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***

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

To a discerning eye;

Much sense the starkest mad-

ness.

‘T is the majority

In this, as all, prevail.

Assent, and you are sane;

Demur, – you’re straightway dan-

gerous,

And handled with a chain.

OUR RE-CREATION:

XI

Muita demência é diviníssimo

Senso pra um olho discernente;

Muito senso demência in-

tensa.

Nisso, como em tudo, a

Maioria prevalece.

Consente, e tu és são;

Duvida, e já és da-

noso,

E preso num grilhão.

.

Although Campos says that Dickinson’s poetic revolution was more radical than Whitman’s, we must not forget the other aspects of his genius, as Freyre reminded us in his conference “Comrade Whitman” about the fact that in Whitman the poet, the man and the politician can not be separated. Perhaps Dickinson’s capacity for breaking the limits of conventional language was really more brilliant than Whitman’s, and surely her disposition to lead a solitary life was greater, but the other aspect or aspects of a public figure were lacking in her. We could say that Whitman’s position in society, that is, literarily, personally and politically, is the opposite of hers, because he was a public person, he was in touch with the movements of the world. He was a person in the world, an observer who was close to it, taking part in it, as he sings in section 4 of “Song of Myself”: he was “Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.”; he was playing the game of the world, but at the same time he was critically observing it, and reasoning about it, and not being a mere naturalistic observer who was just portraying it from outside, while she was an observer who was literally invisible to the world, although definitely not a naturalistic one, either! However, like the lady in section 11 of “Song of Myself”, with “Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.”, who “[…] hides, […], aft the blinds of the window.”, and who stays “stock still” in her room, being just the “unseen hand” that passes over the body of the world, watching the world as a voyeur does, she never left her position as such. She never left the position behind the curtains to go there to touch and see the world in motion, feeling all its odors, sorrows and joys, being in close contact with the stuff that makes the world, sharing in it and actively taking a stand in it.

We could say then that they both did similar works in literature, both were revolutionaries. However, while one carried out a public revolution, the other did a private one. One fought openly on the field. The other did it from behind the trenches of privacy.  Both are coherent in their behavior. Traditionally, they can be seen as archetypes of the human Male and Female. Nevertheless, they still are the two greatest geniuses of North American poetry, and still remain two great literary mysteries and endless sources for literary students. As Professor Warren[2] points out about Whitman’s revolution in the following passage:

The poems Whitman published from 1938 to 1850 are mainly exercises in iambic tetrameter quatrains, with rhymed second and fourth lines. Archaisms and conventional poetic formulas dominate the diction, especially in the earliest poems. [...] With very little warning, then, the 1855 Leaves marks an abrupt departure from Whitman’s previous style and an absolute discontinuity with the traditions of English verse. (WARREN, 1997, p.46)

This discontinuity has been shown by us when we compared Whitman’s style to Longfellow’s, indicating the poetic re-molding performed by the first, departing from the mellowness of traditional songbirds. Naturally, this withdrawal from traditional forms had its basis on them, which became, now transformed, made new, adapted to a new era, the alchemy of old poetry into modern singing. Dickinson followed the same procedure. Though she has her own way into poetry, as Bloom (1995, p.276) puts it: “Literary originality achieves scandalous dimensions in Dickinson, and its principal component is the way she thinks through her poems.”, for her originality is “cognitive” (1995, p.272). Regarding this aspect she can be compared to Shakespeare, Dante, Blake and Whitman. Although “Her own obvious affinity is with Emerson’s poetry, but her immediate precursors, like his, are the English High Romantics, and her underground affiliations are surprisingly Shakespearean.” Like Whitman, she has a relationship with the past, which she does not deny. It is rather the other way around, for “The immense legacy of the male tradition was a singular advantage for her, since she had an original relation to that literary cosmos” (1995, p.276). This attitude toward the past is shared by Whitman, which is signalized by Warren in this passage:

The model of revolutionary style reveals a more varied and complex sense of Whitman’s relationship to tradition than the totalizing critical narrative suggests. [...] “Song of Myself,” although utterly revolutionary in style and theme, also pays ample tribute to the past. (WARREN, 1997, p.47)

---

[1] Bartleby website offers 597 poems by Emily Dickinson, including this one, at:  <http://www.bartleby.com/113/>. Accessed on June 10, 2007.

[2] WARREN, James Perrin. “Reading Whitman’s Postwar Poetry”. In: GREENSPAN, Ezra. The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman. Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.46. (James Perrin Warren is Assistant Professor of English at Washington and Lee University.)

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,

Candid, from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,

From wounds made to free you whence you were prison’d,

From my face, from my forehead and lips,

From my breast, from within where I was conceal’d, press forth, red       drops, confession drops,

Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody          drops,

Let them know your scarlet heat, let them glisten,

Saturate them with yourself, all ashamed and wet,

Glow upon all I have written, or shall write, bleeding drops,

Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops[1].

(WHITMAN, 1996, p.278)

He spent long years “absorbing passionately human nature behind the scenes […], scenes of nature, and books” (1943, p.25), so that he could later transform his human and literary heritage and background into something new, for he was always against mere imitation or transplantation of foreign models into the literature of his country, and also against the sole description of nature in a naturalistic way, which was also advocated by Oswald in his manifesto. The Brazilian poet was against the naturalistic detail, which for him was only “copying”. The revolution meant “invention”, “surprise”, to “see with free eyes”, without any “previous formulas for the contemporaneous expression of the world”. The expression of Brazil included the “sabiá” or “tordo”, and the Brazilian woods. Our true tropical nature was present in his manifesto, which resounded our indianist poets, properly digested. Another example of this is his poem “Meus Oito Anos” (“At Age Eight”), from Primeiro Caderno do Aluno de Poesia Oswald de Andrade (Poetry Student Oswald de Andrade’s First Notebook), published in 1927, which is a parody[2] of another famous poem in our literature, this time by Casimiro de Abreu (1839-1860), a Romantic poet, who used to write very melodious verses, such as Longfellow’s (as we will see later on, when we discuss Longfellow’s “verbal melody”); de Abreu, who was loved by the readers, died of tuberculosis at the age of 21.

This poem by de Abreu, written in our popular “redondilha major” (heptasyllables), sings of past time, the author’s childhood, when he lived happy times “À sombra das bananeiras, / Debaixo dos laranjais!” (“At the shadows of banana trees, / under the orange trees!”). Oswald makes a parody of this piece, with the same title, in the following way: he sings of the “Aurora da minha vida” (“Daybreak of my life”), recollecting his infancy at his home, but then he mentions that he did it “Debaixo da bananeira / Sem nenhum laranjais (sic)” (“Under the banana tree / With no orange trees”; 1991, p.28). Thus, the “golden dreams” of de Abreu’s world, when he lived in the countryside playing under the trees, can not be a reality any more in an urban and modern area. Besides, Oswald, as he emphasized in his “Pau Brasil Manifesto”, was also against the morbid and melancholic feelings of some of our romantic poets, particularly the ones who belonged to the “second generation” of romanticism, who suffered from the malady of the soul, for they were pessimistic, sad, and many of them died very young (both Álvares de Azevedo, 1831-1852, and Castro Alves, 1847-1871, died of tuberculosis; Alves, who actually belonged to the “third generation” that focused on social issues and was our last romantic poet, wrote many poems on slavery and became famous as an abolitionist poet).

Paulo Prado[3], in his preface to Oswald de Andrade’s book Pau-Brasil, wrote that the growth of a truly national literature was hampered in the nineteenth century by the “romantic malady that, at the birth of our nationality, infected everything and everybody so deeply”. Then, praising this new poetry, which is “the first organized effort for the freedom of the Brazilian verse”, he expects it to “terminate once and for all one of the great evils of our race – the evil of fat and crawling eloquence.” He thinks that, in modern times, poetry should be able to follow the movement of progress, and that in “this age of rapid realizations the tendency is entirely to the rude and naked expression of sensation and feeling, in a total and synthetic sincerity,” which is impossible to do with words “extracted from the Portuguese classics” and “old dictionaries” (ANDRADE, 1990, pp.57-9). Although our Romantic movement has been considered by some critics (CANDIDO & CASTELLO, 1992) of some importance and value for its literary reform and its attempt to release itself from the Portuguese tradition and influence, others are more severe and view our Romanticism more as a copy of foreign writers such as Byron, Musset, Espronceda, Chateaubriand, Cooper and Hugo, even when taken into account that the Romantic movement in Brazil helped to free our literature from a recent classicist past (HOLANDA, 1963), and the honesty and good intentions of its authors. However, Holanda argues that this entire effort of our Romantic generation was not able to grasp the real social life of our country, and eventually, it was more a movement of imagination than of reality, which was ashamed of seeing the “mean and despicable things”(1963, p.156) that were part of our early urban life. This included also Pedro II, the Emperor of Brazil, a man “of his time and of his country”, wrote Holanda (1963, p.158), who was partially responsible for the transformation of an agrarian nobility into an urban aristocracy, which was represented in literature by the writers of the time, including the Romantic poets and authors of fiction. The inconsistency and fragility of this literature is the focus of Prado’s critique, whereas the Modern movement is praised by him as the greatest effort in search for freedom in our verse. Whitman, then, is closer to our Modern poets than to the Romantic ones, as well as the Romantic poets in Brazil are closer to Longfellow, in the United States, as we will see in the next section when we discuss his detachment from the social reality of his time.

For the new times, there should be new poets and new verses. Paulo Prado sounds really like Whitman (2002, pp.621-2) in his 1855 Preface, when the American bard writes that “The poetic quality is not marshal’d in rhyme or uniformity, or abstract addresses to things, nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else, and is in the soul.” The poet adds that “The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems […] are not independent but dependent.” He continues: “All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain” and “If the greatnesses are in conjunction in a man or woman, it is enough—the fact will prevail through the universe; […] who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost.” These ideas seem all to stem from another basic idea noted down by Whitman in one of his notebooks in the late 1940’s, which Allen (1955, p.135) indicates as a “rudimentary” principle on which the poet was trying to develop his “versification”: “Be simple and clear. – Be not occult.”

One example of the morbidity fought by the modernists is expressed by de Abreu’s poem “Amor e Medo” (“Love and Fear”), included in his only book As Primaveras (The Springtimes), in which he sings that the lady is in love and he is afraid. He is afraid of many things, not only of love, as he chants in the third stanza of this poem: “Tenho medo de mim, de ti, de tudo, / Da luz, da sombra, do silêncio ou vozes.” (“I am afraid of myself, of you, of everything, / Of light, of shadow, of silence or voices.”). Moreover, de Abreu also wrote an “Exile Song”, for he lived in Portugal from 1853 to 1857. Premonitorily, in this song he begs God not to let him die soon, although he intuitively feels that he is going to die in his youth, but he still wants to hear the “sabiá” singing!

