.

However, in this kind of work, when we take creativity into consideration, the translator’s work amounts to almost nothing. He might have an incredibly creative text on his hands, but he will be oppressed by its semantic information. In the sense that he might have something poetically beautiful, but at the same time he will have to express it in a long array of terms that will destroy the beauty as it is seen in the original language, especially when the text is in verse. Sometimes it can be metaphors that he will have to explain rather than re-create, or rhymes or rhythm. This happens even in prose. From our experience, literal translation means basically reading the original and writing down the text in the target language. Consequently, this type of translation involves little imagination and creativity. The translator does not have to create anything, for the task requires basically reading and interpreting. It is similar to translating technical texts, which involves research on specific jargon, such as Law or Medicine. Consequently, the purely literary aspect of the language does not have any effect in this part of the work. And the translator is overwhelmed by the original, for it allows him at most to be a good reader and linguistic researcher, or a scrivener, who copies a text into another language.

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.

2.5.1 The myth of calamus

There is a network of interconnections in Leaves of Grass around the word calamus, or reed. It points to several myths, meanings and details that lead us to many directions; however, they are all related in some way to this plant. It is as though the reed were a tree with various branches. We shall seek here to try and follow these branches to find the   flowers and fruits they might give us. First, it is necessary to go back in time to the account of the myth of calamus (or kalamos, in Greek), which will take us to the Greek mythological figure that bears this name:

Calamus, the son of the river-god Meander, his name means ‘reed’. He was in love with a youth named Carpus [Karpos, in Greek]. One day they were both bathing in the Meander and Calamus wanted to show his friend that he was the better swimmer, but in the competition that ensued Carpus was drowned. In his grief Calamus withered to such extent that he became a reed by the river bank. (GRIMAL, 1991, p.80)

From the start, we have an allusion both to male love and antiquity, that is, to a mythological past, the past that Whitman did not want to “repel”, as he stated in the first sentence of his Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. We can see in this very brief record of the myth the summary of what the poet wanted to express by the “Calamus” cluster: manly attachment, comradeship, “unphysical” or disembodied love between men, union, nationality. Certainly the title of this cluster was not chosen at random, for Whitman was an expert on inventing titles for poems and books. As indicated by the manly attachment of the myth, the “Calamus” poems are widely recognized as homage to male love, as is stated by Canby (1943, p.176) in his Walt Whitman, An American, “A Study in Biography” of the America bard:

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.

Section 3.4 of my dissertation is on: parallelism, enumeration, catalogues (Bible and Greek epics), and meter and the transposition of Leaves of Grass to Portuguese.

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.

Dear readers,

I offer here a passage from my PhD dissertation (degree earned in 2008), section 3.8 (pp. 167-9), in which I showed some examples of poetic translations (English-Portuguese)  that I had performed before starting to work on Leaves of Grass. This is my tribute to this great North-American artist.

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.

SEARCHING FOR WHOLENESS, OR DIVINITY

The passage “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then, I contradict myself. / I am large, I contain multitudes.”, from section 51 of “Song of Myself”, is a true picture of Whitman and the Leaves. For the author as well as the book contain multitudes. “Multitudes” means a great number of things or people, the masses, the populace, hosts, legions, armies, or even multiple points of view, as in the expression “a multitude of reasons”. A reader may be even puzzled by the Leaves for many years, feeling confused by not comprehending its messages, and considering himself unintelligent for not being able to capture the totality of the work or to grasp its open or hidden meanings.

However, when this reader finds words like: “Except for Dickinson (the only American poet comparable to him in magnitude), there is no other nineteenth-century poet as difficult and hermetic as Whitman [...]“, and “Only an elite can read Whitman, despite the poet’s insistence that he wrote for the people [...]“, written by Bloom (1985, p.3), he understands that he needs more than a superficial comprehension of the book to really walk down these leafy roads.

The poet was not easy to be understood; although he was acquainted with people of all ranks, he preferred to be with the common men, as he called himself “one of the roughs”(BLOOM, 1985, p.2), someone who enjoyed being with the common people on ferries and buses, as he truly confesses in this poem, “To the Prevailing Bards”, from “Uncollected Poems”:

Clique aqui para ler o texto completo.