The presence of a bird as an archetype of the singer or of singing and of coming spring or summer in poetry is a common feature in literature. For instance, we could mention a Shakespearean sonnet, 102 (SHAKESPEARE, 1992, p.763), where the poet mentions Philomel (GRIMAL, 1991, p.348), one of the daughters of the king of Athens (Pandion), who was changed into a nightingale by the gods when she was persecuted by Tereus; thus Philomel became synonymous with the bird: “As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing”.  Besides that, there is the famous passage from Romeo and Juliet (SHAKESPEARE, 1992, p.355; Act 3, sc. 5), where Juliet tells Romeo that it was the nightingale that “[...] pierced the fearful hollow of [his] ear;” to mean that he did not have to hurry to go away from her window, because the nightingale sings in the middle of the night to announce that they had plenty of time to spend together. Another example of poem that brings up the figure of a nightingale, this time singing in a divine language, is rubai, number VI from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, whose re-creation is included in section 3.8: “And David’s Lips are lock’t; but in divine / High piping Pelevi, with “Wine! Wine! Wine! / Red Wine!” – the Nightingale cries to the Rose / That yellow Cheek of hers to incarnadine.” It is also a bird[4] that appears in Whitman’s poetry to represent the singer[5]: the thrush, in “Starting from Paumanok”, and in “When Lilacs…”, where the bird announces the spring, and “Solitary, […] avoiding the settlements, / Sings by himself a song.”, the death song sung by the “gray-brown bird”, which will remind the poet, with “ever-returning spring”, of the one the poet loves so much (President Lincoln). Co-incidentally, the Brazilian “tordo”, or “sabiá”[6], which is so honored by our poets as the very symbol of our lyricality, belongs in the same (genus Turdus) family (Turdidae) as the whitmanian thrush.

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[1] We include here our re-creation of this poem, which is part of our previous work at this University (SARAIVA, 1995, p.85), in a revised version: “VERTEI GOTAS”:

VERTEI gotas! minhas veias azuis vazando!

Ah gotas de mim! vertei, vagarosas gotas,

Caindo cândidas de mim, pingai, sangrantes gotas,

De ferimentos feitos para vos libertar donde estáveis presas,

De meu rosto, de minha testa e lábios,

De meu peito, de dentro onde eu estava oculto, pres­sionai rubras gotas, gotas de confissão,

Manchai toda página, manchai toda canção que can­to, toda palavra que digo, sangrentas gotas,

Dai a conhecer vosso calor escarlate, permiti-lhes cintilar,

Saturai-as convosco inteiramente acanhadas e úmidas,

Fulgi sobre tudo que tenho escrito ou escreverei, san­grantes gotas,

Que tudo seja visto à vossa luz, enrubescidas gotas.

[2] Oswald (1991, p.27) was so keen on parody that he even wrote another poem to make fun of this one, titled “Meus Sete Anos” (“At Age Seven”).

[3] Paulo Prado (1869-1943) belonged to one of the wealthiest families from the aristocracy of coffee planters from São Paulo. He participated in the 1922 Week of Modern Art as a patron of the arts. He was also interested in Brazilian History and published a book called Retrato do Brasil (Portrait of Brazil) in 1928, a study on the sadness of the Brazilian people.

[4] The nightingale used to belong in the same family as the thrush, but today it is classed in a different family, the “Muscicapidae”.

[5] In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”, it is another bird that comes to the rescue of the poet, to help him awaken his own songs, merging the song of the bird, the word from the sea, “death”, and his own songs into one single chant: “Which I do not forget [the word from the sea, Death], / But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother [the bird], / That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok’s gray beach, / With the thousand responsive songs, at random, / My own songs, awaked from that hour; […]”.

[6] In 1968, Tom Jobim composed the song and Chico Buarque (both are Brazilian composers and song-writers) wrote the lyrics for “Sabiá”, which, again, makes a new parody of the “Exile Song”. The lines read:  “Sei que ainda vou voltar / Para o meu lugar / Foi lá e é ainda lá / Que eu hei de ouvir cantar / Uma sabiá”; and “Vou deitar à sombra / De uma palmeira / Que já não há” (“I know I am going to go back / To my place / It was there and it is still there / That I will hear a thrush / singing”; “I will lie down at the shadow / of a palm tree / that does not exist any more”). The song tells of the song of a female thrush, while the traditional poems picture male birds. It also makes reference to a palm tree that has probably been cut off and almost disappeared from our home land.

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. […]

The natural man. […]

The spirit refuses to conceive of the spirit without the body.

Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness. […]

The fixation of progress by means of catalogues and television sets. Only machinery. And blood transfusions. […]

Against Memory source of customs. Personal experience renewed. […]

We are concretists. Ideas take over, react, burn people in public squares. Let us suppress ideas and other paralysis. In favor of plots. To believe in signs, to believe in tools and the stars. […]

Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy.

Against the social reality, dressed and oppressive, recorded by Freud – reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions and penitentiaries of Pindorama’s matriarchate.

Some ideas in the manifesto deserve explanation. First, the ideas were juxtaposed on the page, without linking words, breaking the grammatical organization of the text, which is characteristic of the cubist artists. In this way, the sentences are connected to each other by “unexpected links”, as it happens in a “cubist painting, [where] a design reduced to an amplified detail of an eye is sided by a playing card or the body of a guitar” (ANDRADE, 1990, p.38). Haroldo de Campos, who wrote the introduction to this 1990 edition of Pau Brasil, compared Oswald’s poetry to painting, in this case, cubist painting, but not for the technique itself. It was more for the search for a “primitive sensitivity” and a “poetics of concreteness” (1990, p.45). Thus, the poet already uses in his manifesto the techniques he is proposing for his poetry, like the montage technique and the repetition of certain words (anaphoras: words like “contra” / “against”, “nunca” / “never”, and “tínhamos” / “we had” are spread throughout the text). Then, the allusion to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be, that’s the question” (SHAKESPEARE, 1992, p.669: this line opens Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act III, scene I) that is devoured and re-coded into “Tupi, or not tupi, that’s the question”, which is a reference to a Native American Indian tribe that lived on the coast of Brazil and their language. Therefore, being authentically Brazilian is the real question, and that must be faced by us all.

Since poetry is not separated from culture, at this point we must make a connection between the linguistic aspect of the modernist poetics with its cultural and social aspect. This is so because the idea behind the poetic manifestation carries a socio-cultural one, which is the attitude against foreign cultural imposition and the acknowledgment of our own nature. This explanation is necessary because we also need to understand the socio-cultural difference between Brazil and the United States in the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. The fact is that, in Brazil, unlike the United States, miscegenation was and is a reality. In this sense, there is much more ethnic integration in Brazil than there is in the United States, even considering all the social problems stemmed from racial discrimination. We could possibly assert that Whitman’s dream of national integration, in ethnical and cultural terms, came true, at least partially, in Brazil, despite all the still existing problems. In order to show this contrast between the two countries, we will resort to quotations from Democracy in America (two volumes: 1835 and 1840) by Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1859, the French political thinker and historian who also wrote The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), and Casa Grande e Senzala (The Masters and The Slaves), by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre. First, we will present a quotation from Democracy in America, by Tocqueville, whose works depict the social conditions of the individual and the state in western societies. In this book, he addresses this problem in the USA in the nineteenth century:

The human beings who are scattered over this space do not form, as in Europe, so many branches of the same stock. Three races, naturally distinct, and, I might almost say, hostile to each other, are discoverable among them at the first glance. Almost insurmountable barriers had been raised between them by education and law, as well as by their origin and outward characteristics, but fortune has brought them together on the same soil, where, although they are mixed, they do not amalgamate, and each race fulfills its destiny apart. [...] The Indians will perish in the same isolated condition in which they have lived, but the destiny of the Negroes is in some measure interwoven with that of the Europeans. These two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are alike unable to separate entirely or to combine. The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.[4] (Chapter XVIII, on the three races that inhabit the United States)

On the other hand, this impossible racial mixture between the three races, which had “insurmountable barriers […] raised between them” in the United States, was carried on at every level of contact between the peoples living in Brazil: the Indians, the Portuguese and the Africans brought here[5]. Another excerpt from the same chapter from Democracy in America indicates that Tocqueville considered that the mixing of races would create a more appropriate environment for the mutual understanding of races forced to live together, as is the case in Brazil, although he recognizes that of “[…] all Europeans, the English are those who have mixed least with the Negroes”, which testifies to the enormous difficulties of Americans in mingling with Native or Afro-Americans:

I have previously observed that the mixed race is the true bond of union between the Europeans and the Indians; just so, the mulattoes are the true means of transition between the white and the Negro; so that wherever mulattoes abound, the intermixture of the two races is not impossible. In some parts of America the European and the Negro races are so crossed with one another that it is rare to meet with a man who is entirely black or entirely white; when they have arrived at this point, the two races may really be said to be combined, or, rather, to have been absorbed in a third race, which is connected with both without being identical with either.

Freyre, in his book Casa Grande e Senzala (The Masters and The Slaves, 1984), originally published in 1933, centers his research on this theme, racial relations in Brazil in the nineteenth century, which was fundamental to him, as he stated in his preface to the book. Based on the fact that the pre-Colombian peoples living in these lands were very receptive (1984, p.89-161; chapter II, on “The Amerindian in the Formation of the Brazilian Family”), the Portuguese people were given to miscegenation, had no rigidity and were heir to a great social flexibility (1984, pp.189-262; chapter III, on “The Portuguese Settler”), and the Africans brought to Brazil were very adaptive, but also persistent in leaving their mark on the culture, body or soul of “every Brazilian” (1984, pp.283-379; on “The Black Slave in Brazilian’s Sexual and Family Life”). If we look more closely at the metaphorical references of “blood transfusions”[6] and the “Absorption of the sacred enemy”, the expressions that appear in Oswald’s manifesto and link them with the socio-cultural aspect of our nationality, we can see them as indicators of our multiraciality, represented, for example, by people defined in Brazil with mixed race terms such as: “Caboclo”, a term for white and Amerindian; “Cafuzo”, a word for black and Amerindian; and “Mulato” (mulatto) an admixture of white European and black African ancestry.

In relation to this, Oswald, like Whitman, believed in a harmonic natural life of soul and body, and this harmony in man and with nature is highlighted by the next statement in his manifesto about the discovery of happiness. The meaning of this is that the Indians, before the arrival of the Portuguese conquerors, already lived happily, without the help of the Catholic Church, or the tiring tyranny of foreign religion. Therefore, instead of promoting a conflict within an already multiethnic group, Oswald calls for national unity, and through an element of one of the three cultures involved, the Indian anthropophagic rituals, he struggles for the renewal of our personal, and then collective, experience. This would finally come to the sociological field, fostering a new social reality, a healthy one, stripped of old customs.

For example, the custom of being too much dressed, which was counteracted by the nakedness and daily bathing of the Indians, so that everything would be clearly seen in the light of the tropical sun (nakedness is a topic addressed by Whitman, as we have seen in the last section of chapter 2; “no clothing”, except for ornaments and personal belongings, is listed as one of the characteristics of most of the Indians living in Brazil; 1984, p.97). Besides that there is the old custom that was most embedded in our antiquated mentality: “the patriarchal system of the Portuguese colonization” (FREYRE, 1984, Preface, p. lxii) of our society, the same “pater familias” (p. lxiii), which is the paternal power of life and death over family and slaves, handed down to us from Roman Law that was inherited by the Portuguese. This is the law, mentioned in the manifesto, whose rigidity should be melted by the joy of “Pindorama’s matriarchate”. Curiously, Oswald’s autobiography, Um Homem Sem Profissão (A Man Without Profession), has an appropriate subtitle: “Sob as Ordens de Mamãe” (“Under Mama’s Orders”).

Our always useful Aurélio[7] provides the definition for “pindorama”, which is a word from the Tupi language meaning the “Region or country of palm trees” (FERREIRA, 1999, p.1567). This again sounds like an anthropophagic act, since the expression “palm trees” refers to a common feature of our land and also to one of our most famous poems, “Canção do Exílio” (“Exile Song”), by our first and most renowned “indianist poet” (BILAC; PASSOS, 1930, p.24), Gonçalves Dias, whose lines “My land has got palm trees, / where the sabiá[8] sings” are repeated throughout the poem, as anaphoras and epiphoras (repetition of words or phrases at the beginning and end of stanzas). Indeed, this culturally cannibalistic attitude had been expressed by Oswald de Andrade in his “Manisfesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil”[9] (“Brazil wood Poetry Manifesto”), in which he states that what we need is “A reaction against all indigestions of wisdom”, and strives for “The best of our lyric tradition” and “The best of our modern display”. He said that we must be “Only Brazilians of our own time”, with a sufficient amount of chemistry, mechanics, economy, ballistics, and “all digested”. We should be “practical”, “experimental”, in sum, “poets”. As this type of poetry is for exportation, like the Brazil wood at colonial times, based on “synthesis”, “balance”, “invention”, “surprise”, the “digestion” of past culture and foreign culture was a necessary step, and digestion can only happen after ingestion, that is, eating, devoration. Another aspect of this “digestion”, a word that denotes transformation of matter into bodily absorbable substances that will later be converted into energy, is that it also means, figuratively, “mental absorption”, assimilation.

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[1] As there are two remarkable “de Andrades” in our Modernist movement (Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade), we will refer to them by their first names. Despite the same last name, they are not related.

[2] This comment is in Um Homem Sem Profissão (A Man Without Profession); (ANDRADE, 1990, p.8).

[3] This “Anthropophagic Manifesto”, published in the “Anthropophagy Magazine” (the other founding members of the magazine were Raul Bopp and Antônio de Alcântara Machado), was, in Pignatari’s opinion (1990, pp.8-9), the “cultural proposition for the old peoples of new nations […], turning the nationalistic-romantic indianism inside out”, making eating a sign and making the sign a form of eating. The result was “devoration”, which is, culturally speaking, a ritualistic act of absorbing/devouring the foreign culture to acquire its best features, and then combining these new features with our own best qualities, which would produce poetry for exportation, like Brazil wood, our first export product.

[4] Tocqueville’s works are available on the internet nowadays on several sites, such as <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/toc_indx.html>, owned by the University of Virginia. Accessed on May 16, 2007.

[5] Although we are discussing miscegenation, we are not blind to the fact that there was, around 1500, in Brazil, an Indian population ranging from 1 to 10 million individuals, and that these people were gathered in different “societies” and spoke around 1300 different languages, being Tupi one of the main societal and linguistic branches. Nowadays, there are around 460 thousand individuals who speak around 180 languages. However, we prefer to think like the great Chief Seattle, even if official authorities do not validate the document. Thus, we quote here the last section of Chief Seattle’s speech in, presumably, 1854 or 1855: “[…] And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone. / Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.” Data on Brazilian Indians available at: <http://www.funai.gov.br/>.

Accessed on: May 3, 2007. Data on Chief Seattle available at: <http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1985/spring/chief-seattle.html>. Accessed on May 3, 2007.

[6] Though the original phrase reads “blood transfusing machines”, it refers to technology and to donating and receiving blood, which is a process that does not make it possible to identify the blood donor’s skin color.

[7] Aurélio, in Brazil, has become synonymous with dictionary, for Aurélio Buarque de Holanda Ferreira is the author of the most famous dictionary in our country.

[8] Sabiá is the Tupi word for a typical Brazilian bird (“tordo”, of the genus Turdus) of the thrush family Turdidae. In 2002, the “sabiá laranjeira” (Turdus rufiventris), was chosen as the symbol-bird of Brazil.

[9] This manifesto (1924), altered and reduced, was used as a “program-poem” in the 1925 edition of Pau-Brasil, the book of poems that portray our country, with sections such as “History of Brazil” (with passages from historical documents rearranged into poems in a parodic way, such as Pero Vaz de Caminha’s letter to the king of Portugal, and Pero de Magalhães Gandavo’s “História da Província Santa Cruz” / “History of the Province of Santa Cruz”), “Colonization Poems”, “Carnival”, “Mine Paths”, and “Lóide Brasileiro”, which recollects his trip from Europe to Brazil, and whose first poem is a parody of the “Exile Song”, “Canto de Regresso à Pátria” (“Song of Return to the Nation”), with verses like “Minha terra tem palmares / onde gorgeia o mar” (“My land has got “palmares” / where the sea trills” and “Não permita Deus que eu morra / Sem que volte pra São Paulo / Sem que veja a rua 15 / E o progresso de São Paulo” (“I beg God not to let me die / Without returning to São Paulo / Without seeing 15 Street / And São Paulo’s progress”). Indeed,  “Palmares” has got three meanings: 1. regions whose vegetation is mostly palm trees, such as the one where the Quilombo dos Palmares was located (Alagoas, Brazil); 2. Quilombo dos Palmares (around 1580-1695), historically the most important “quilombo” in Brazil (a “quilombo” is a refuge of runaway and free-born African slaves fighting for freedom), whose most important and last leader was Zumbi dos Palmares (1655-November 20, 1695); nowadays, november 20^th is the Afro-Brazilians’ Black Consciousness Day; 3. individuals living within a “quilombo” (ANDRADE, 1990, p.139).

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.

On the other hand, if we want to free the translator’s creative mind or imagination, we must avail him the possibility to interact with the text, which will enable him to establish a dynamic relationship with it. In this sense, he will be able to re-create the body of the original, so that when he brings the soul, it will be incarnated in its proper physical form. This physical structure, the poetic re-construction of the linguistic devices used to support the meaning, will show, virtually, where the embodiment of the poet’s soul, the materialization of his inspiration into words, was effected at every given moment. Therefore, the action that was impossible to do before, in other words: creativity, can now be achieved, and the translator is granted freedom of movement in his work. Thus, the freedom to re-create the linguistic and poetic/aesthetic beauty of the form of the original text not only does warm up the translator’s creative capacity, but also gives him the chance to even find out other correlations of meanings that might only appear when the translator digs deeply into the structures of the text, analyzing it bit by bit, de-constructing it and disassembling it to see its internal workings. In this operation he can learn how to create equivalent parts in the other language, which, when put together, will make the poem sound meaningful and harmonious, literally speaking, it becomes singable; this, of course, is a general statement, for there are cases when the texts intend to do the opposite in order to shock or amaze the reader.  Our main idea then is to re-create the form according to its original adequacy to its meaning. Therefore, we think that the component of untranslatability of poetic texts, already mentioned, which could at first appear as an obstacle, actually indicates the solution, which is represented by poetic re-creation.

In fact, the Concrete poets also discussed the idea that the form of the original text “postulates the impossibility of translation”, or the “thesis of untranslatability […] of creative texts” (CAMPOS, 1992, p.34). What is meant by “creative texts” in this case is great poetry, or inventive poetry by already canonized poets, such as Homer, Dante, Provençal poets, Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Pound and the Concrete Poets themselves in Brazil. Also, poetry by poets of the past and present that the translator’s attentive eye may find, and some cases of exceptional prose, by writers (1992, p.34) such as James Joyce (Ulysses, Finnegans Wake), or some Brazilian writers such as Oswald de Andrade (Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar, Serafim Ponte Grande; novels mentioned by Haroldo de Campos as “invention-novels” (1977, p.168), Mário de Andrade (Macunaíma, defined (CAMPOS, 1992, p.173) as a “pan-folkloric arch-legend”), Guimarães Rosa (Grande Sertão Veredas, translated into English as The Devil To Pay in the Backlands; Haroldo defines its language as “the movable stage for the metaphysical struggle between man and Evil” (1992, p.59), so ample are the linguistic resources provided by the author), and Paulo Leminski (O Catatau).[4]

This concept of creative or inventive texts was set by Ezra Pound (1885-1972) in his book ABC of Reading (1987, pp.39-40), in which he establishes the six “classes of persons” who create literature, the two first being (1) “Inventors” (“Men who found a new process,”) and (2) “masters” (“Men who combine a number of such processes, and who use them as well as or better than the inventors.” The others are: (3) “diluters”, the next in line and who do not “do the job quite as well.”; (4) “Good writers without salient qualities.”; (5) “Writers of belles-lettres […] who specialized in some particular part of writing”; and (6) “The starters of crazes”. We will see, in the last section of this chapter, 3.7, examples of the “proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters”, which for Pound is “the method of contemporary biologists, that is, careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another” (POUND, 1987, p.17).  In this case, the method is applied to re-creation of poetry, that is, comparison of different translations of the same text.

Based on the problem posed by literal translation, which implies aesthetic loss, we agree with Haroldo when he advances the “thesis of untranslatability […] of creative texts”. As a result, the “impossibility […] of translation of creative texts” seems to “engender”  “[…] the possibility […] of re-creation of these texts” (CAMPOS, 1992, p.34), if we want the translator to exercise his creative mind and free his poetic imagination. In this manner, our purpose here, the re-creation of poetry, or more specifically the re-creation of some books and poems from Leaves of Grass into Portuguese, is actually contrary to literal translation, which is the sole translation of meaning or content in any form provided by the translator into the target language. We believe that re-creating a poetic text in a different language will re-construct its aesthetic information in the other language. The meaning will be transmitted, and so will its “physicality, its very materiality (phonic, visual properties),” and its prosody (from Greek pros?idi?, or song sung to music; accent: pros-, pros- + ?id?, ode / song; or how the poem sounds, its tone, pitch of voice, its “phonic environment”). Other poetic elements will be re-recreated or re-constructed as well, such as meter: measured arrangement of words in a poem; rhythm: the pattern or flow of sound created by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in accentual verse as we have in English, or of long and short syllables in quantitative verse (based on the duration of syllables) as in Greek or Latin poetry; or the syllabic patterns, combined with accents, in Portuguese; in a broader sense, the movement of images, thoughts and ideas in a poem characterized by a correlative flow in syntactical structure grammatically marked by a “frequent repetition at regular intervals” (ALI, 2006, p.29) of certain linguistic/poetic patterns or elements. Ali, in his classic book Versificação Portuguesa (Portuguese Versification), observes that this “reiteration”, or frequent repetition, is an “essential condition” (p.29) of the concept of rhythm. There are also rhyme: correspondence of sounds in lines of verses, at initial, medium or terminal positions; alliteration: repetition of sounds, especially consonant sounds; and assonance: repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds; in short, its poetic structure. What we mean is that this type of work is quite different from literal translation, since literal translation transposes the meanings, the significance, the content of a text from one language into another. As we have said above, we will bring some examples of re-created texts and discuss more closely the technical details of our work at the end of this chapter.

When we re-create “creative texts”, also referred to by Haroldo as texts which are “full of difficulties”, in the sense that they are actually “seductive” (CAMPOS, 1992, p.35) to the translator for being polysemantic/polysemous, that is, full of poetic possibilities, there are still other aspects that play important roles in our task, such as the particular “poetic diction” of each poet/writer, their tones, their individual prosody and rhythm, and also of each passage. Re-creating a poetic text (poetry or poetic prose) involves a complex set of actions:

It is as though we disassembled and re-assembled the creating machine, that apparently intangible utterly frail beauty that offers us the finished product in a foreign language. And, which, however, reveals itself susceptible of an implacable vivisection that revolves its guts, to bring it again into light in a diverse linguistic body. This is why translation is criticism. (CAMPOS, 2004, p.42)

It is a way of apprehending the spirit of the artist materialized in his verses in order to discover the many possibilities of significance, as though we were speaking with his soul to decode all the messages inserted in the text. After that, when we are in possession of that meaning, we study the linguistic and poetic structures used to convey that meaning in the original language. Finally, we search in our own language the various possible ways to re-structure that meaning in our vernacular, but keeping in mind that our re-created poem is an “isomorphic re-project of the original poem” (CAMPOS, 1981, p.181). By the way, “Isomorphism”[5] is a very dear term to Haroldo. Although the term comes from the field of biology (Pound is mentioned above for his use of a biologist’s studying procedure), it is very useful in describing this process of re-recreation of poetic texts, for it gives an exact image, a mirror image, of the end-product. As we know that nature and life are a constant process of transformation, meaning that there is no end-product, rather a “work in progress”, which leads us to the idea that there is no end-product in poetry either, we must say that this expression is used here to refer to poetry as being an updated medium of conveying sense from one human being to another in an era of industrialization. So poetry is not apart from the progress of humanity, and similarly to the products of technology, it must be regularly modernized and updated. Thus, if conceived as a fine product of a man’s intellect made according to his time, it is necessary to re-create its aura, atmosphere, the strong gesture that is implicit in or beyond his words, the same way as we see the beauty and strength of nature, but we do not see what is beyond it, although we know that it is there, the invisible background that generates everything that exists, like the poet’s soul behind his verses. In section 3.4, we will discuss progress in Brazil in more depth and provide more information on author Oswald de Andrade.

In addition, in an article entitled “Comunicação na Poesia de Vanguarda” (“Communication in Vanguard Poetry”), Haroldo gives more information on this idea, and indicates that he borrowed the expression “creative transposition” (1977, p.143) from Jakobson[6] to define his own work of re-creating poetry as an act of “re-creation” or “trans-creation”, which is more precise in describing the movement of re-creation, as opposed to mere “transcription” of texts (“Trans” is a  Latin prefix / noun, meaning “across”, “beyond”, “on the opposite side”; e.g.:  transportation, transmission; the corresponding prefixes in Greek are “dia”, “between”: dialogue, diaphanous = transparent, and “meta”, change, as in metamorphosis = transformation, change of form).

Actually, this idea of “trans-creation” of inventive texts is based on a larger concept of the work of the poet translator as “trans-creator” of texts. It comes from the research and practice of the Concrete poets on language and on linguistic criticism, as they did not separate the work of the poet from that of the translator or critic. In the same article, Haroldo describes his “Scheme of verbal communication”, in which he gives us the “Factors and functions of language” (1977, pp.136-143). Briefly explained, the “scheme of communication” is as follows: a sender/emitter sends a message to a receiver/recipient; every message has its sender and  receiver/recipient; the message refers to “an object or situation”; naturally, for the message to be sent and understood by the receiver, there must be a “common code” between them and also a contact, a means of connecting them; then, we have in this context the six “factors” operating in the transmission of a message. Each of them originates a “linguistic function”. These functions can appear in various combinations depending on the situation.  What really matters to us here are the six functions mentioned: 1. the “emotive” or “expressive” function, because it expresses the emotions and reactions and attitudes of the sender. The sender is also characterized as a “codifier” of messages, since he uses a common code to emit his feelings/thoughts; 2. when the communication activity is “centered upon the recipient”, it is a “conative” function, which means that it expresses desire, volition, impulse towards the second person of speech, the “you”. It is also a kind of “magic or enchanting” function, as it exerts power over the other person; 3. the next function is a “cognitive” one, centered upon a context, a reference point. The message “denotes” (to denote is to mean something literally) concrete things or “conveys knowledge” about a “specific object”; 4. the “phatic function”, which means the expressions used to establish or interrupt communication rather than express ideas; in this function, expressions such as  “Hello”, “How are you”, “Alright”, “Okay” are used; 5. the “metalinguistic function”, where the important factor is the “code”, which “is the system that establishes a repertoire of signs [linguistic units linking the signifier, a group of letters, to its signified, the meaning attributed to the signifier] and its rules of combination”. The important fact here is that in this function the message is directed upon another message, like the entries in a dictionary. Also, if combined with the cognitive function, for example, this can be expressed through “literary criticism”, for in this kind of work the critic is analyzing a work of art in written form. Finally, function 6, which is the “poetic function”, where the message “turns to itself”, to its “sensitive aspect, to its configuration”. Then, in poetry and in creative/inventive prose, this function has a dominant position. When this function is combined with the metalinguistic function, they appear in contexts where the poet or writer is criticizing their own act of writing in creative texts. The theater within the theater in Hamlet (SHAKESPEARE, 1992, p.671; “The Mousetrap”, Act 3, scene II) is an excellent example of this. In that scene, Hamlet, as if he were Shakespeare himself, is discussing acting within the acting of the play, while the focus of the work of the dramatist is on “configuring” the “sensitive” aspect of language. The first line of the scene already shows the rhythm and alliterations of the poetic construct / conception (conception as the ability to form concepts or as creation, both apply in this context): “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue […]”. The bold type highlights the poetic function, to show how the work on language makes it different from its common use in the cognitive function, although sometimes it can naturally occur in normal daily conversation.

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[1] We will refer to the Campos brothers by their first names, to avoid confusion.

[2] Our own work is an example of the difference between these two types of transmission of data. For example, the description of our method of re-creating poetry that we are giving here is a way of organizing, translating and conveying “documentary and semantic information” concerning our work and the work of poet-translators, of which we give a summary. As the focus in this part of the work is on the content that we want to expose, we do it according to the form which is most suitable to an academic assignment. For this reason, our knowledge in this field, which has been primarily acquired in our mother tongue, Portuguese, is translated and presented in English. Conversely, the application of this knowledge or the theory put into practice follows the opposite direction: the re-creation of poetry is carried out from English into Portuguese. Therefore, it is not a case of which activity is better, but of knowing that each one has its own useful application.

[3] Examples of our work on the re-creation of the “original codification” from Leaves of Grass are given in sections 3.7 and 3.9, in addition to translations by other translators, for the purpose of comparison. Apart from these annotated examples, there is chapter 4, which contains the poems re-recreated in this research.

[4] In the article (1992, pp.218-9) “Uma Leminskíada Barrocodélica”, Haroldo calls Leminski  a “rhapsode”, to indicate that the frontiers between poetry and prose are “movable”, “rarefied”, subtle, when the prose is so  poetic that it seems to be the work of a poet. Leminski is not only a creative writer and poet, but also a great translator. His creative translations include Giacomo Joyce (JOYCE, 1985), Sol e aço (MISHIMA, 1985), Satyricon (PETRONIO, 1985) and Malone morre (BECKETT, 1986). Beyond his technical skills and wide imagination, artistically speaking, Leminski has the gift of surprise; he always knows how and when to take the reader by surprise with totally unpredictable rhymes, images, thoughts and combination of words.

[5] Isomorphism is similarity in form, shape or structure, but in organisms of different ancestry. As we are discussing poetic phenomena, it is interesting to notice that this term is used in Mathematics to define a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of two sets such that the result of an operation on elements of one set corresponds to the result of the analogous operation on their images in the other set. And it is also used to describe a close similarity in the crystalline structure of two or more substances of similar chemical composition. In terms of poetry, the poem in one language becomes the mirror image of the original. It has everything to do with the idea of re-creation, since Haroldo also calls this process “crystallography” (the scientific study of crystals) (CAMPOS, 1981, p.181).

[6] In Portuguese, the writings by Roman Jakobson appeared in a collection of articles: Lingüística e Comunicação. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1969.

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:

In 1860, the central theme is love – between the sexes in Children of Adam, and the love of male comrades in Calamus. It was the centrality of a love which was sexual as well as spiritual, that Walt could not successfully explain to Emerson, and so kept silent.

For example, in “Calamus”, Whitman sings how the attraction from man to man can be acknowledged as the real love that will unite the nation. His best known poem on this subject is “For You O Democracy”, whose first stanza presents the “life-long love of comrades” as the foundation of the indissolubility of the future continent:

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,

With the love of comrades,

With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of     America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the   prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,

By the love of comrades,

By the manly love of comrades.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

The poet sings that everything will be done with and by “manly love”, especially to serve Democracy, the mother of all the children of the nation. These are the children who will be employed later, in the American Civil War (1861-1865), to protect the Union fighting against the Confederate States of America, the eleven Southern slave states, which did not agree with the Union politics of preventing the expansion of slavery into new territories of the United States and decided to secede. The fact is that Whitman was against slavery, but he was in favor of the unity of the country and of the Constitution, which is similar to the position withheld by the Union. Even though he suffered a lot and did what he could to help relieve Northern and Southern soldiers’ suffering, he knew that, given the political and economic situation of the United States[1], the only possible solution to maintain the union as such was the war. His love for his country as a unity made him support the leader of the nation, Abraham Lincoln[2], whom he admired personally. This attitude is coherent with what he had sung in his belief in inseparability. Later, during the war, while in daily contact with soldiers, he verified that what he had written was true, for what he had felt about his countrymen before, that they were comrades capable of love and friendship and of a magnetic energy that “will make divine […] lands”, was something real. When he was close to them, those simple affectionate people, who were the basis of the nation, lived up to his expectations. For these simple men were also capable of heroic deeds, of giving their lives to maintain the union of their homeland, even though there were those for whom North-America was a forced or new homeland (African Americans and immigrants). Whitman recorded this deep human experience in Drum-Taps (1865), “Sequel” to Drum-Taps (1866) and Specimen Days and Collect, published in 1882-3 by Rees Welsh and Co., and later included in his Complete Prose Works, 1892, published by David Mckay. As written above in section 2.1, the “Sequel” is the supplement that contains the poet’s meditation on the death of Abraham Lincoln, his “Memories of President Lincoln”. There are other poems as well in this edition, such as “O Captain! My Captain!”, a beautiful and sad lament because the captain “does not answer” any more; “Hushed Be the Camps Today”, the quiet song of the poet on the “dear commander’s death”, speaking for those who were silent; and “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”, the poem that he was asked to sing by a “Phantom gigantic superb” that said to him:

Chant me the poem, it said, that comes from the soul of America, chant me the carol of victory,

And strike up the marches of Libertad, marches more powerful yet,

And sing me before you go the song of the throes of Democracy. (WHITMAN, 1996, p.469)

Here is the poet singing Democracy, comradeship, heroism, but never forgetting the pain that was in everybody’s soul and in many people’s bodies. This is why we mentioned unphysical love. Whitman was describing a type of love that is beyond pure physical love, or sex. He was talking about something greater, something that continues after the death of the physical bodies, or something one feels for their homeland, their country, because while the country does have a concrete existence, it also exists as a mental concept and a sentiment. They are all related to create the sense of being, the spirit of the nation. And this is beyond bodily attraction. In this sense, the myth of Calamus illustrates this type of love, because their love remains in a different form.

In this manner, Whitman sings a complex form of love that goes beyond homo-erotic sex, although it might include that: the myth tells the story of two youths that end up dying. One is called Carpus (the fruit of the vegetation) and the other becomes a reed, which is a kind of tall grass. The myth tells us that when the two young men die, they continue to live in new and different bodies, but as transformed parts of nature that can live near each other. That signifies that the poet is depicting a kind of love that transcends the physical bodies and even a form of life. It is really a metamorphosis, a transformation, but a natural one, as it happens when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly, a process which is common in nature and is assimilated into ancient mythology[3]. Which means that this kind of love the poet is portraying is long lasting, not to say eternal, and also that our spirits are undying, and may continue living in a different way.

A scene from “These I Singing in Spring”, from “Calamus”, might be helpful to clarify this point, for in this passage the poet at first thinks that he is alone, but some unexpected visitors show up:

Solitary, smelling the earthy smell, stopping now and then in the silence,
Alone I had thought, yet soon a troop gathers around me,
Some walk by my side and some behind, and some embrace my arms or            neck,

They the spirits of dear friends dead or alive, thicker they come, a great crowd, and I in the middle,
Collecting, dispensing, singing, there I wander with them,
Plucking something for tokens, tossing toward whoever is near me,
Here, lilac, with a branch of pine,
Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull’d off a live-oak in Florida         as it hung trailing down,
Here, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of sage,
And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pond-side,
(O here I last saw him that tenderly loves me, and returns again never to separate from me,
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-            root shall,
Interchange it youths with each other! let none render it back!) (WHITMAN, 1996, p.272-3)

In parenthesis we can see the reference to the scene of Calamus and Carpus, where the poet plays the part of Calamus, walking in the water, recollecting the one who loved him, who now returns never to separate from him in spirit, for the crowd that appeared to accompany him is a crowd of spirits of beloved companions. This poem also presents some elements or symbols that will appear later in the poem mentioned before, the “Lincoln elegy”: the lilac, the pine, the one he loves, nature, dead persons, memory of dear comrades. Allen (1955, pp.329-30) sometimes comments on the poet in his biography of Whitman, The Solitary Singer, that he is many times prophesying. Amazing as it may seem, it is a fact that many items that appeared in the 1860 edition in “Calamus” and “Children of Adam” naturally become part of the elegy on Lincoln’s death.[4] The time, the weather and nature before the assassination of the President were unusually strange. The evening star was brighter than before, the lilacs were blooming everywhere, the sky was clear, but there was a terrible rush at the White House on the day of Lincoln’s inauguration, and Whitman reported that after that, when the President came out of the Capitol portico, there was only one cloud in the sky hovering over the President. The poet was deeply touched by these events. When the one he loved so much was assassinated, his dear comrade, all these elements that were fluttering in his soul were poured into the poems. This shows how the poet is integrated into his surroundings, or environment, living his life and absorbing the life that is taking place around him, in order to put them together in his poetry. We will discuss about this a little more below, where we mention other poets that were able to fuse individual interest with collective action.

Another poem from “Calamus” that deals specifically with the theme of comradeship and love from person to person as the linking element that will sustain the nation, that is, a personal sentiment with a political significance, is “The Base of All Metaphysics”:

[…]
Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems,
Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel,
Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato,
And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ divine having studied            long,
I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic systems,
See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets see,
Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath Christ the divine I see,
The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend,
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
Of city for city and land for land. (WHITMAN, 1996, p.275)

This “dear love” is also what maintains the “city of Friends”, the “city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth”, the city that is the poet’s dream seen “in a dream” (“I Dream’d in a Dream”, from “Calamus”; WHITMAN, 1996, p.284). In short, the poet was always seeking those whose blood was like his, someone who could become his “eleve”[5] (pupil, student), to learn this kind of love, his capacity to love all, unconditionally. This is what is amazing in Whitman, this broad heart of his, with an ocean of love ready to pour forth as he sings in “Recorders Ages Hence” from “Calamus” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.276). This is his strength, his all-embracing human warmth, showing affection towards everybody and every body, low people, prisoners, soldiers, men, and women, as in “O woman I love! O bride! O wife!”[6].  As he sings in “From Pent-up Aching Rivers”, from “Children of Adam”:

Singing the song of procreation,

Singing the need of superb children and therein superb grown people, Singing the muscular urge and the blending,

Singing the bedfellow’s song, (O resistless yearning!

O for any and each the body correlative attracting!

O for you whoever you are your correlative body!

We can trace the movement of his love, and we can see that it goes from a personal level, in which he speaks of love between comrades, then of friends, from friends to families, and crowds, cities, lands, nations, until it reaches a spiritual level, as at the end of “I Sing the Body Electric”, in which he describes the beauty of bodies and of each part of the bodies, to finally summarize all these bodily expressions in “I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, / O I say now these are the soul!” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.258). And even then he goes further, for he raises his song to a religious level, for he is the “immortal […] chanter of Adamic songs”, which are bathed “in Sex”[7]. Again, he performs this interpenetration of dimensions, as he asks of his own “children” to interpenetrate with others, the children that he impregnated on women, who are to be “the best-beloved of [him] and America”. He becomes a myth, Adam, re-incarnated and a man, the poet who is singing the songs. He is an archetypal father (like his dear comrade Lincoln) and the man who is on earth singing his days and the life of his land, that is, the present, as he does in “Passage to India” (WHTIMAN, 1996, p.531). He sings a “simple separate person”, yet he sings the democratic “En-Masse”[8]. The first lines of “Song of Myself” describe this whitmanian capacity to synthesize the private and the public, the individual and the community, the physical and the spiritual, body and soul, in a single act of love for all: “I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”.

This broad gesture of Whitman’s reminds us of other artists who incarnated this same spirit, such as Oswald de Andrade[9], in his “Cântico dos Cânticos Para Flauta e Violão” (“Song of Songs to Flute and Guitar”), in which he abolishes the frontier between individual love and collective love, for he sings his love for his beloved Maria Antonieta d’Alkmin inextricably mingled with his love for humanity, who was at that moment celebrating the victory of Liberty during World War II (ANDRADE, 1991, pp.55-65). His love for one person or for a woman is not separated from his love for all. This is where the personal sphere is linked to the collective sphere, where the specimen meets the species, or is not afraid to surrender to it; by understanding that only as a part of it can he actually exist, for a part can not be greater or larger than the whole. In modern times, this can be said to be the limit of selfishness and the beginning of selflessness, or what we might define as a personal interest surrendering to a collective interest, which becomes stronger by this act, being also a transmutation and integration of the person into his human group.  This is the democratic aim of the poet, which shows the common interest of the whole overcoming the egotistical interest of only one part of it. The fact is that artists, and especially great artists, are able to fuse, to blend, to commingle their personal lives with the collective life of the community they represent.

Haroldo de Campos, in “Lirismo e Participação” (“Lyricism and Participation”; 1992, pp.89-96), describes this blending of the “two spheres”, the personal and the collective, not only in the themes addressed by the artists, but also in the language used by them. He cites Vladímir Maiakóvski, the Russian-Soviet poet (in his poem “Letter to Tatiana Iácovleva”), Oswald de Andrade (in his poem “Song of Songs”), and Alain Resnais, the French film-maker (in his film “Hiroshima”), as examples of artists who were able to mix the two sides of a person’s life into one single motif: love, by which we mean individual love mixed with collective love, to show that one is not separated from the other, and both are different forms of the same feeling.

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[1] We will print as an annex to this work a document called “Origins of Attempted Secession” (WHITMAN, 1996, pp.1018-24; included in “Specimen Days and Collect”), in which Whitman offers his historical, political and economic analysis of the circumstances that led to the American Civil War, where he shows that both North and South were responsible for the fratricidal events that tore the country.

[2] Lincoln (1809-1865) was from Kentucky, which was considered frontier land at the time. He was born from uneducated anti-slavery farming parents. However, he was an avid reader, and self-taught law, which he began to practice in 1837, though having had only eighteen months of formal education. At the same time, he developed his writing and continued his political career, which he had begun in 1832. In 1844, he entered the Republican Party, and was nominated in 1860 for the Presidency, which he won. His main attributes were: being a “western” man, which made him gain support from frontier states and his anti-slavery view, which was not too extremist. In 1864, he was re-elected, for his commitment to winning the war. The fact is that Lincoln’s background fits Whitman’s ideal of a political leader, someone who would come from the multitude of common men.

[3] The Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid [ Publius Ovidius Naso. 43 b.c.-a.d. 17.] is a poem in fifteen books that describes the creation and history of the world in terms according to Greek and Roman points of view. Probably written in 8 BC, it has remained one of the most popular works of mythology, being the Classical work best known to medieval writers and thus having a great deal of influence on medieval poetry. Content: Ovid emphasizes tales of transformation often found in myths, in which a person or lesser deity is permanently transformed into an animal or plant. Available at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses>

Accessed on: March, 14^th 2007.

For Ezra Pound, Arthur Golding’s (1536-1606) translation of the Metamorphoses “is the most beautiful book in the [English] language”, and he said he suspected this would be Shakespeare’s opinion as well. (POUND, 1987, p.58).

[4] Similarly, Drum-Taps, his volume on the American Civil War, was started in 1860, the year before the war, which begun in April, 1861. Coincidentally, the original title for this book was Banner at Day Break. Later it became “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” and was included in Drum-Taps. In reality, “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.239-244) is a conversation, or a play, in which the following characters discuss the oncoming war: Poet, Child, Father, Banner and Pennant (types of military flags).

[5] Both references from “To a Western Boy”, in “Calamus” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.285).

[6] “Fast Anchor’d Eternal O Love!”, from “Calamus” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.285).

[7] “Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals”, from “Children of Adam” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.264).

[8] “One’s Self I Sing”, from “Inscriptions” (WHITMAN, 1996, p.165).

[9] There are other aspects that relate Whitman and Oswald, such as their use of free verse and their relationship with nature, which will be dealt with in section 3.5.

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.

Gay Wilson Allen, who wrote the introduction to the Signet Classic edition and is the author of The Solitary Singer (1955), one of the best biographies of Whitman, an infinite source of factual and critical information on the life and career of the American poet, year by year, adds that “Whitman anticipated some of the most vital poetic techniques […] of the twentieth century” (WHITMAN, 2000, p.xxi) and has “genuine esthetic achievements” (2000, p.xix), such as his “panoramic, unending” (p. xx) flow of images, the “montage” technique that is so typical of modern poetry, based on his “basic prosodic form”, and the parallelism of structure, for which the Bible, or “ancient Hebraic verse” (p.xix), which represents in verse his social equalitarianism, is one of the sources. The best thing to do in such cases is to bring the very word of the poet about the matter under discussion, so that we can easily notice the influence of the Bible on his writing. This excerpt from “The Bible As Poetry”, from November Boughs, will do:

Compared with the famed epics of Greece, and lesser ones since, the spinal supports of the Bible are simple and meagre. All its history, biography, narratives, etc., are as beads, strung on and indicating the eternal thread of the Deific purpose and power. Yet with only deepest faith for impetus, and such Deific purpose for palpable or impalpable theme, it often transcends the masterpieces of Hellas, and all masterpieces. The metaphors daring beyond account, the lawless soul, extravagant by our standards, the glow of love and friendship, the fervent kiss—nothing in argument or logic, but unsurpass’d in proverbs, in religious ecstacy, in suggestions of common mortality and death, man’s great equalizers—the spirit everything, the ceremonies and forms of the churches nothing, faith limitless, its immense sensuousness immensely spiritual—an incredible, all-inclusive non-worldliness and dew-scented illiteracy (the antipodes of our Nineteenth Century business absorption and morbid refinement) […] (WHITMAN, 1996, p.1164).

The montage technique[1] is a juxtaposition of pictures, like a succession of shots in a movie, “as beads, strung on and indicating the eternal thread of the Deific purpose and power”, which was applied in modern poetry by deleting the linking words and arranging the verses in chains of independent utterances. Allen goes on to point out that this use of parallelism, which is employed also for another purpose, enumeration, comes from the fact that Whitman had a “vicarious [empathic] desire to embrace the physical world” (WHITMAN, 2000, p. xx), incorporating in his poetry the then recent awareness of Americans of their own country, in a time when “everyone was trying to grasp the significance of the continental expanse of the new nation” (p. xx). So, this gigantic “space-consciousness” (p. xx), which could not be conveyed within the fixed forms of traditional poetry, appears in long poems made up of free verses, such as those at the beginning of “Out of the Cradle”, along one single sentence of twenty two lines, the poetic equivalent of his “empathy for space and movement” (p. xx) in syntactical structure.

In order to explore this subject more deeply, we will discuss now the use of parallelism of structure for the purpose of enumeration, which was Whitman’s attempt to include the whole of North America in his poems. This led him to the creation of the catalogues in the Leaves. Next, we will provide an example of Whitman’s flow of images and a description of meter, or versification, in English and Portuguese, so that we can have an idea of our work of poetic re-creation. As for the catalogues, they are another example of Whitman’s capacity for appropriating ancient symbols or poetic structures to validate his poetry by re-working the past to renew the present, mingling into a single expression the old and the new, and giving them an appropriate place and meaning in his poetic creations. This conscious inclusion of ancient forms of verse shows us that Whitman, although conceiving of himself as a new Adam born in a New Garden, the New World, was no “fool […] pretending that no poet or man of any kind ever existed before he was born upon the earth” (BLOOM, 1985, p.88). Considering this, there are two reasons for the use of parallelism in his poetry: its use in general as a poetic element which was carefully worked on; and parallelism for the purpose of enumeration, which takes us to the element just mentioned, the catalogues.

The first feature, also called parallel structure, makes speaking and writing easier to understand. Thus, “all items in a series” must be put “in the same grammatical form” (MAURER, 2000, p.252). This means that all verbs in a sentence must be in the same tense (e.g.: Last week she painted the bedroom, bought furniture and sold the car.), so that the same structure is repeated, and the same applies to any tenses or even nouns (e.g.: He bought a book, a CD, and a shirt.). This use of identical or similar syntactic constructions in clauses or phrases in the Leaves is not a pure transposition of rules of grammar into poetry. Actually, Whitman, when working on the poetic function of language, “uses parallelism not as a device of repetition but as an occasion for development” (WRIGHT, 1985, p.96). For his intention is to make the reader aware that he is not a grammarian working to perpetuate the rules of grammar, but a poet who knows what he is doing with the language, so he “lets his images grow, one out of another”. The poems then “show the free growth of metrical laws” and their uniformity and perfect form will “bud from them [the metrical laws] as unerringly and loosely as lilacs and roses on a bush” (1985, p. 91), freely but naturally, with forms and shapes in harmony with their significance, being the flowers and fruits a perfect produce of their tree. This way the poet depicts the modern world possessed of means that are appropriate to it.   We will soon provide an example of this process, when we quote the poem “Salut au Monde!”

Now we shall concentrate on the other feature of Leaves of Grass: the catalogues. There are two basic sources for the catalogues in Leaves of Grass: the Bible and Homer’s epics. They are present in books like Genesis, with the long genealogical descriptions of the ancient families, or the “Song of Solomon” (“Song of Songs”), where all the parts of the body of the bride are mentioned and compared to things (the poem “I Sing the Body Electric” is a catalogue of body parts). These books provided the source, the original idea for the catalogues, which Whitman adapted and recreated according to his own poetical purpose, to include the scenes and peoples from America in particular and from the world at large into his poetry. Whitman himself provides us with information on this subject, in his essay “The Bible As Poetry”, from November Boughs. In this essay, he gives an account of how he, the poet, his country, America, and humanity in general have a common root that links us to the past, especially a religious past, for there is a long line of ancestry dating back to ancient times:

Of its thousands, there is not a verse, not a word, but is thick-studded with human emotions, successions of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, of our own antecedents, inseparable from that background of us, on which, phantasmal as it is, all that we are to-day inevitably depends—our ancestry, our past. (WHITMAN, 1996, p.1166)

And this ancestry is so important to our existence, so fundamental, that in his view not even America could exist today without it. Thus, the long catalogues, which have in times been criticized, are one of the cornerstones of the Leaves, as an honor to the value of the “Bible as a poetic entity”:

Strange, but true, that the principal factor in cohering the nations, eras and paradoxes of the globe, by giving them a common platform of two or three great ideas, a commonalty of origin, and projecting cosmic brotherhood, the dream of all hope, all time—that the long trains, gestations, attempts and failures, resulting in the New World, and in modern solidarity and politics—are to be identified and resolv’d back into a collection of old poetic lore, which, more than any one thing else, has been the axis of civilization and history through thousands of years—and except for which this America of ours, with its polity and essentials, could not now be existing. (WHITMAN, 1996, p.1166)

As our very existence is based on the acceptance of these “fountain heads of song” (1996, p.1167), he confirms his position by saying that “No true bard will ever contravene the Bible” (1996, p.1166). Here we have, revealed in his own words, how Whitman fused the “true bard” with the “true son of God”, the poet. For him, the role of a bard and that of a son of God are not separated, since they are one single entity working to spread the Word of the Lord on earth. The catalogues are one of the ways he found to create this type of ordering of the world in America, and then to formulate it into his songs, establishing the new era on a very solid and fundamental basis. Emerson, upon reading the gift copy of the 1855 Leaves of Grass sent to him by the poet, quickly realized that “the solid sense of the book” was “a sober certainty”. Although he “rubbed” his “eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion”, he acknowledged that the book had “the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.637). These words from the Sage of Concord to Whitman, greeting him “at the beginning of a great career”, are part of the famous letter the former wrote the latter on 21 July, 1855. As Emerson was himself a minister[2], we might draw the conclusion that he saw nothing offensive to religion in Whitman’s book, including the use of catalogues. On the contrary, he was so delighted and reassured by the Leaves that he decided to visit New York to pay his respects to his “benefactor”. Since Whitman had admitted that Emerson was one of the greatest influences on him (ALLEN, 1955, p.242), certainly Emerson was very happy to recognize his teachings embodied in such a book. From this point of view, Emerson was necessarily the best judge for the Leaves. In fact, he and Thoreau were the only ones of such high stature to give a warm welcome to it.

The other source for the catalogues, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, contains some of them. The most famous one is the “Catalogue of the Ships”, a passage in Book 2 of the Iliad (2.494-759), which lists the contingents of the Achaean army that were on their way to attack Troy. The catalogue lists the names of the leaders, where each of them came from, sometimes giving an epithet (a descriptive phrase and a noun) to describe parentage and place, and also the number of ships used to transport the men to Troy. After that, there is a “Catalogue of the Trojans” and their allies (2.816-877). The “Argument” of Book II, on “The Trial of the Army, and The Catalogue of the Forces”, explains that this section of the epic “[…] gives occasion to the poet to enumerate all the forces of the Greeks and Trojans […]”[3]. Here we have the principal linguistic aspect of the catalogues: enumeration, which leads to grammatical parallelism. Book XVIII of the Iliad provides the “Catalogue of the Nereids”, a shorter version of the same catalogue that appears in Hesiod’s Theogony (the poem that describes the origins and genealogies of the gods of ancient Greece).  In Book XI of the Odyssey, there are two catalogues that are presented during the nekuia, Odysseus’ visit to the dead, or trip to the underworld: “The Catalogue of the Ladies”, when, after speaking to Tiresias, he speaks to a dozen women, who are related by blood to heroes or are favorites of gods; and “The Catalogue of the Condemned”[4], which lists the heroes that died in the Trojan War, and to whom he speaks.

The second topic mentioned above, the flow of images, blossoming and multiplying down the pages of the book, brings together the catalogues and the “free growth of metrical laws”. The first section of “Salut au Monde!” shows this growth of images, as an effect of what could be at first supposed to be just a plain use of mere repetitions:

O take my hand Walt Whitman!

Such gliding wonders! such sights and sounds!

Such join’d unended links, each hook’d to the next,

Each answering all, each sharing the earth with all.

What widens within you Walt Whitman?

What waves and soils exuding?

What climes? what persons and cities are here?

Who are the infants, some playing, some slumbering?

Who are the girls? who are the married women?

Who are the groups of old men going slowly with their arms about each other’s necks?

What rivers are these? what forests and fruits are these?

What are the mountains call’d that rise so high in the mists?

What myriads of dwellings are they fill’d with dwellers?

(WHITMAN, 1996, p.287)

When we look closely at the poem, we perceive that each verse has its own form, its own music, its own modulation that is the result of the poet’s inspiration, feelings, and thoughts conveyed in words in a poetic way. The alliterations, with capital letters to highlight the elements mentioned: “Such SightS and SoundS”, which makes us feel as if the “gliDINg WONDerS” were blowing in the wind; the combination of alliteration and assonance in “WhAt WIdens WIthin You WAlt WhItman”, with the chain of W’s plus the vowel sounds echoing forever as if to mark the spatial expansion inside the poet’s body and soul. Also, the use of traditional forms, in this case, a combination of a spondee (two stressed syllables) with two anapests (two unstressed syllables followed by a long one); in the following line we have the same combination: this time, two spondees followed by two anapests: “What CLImes? WHAt PERsons and CIties are HEre?”. “What rivers are these?” (spondee and anapest); “What forests and fruits are these?” (a spondee, an anapest and an iamb). The iamb, the metrical foot of two syllables, one unstressed and one stressed, is the basis of the traditional iambic pentameter, the verse that comprises five iambs and is at the core of English poetry; some lines from the famous sonnet 18 by Shakespeare (1992, p.753) will do as an example: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate. / Rough winds do shake the darling buds of may, / And summer’s lease has all too short a date”, which is in the first lines: “O take my hand Walt Whitman”; “Such gliding wonders!”. Then a caesura, a pause or break near the middle of the line, and after that, another couple of iambs: “such sights and sounds”.

This example of verses takes us now to the third topic mentioned, which is meter, or versification. We know that we could supply more examples of the traditional poetic forms used in Leaves of Grass. However, we must make a stop here so that we can introduce the subject that we actually need to discuss: the fact that the poetic system in Portuguese is different from the English one in some respects, as we will see below. The reason for that is that our work here is on the re-creation of Whitman’s poetry into Portuguese, and a sole description of the English versification system will not help us much. In reality, what we need is to know how different or similar they are, so that we can perform our task more perfectly. At this point, we will only complete the information about the most common types of feet in English, in order to move to the next step, the Portuguese meter. So, in English, there is the trochee, which is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. It consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. William Blake[5] provides us an example with two lines of his famous poem “The Tyger”: “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night”. The dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables, as determined by syllable weight. In accentual verse, such as English, it is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, the opposite of the anapest (two unstressed followed by a stressed syllable). This form uses verses of six feet. There is usually a caesura after the ictus (beat, the strongest syllable) of the third foot.  Examples: the opening line of the Aeneid (Virgil) is a typical line of dactylic hexameter (here we have an example of quantitative Latin verse translated into accentual English verse): “I sing of arms and the man, who first from the shores of Troy [...]” (“Árm? v?r?mqu? c?n?, // Tr?i? qu? prím?s ?b óris”). The first and second feet are dactyls. The third and fourth feet are spondees, with two long vowels, one on either side of the caesura. The fifth foot is a dactyl, with the ictus this time falling on a grammatically long vowel. The final foot is a spondee with two grammatically long vowels. The dactylic hexameter[6] was utilized in English by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (mentioned below in section 3.5) in his poem Evangeline, “which we are told to read as though [it was] written in the classical dactylic hexameter” (WRIGHT, 1985, p.90); Wright is saying that because he knows that Longfellow was a master of the “iambic patterns” with a “grasp of its permissive variations”; but, most importantly, apart from his masterful “grasp” of the techniques, in his opinion, Longfellow had “radical limits”, due to the fact that his mastery drove him away from the “living world”. It is like the designation of the poet in an ivory tower, detached from the physical, practical world, which is known to English, French, American and Brazilian people. The first line of the poem will serve as an example (capitals to indicate stress): “THIS is the / FORest prim- / EVal. The / MURmuring / PINES and the / HEMlocks,”.

When we look at these verses from the perspective of a Brazilian reader, whose cultural and poetic background is based on a different poetic system, we have a different interpretation. In Portuguese, verses have a syllabic base, whereas in English they have an accentual-syllabic one, which is based on its stressed and unstressed syllables and on the number of syllables of each foot and its variations. Poetry in languages like Latin and Greek use quantitative verse: long and short syllables, which means that it is based on duration, the length of time needed to pronounce each syllable. In Portuguese, the verses have a fixed number of poetic syllables per line, counted until the last stressed syllable of the line[7], with patterns of regular accents. Verses range from one to twelve syllables, thus defined: monosyllables, disyllables, trisyllables, tetrasyllables (or quadrisyllables), pentasyllables, hexasyllables, heptasyllables, octosyllables, eneasyllables, decasyllables (there is the blank or heroic decasyllable, which is not rhymed), hendecasyllables and dodecasyllables, or alexandrines. Longer verses, usually from ten poetic syllables on, have a caesura (a break) that divides the line in two parts called hemistiches, or half lines of verse (which can be marked by punctuation or just the pause between phrases).

The verses of five (with the accent on the fifth syllable and on some other for phonic support) and seven syllables (with varying accents on the second, third, fourth and fifth, and naturally on the seventh), in Portuguese, are called redondilhas (TREVISAN, 2001, p.172), which represent the most popular forms, traditionally (minor and major, according to the number of metrical syllables; the word comes from Spanish redondilla, a stanza form that consists of four lines, normally of eight syllables each, rhyming in abba; in Portuguese, we have a different way of counting the syllables from Spanish: all syllables are counted in verses in Spanish scansion, which is why they are heptasyllables in our vernacular). The “redondilha major” is the more popular of the two, for its rhythm finds easy expression within our language. We could say that poetry written in verses with an odd number of syllables is more lyric and those written in verses with an even number of poetic syllables are more recitative, more prosaic, although that is not something fixed.

In this manner, when a Brazilian reader, who has acquired some basic knowledge in Brazilian literature, reads the same verses by Whitman from “Salut au Monde!”, he will see the same elements through another aesthetic and linguistic filter, that of the “metrical laws” in Portuguese: “O take my hand Walt Whitman!” is a hexasyllable with accents on the second, fourth and sixth syllables; “Such gliding wonders!” and “such sights and sounds!”, an eneasyllable separated by a caesura after the fifth syllable or two tetrasyllables. “What widens within you Walt Whitman” is an octosyllable, and “What climes? What persons and cities are here?” is a perfect decasyllable, with main accents on the second, fourth and seventh syllables. Even though the approaches to the literary piece are diverse, the final impression on the reader is the same, for the poetic product is the same. Our fruition of poetry, despite being in another language, does not pose a problem. The reader does not need to know which feet are employed in the making of a poem or the patterns of accent or rhyme to have delight in it. The only thing that matters is whether the poem is effective or not, whether it conveys its meanings in an appropriate manner or not. Being ignorant of the metrical laws does not prevent readers from appreciating poetry. Fruition of aesthetic beauty does not rely on previous knowledge of techniques of composition. Otherwise, the common man would never enjoy beauty in any form or shape in which it is presented. Naturally, there is a problem when the specialist, who can be a poet or a critic, reads the piece of writing. In this case, the poet or translator must be aware of the fact that he must study this subject, when he undertakes such a task.

Therefore, the main question is: how to transfer the sounds, the prosody of one language into another? There is a problem imposed to us by the difference between the poetic systems, based on the prosody of each language. The rhythm of the English language is based on this correlation between stressed and unstressed syllables, and also on the duration of sounds. The question of rhythm is important because there are two important factors concerning pronunciation in English: English pronunciation is irregular; that is, stressed syllables vary even within word families (see: compare, comparison, but comparable); and the unstressed syllables are “shortened”, or reduced (GILBERT, 2001, pp.22-25) and have a “muffled” quality, so they are “unclear”. This is phonetically called “schwa”, “the most common vowel sound in English”, whose phonetic symbol is ?. As any teacher of English will know and Gilbert highlights it, only teachers “enunciate every sound clearly in order to help students understand” (2001, p.25) the language, making it difficult for the native speakers to understand people who speak English applying to it the concept of equal length of syllables (as is the case of Portuguese). A ten-year-experience of teaching English as a foreign language has showed us the difficulty students have with rhythm when learning English. On this topic, Gilbert, a researcher who works with EFL teachers, writes:

[…] syllables are an essential foundation for English rhythm. Rhythm may be the single most important element in learning clear pronunciation. There may also be consequences for grammar. […] students with an instinct for the rhythm of English seem to have better control of the structure words [articles, pronouns, auxiliary verbs]. An awareness of syllables is important because it helps students: 1. identify the exact syllable for stress marking, which native speakers rely on for clear understanding […] 2. Notice reduced syllables […] 3. Become sensitive to English rhythm […] (GILBERT, 2001, p.1)

Apart from the focus on rhythm, Gilbert advises teachers to use the words “short” and “long” to describe the “duration contrasts” between words like “ship/sheep”, “pull/pool”, “bit/beat”, “sick/seek”, “live/leave” (minimal pairs) and so on, which will help students “produce authentic English rhythm”. But not only these kinds of pairs of sounds can be contrasted in this manner; other words with similar vowel sounds fall within the same category of short and long opposition, according to the sound that comes after the vowel: if the final sound is a “stop” sound like t, d or p, the vowel is short, and if the final sound is a “continuant” sound like y, s, n or l, the vowel sound is long: bite/buy, like/lies, mate/main, light/lie, keep/key, light/line, rope/role, boat/bone, food/fool, rude/rule (GILBERT, 1997, pp.25-7). Additionally, he counsels teachers to resort to poems and songs as an excellent aid to mastering English rhythm and sound.

On the other hand, in Portuguese, according to Bechara, a traditional grammarian, “[…] quantity [that is, duration] is little felt and has no noticeable role in the characterization and distinction of words and grammatical forms[8]” (1989, p.53). We only lengthen words for emphasis. The most important difference is that in our poetic language the “fundamental units of rhythm” are the syllables (TREVISAN, 2001, p.67). Poetically speaking, we may call them “sounds” to distinguish poetic syllables from grammatical syllables. This is useful because in poetry there are elements such as syneresis: the contraction of two vowels into a diphthong; and dieresis: in sound, it is a pause, but linguistically it is a mark placed over the second of two adjacent vowels to indicate that they must be pronounced separately, as in the word naïve. Thus, Trevisan defines a “basic principle” for poetry in Portuguese on syllables and their development around a “dynamic center” which is the “stressed syllable”: “The Portuguese verse has stress and the number of syllables as an obligation. They make up the rhythmic groupings […]” (TREVISAN, 2001, p.68) on which poetry lives, in reality, its material basis. Naturally, in our language we have intonation like any other language, which is necessary to express the speaker’s mind. Bechara asserts that “In Portuguese, […] the clauses are characterized by intonation, that is, the way they are uttered within a certain melodic cadence” (BECHARA, 1989, p.194). So the clauses are articulated in a way that the “end of a clause is always marked by one of the types of intonation” that exist in the language (1989, p.194). Normally, the words in our mother tongue have stressed syllables, and they are obviously important to correct pronunciation. In poetry, they are used to mark the accents in combination with the number of syllables of the meter being used. To make the verse sound as natural as possible, it is necessary to make the stressed syllable coincide with the poetic accent within the meter chosen.

Bilac and Passos[9] (1930, p.37), in their Tratado de Versificação (Versification Treatise), define verse, or rather “meter”, as “a grouping of words, or even only one word, with forced pauses and a certain number of syllables, which become music”. The two Parnassian poets, famous for their struggle for exactness of form and adherence to classical themes that resulted in detachment from their subjects, advised that “in Portuguese, more than in any other language, […] syllables and pauses are cultivated.” This poetic school preceded Modernism in Brazil. Although these poets were considered by modernists as antiquated, what they say about the poetic system of our language is true. So, to answer the question presented above, on how to transfer the prosody of one language into another, we may say that we are going to base our work on sounds and rhythm, and, like Whitman, allow his poetry to grow out of the metrical laws in Portuguese. We shall let it sink in within our soul, so that it will come up naturally in the Portuguese meter, mixing technique and intuition in the re-creation of Leaves of Grass into our vernacular. In the following section we will discuss modernism in Brazil and in some other countries, focusing our attention on the most important writers who are in some way connected to Whitman and the renewal of poetry in the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth.

---

[1] Oswald de Andrade, one of the most important modern writers in Brazil, and a leading figure in the 1922 Week of Modern Art, a turning point in Brazilian art and literature, was mentioned above for his two most famous novels. He was also an experimental poet, and wrote many books of inventive poetry, in which he excelled in the use of this technique. We will present more information on de Andrade in the next section.

[2] Emerson acquired a license to preach in 1826 after taking a course at Cambridge; although successful, he gave up his ministration in 1832, for not being at ease to celebrate Communion.

[3] This information is provided by Alexander Pope, in his translation of Homer’s Iliad, in the “Argument” of Book II. Available at: <http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/homer/h8ip/book2.html>.

Accessed on 19 December 2007.

[4] In the translation of Odorico Mendes, into Portuguese, “The Catalogue of the Nereids” appears on page 408 of the Iliad (HOMERO, 2005); the other catalogues appear in lines 169-495 of Book XI of the Odyssey (HOMERO, 1992).

[5] Blake (1757 – 1827) was an English poet, visionary, painter, and printmaker, author of famous books such as Songs of Innocence, The Book of Thel and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Augusto de Campos paid him a tribute in a book called O Tygre, de William Blake. São Paulo: author’s edition, 1977.

[6] The Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is an example of dactylic tetrameter, also common in classical poetry: “PICture your SELF in a BOAT on a RIVer with / TANgerine TREE-ees and MARmalade SKII-ii-es.”

[7] This is what is stated by traditional scansion in Portuguese, that is, analysis of meter (BECHARA, 1989, p.353); (BILAC; PASSOS, 1930, p.48). Ali, in his book Versificação Portuguesa (Portuguese Versification), argues that counting the syllables only up to the last stressed one is “arbitrary” (2006, p.20), since most of the verses in Portuguese end in words that are paroxytone, that is, words which are stressed on the next to last syllable. Ali presents the more reasonable method of counting all the syllables in a verse line, which would make all verses that end in paroxytones change category; example: a monosyllable would become a disyllable, and so on. Actually, the only thing that changes is the classification of the verses. Nothing changes for the poet or the readers, for the sounds remain the same.

[8] Pound also made this distinction between languages, emphasizing its importance (1987, p.56): “The quantitative verse of the ancients was replaced by syllabic verse, as they say in the school books. […] And that fitting […] of words to tune replaced the supposedly regular spondees, dactyls, etc. The question of the relative duration of syllables has never been neglected by men with susceptible ears. I particularly want to keep off these technical details. The way to learn the music of verse is to listen to it.”

[9] Olavo Brás Martins dos Guimarães Bilac (1865-1918) was the most acclaimed poet of the Parnassian school in Brazil, having won a contest for “Prince of Brazilian poets” in 1907. Sebastião Cícero Guimarães Passos, journalist and poet (1867-1909), was Bilac’s friend. Both were founding members of the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters), established on July 20^th, 1897, whose first and “perpetual” president is Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the most important Brazilian novelist, essayist and short-story writer, historically speaking, who was also a poet and dramatist.

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.

Kind regards,

Gentil Saraiva Jr.

“RE-CREATING WALT WHITMAN’S LEAVES OF GRASS INTO PORTUGUESE“,

Chapter 3, section 3.8:

“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

To a discerning eye;

Much sense the starkest mad-

ness.

‘T is the majority

In this, as all, prevail.

Assent, and you are sane;

Demur, – you’re straightway dan-

gerous,

And handled with a chain.

OUR RE-CREATION:

XI

Muita demência é diviníssimo

Senso pra um olho discernente;

Muito senso demência in-

tensa.

Nisso, como em tudo, a

Maioria prevalece.

Consente, e tu és são;

Duvida, e já és da-

noso,

E preso num grilhão.

Although Campos says that Dickinson’s poetic revolution was more radical than Whitman’s, we must not forget the other aspects of his genius, as Freyre reminded us in his conference “Comrade Whitman” about the fact that in Whitman the poet, the man and the politician can not be separated. Perhaps Dickinson’s capacity for breaking the limits of conventional language was really more brilliant than Whitman’s, and surely her disposition to lead a solitary life was greater, but the other aspect or aspects of a public figure were lacking in her. We could say that Whitman’s position in society, that is, literarily, personally and politically, is the opposite of hers, because he was a public person, he was in touch with the movements of the world. He was a person in the world, an observer who was close to it, taking part in it, as he sings in section 4 of “Song of Myself“: he was “Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.”; he was playing the game of the world, but at the same time he was critically observing it, and reasoning about it, and not being a mere naturalistic observer who was just portraying it from outside, while she was an observer who was literally invisible to the world, although definitely not a naturalistic one, either! However, like the lady in section 11 of “Song of Myself”, with “Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.”, who “[...] hides, [...], aft the blinds of the window.”, and who stays “stock still” in her room, being just the “unseen hand” that passes over the body of the world, watching the world as a voyeur does, she never left her position as such. She never left the position behind the curtains to go there to touch and see the world in motion, feeling all its odors, sorrows and joys, being in close contact with the stuff that makes the world, sharing in it and actively taking a stand in it.

We could say then that they both did similar works in literature, both were revolutionaries. However, while one carried out a public revolution, the other did a private one. One fought openly on the field. The other did it from behind the trenches of privacy.  Both are coherent in their behavior. Traditionally, they can be seen as archetypes of the human Male and Female. Nevertheless, they still are the two greatest geniuses of North American poetry, and still remain two great literary mysteries and endless sources for literary students. As Professor Warren[2] points out about Whitman’s revolution in the following passage:

“The poems Whitman published from 1938 to 1850 are mainly exercises in iambic tetrameter quatrains, with rhymed second and fourth lines. Archaisms and conventional poetic formulas dominate the diction, especially in the earliest poems. [...] With very little warning, then, the 1855 Leaves marks an abrupt departure from Whitman’s previous style and an absolute discontinuity with the traditions of English verse.” (WARREN, 1997, p.46)

This discontinuity has been shown by us when we compared Whitman’s style to Longfellow’s, indicating the poetic re-molding performed by the first, departing from the mellowness of traditional songbirds. Naturally, this withdrawal from traditional forms had its basis on them, which became, now transformed, made new, adapted to a new era, the alchemy of old poetry into modern singing. Dickinson followed the same procedure. Though she has her own way into poetry, as Bloom (1995, p.276) puts it: “Literary originality achieves scandalous dimensions in Dickinson, and its principal component is the way she thinks through her poems.”, for her originality is “cognitive” (1995, p.272). Regarding this aspect she can be compared to Shakespeare, Dante, Blake and Whitman. Although “Her own obvious affinity is with Emerson’s poetry, but her immediate precursors, like his, are the English High Romantics, and her underground affiliations are surprisingly Shakespearean.” Like Whitman, she has a relationship with the past, which she does not deny. It is rather the other way around, for “The immense legacy of the male tradition was a singular advantage for her, since she had an original relation to that literary cosmos” (1995, p.276). This attitude toward the past is shared by Whitman, which is signalized by Warren in this passage:

“The model of revolutionary style reveals a more varied and complex sense of Whitman’s relationship to tradition than the totalizing critical narrative suggests. [...] “Song of Myself,” although utterly revolutionary in style and theme, also pays ample tribute to the past.”  (WARREN, 1997, p.47)”

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[1] Bartleby website offers 597 poems by Emily Dickinson, including this one, at:  <http://www.bartleby.com/113/>. Accessed on June 10, 2007.

[2] WARREN, James Perrin. “Reading Whitman’s Postwar Poetry”. In: GREENSPAN, Ezra. The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman. Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.46. (James Perrin Warren is Assistant Professor of English at Washington and Lee University.)

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!

If you want to know what my research was about,

read a section (below) from my presentation to

the panel of examiners.

Kind regards,

Gentil

—

The focus of my work is on the re-creation of Walt Whitman‘s poetry into Portuguese in a creative way. Basically, it means that literal translation, or the transposition of a text, word for word, from one language into another, is definitely out of question. It might only happen by chance, when a verse naturally may find its way into our language without much re-working. The idea is to convey the meaning based on the re-creation of the poetic structure, the poetic-linguistic means that supports and transmits the affective-intellectual content of the poetry of the American bard. In other words, to combine in a single aesthetic act the conveyance of the semantic element, or the content, harmonized with its formal elements, which in poetry are meter, rhythm, rhyme, assonance and alliteration, in their endless manifestations, as well as the atmosphere, tone or diction of each passage. This term that I use to refer to this process, re-creation, which indicates a type of translation that goes beyond literal translation, was borrowed from my masters in this type of translation, the Brazilian Concretist poets: Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari. In English, I use this word with hyphen, “re-creation” (and its derivatives), due to the fact that “recreation” indicates only diversion, an activity that is performed for relaxation and pleasure, and not “creating again”.

Thus the specific aim of my research was to translate a considerable part of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass into Portuguese, so that the Brazilian reader can have an idea of who the great American poet was and what his poems conveyed. It is also intended to provide some information on his influence on the next generation of writers. In order to do this, I have divided the central part of my research into three chapters (chapter 1 is the introduction): 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 me to understand Whitman and the Leaves better, 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”, I describe my 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 my masters in this type of translation, a discussion on the poetic aspects of Whitman’s verse, some authors who are related to Whitman and some examples of poetic re-creation. Chapter 4 contains the poems and books which I have been re-creating since 2006. In chapter 5, the conclusion, I analyze the result of my work and assess if it has been fruitful. I will give now some more details of this research, of Whitman, of Leaves of Grass and creative translation.

As it can be seen in chapter 2, which I 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 carried no titles either. Whitman’s name appeared only in the middle of the poem that is known today 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. 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.” 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 became known as the “authorized” or “deathbed” edition, and which is the one that is used as the source of my creative translations.

Except for the absence of the poet’s name on the cover and of poem titles, the most striking literary fact after the release of the first edition was that, among many people whom Whitman sent copies of his book, the writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was the only person who personally answered him in writing, that is, by sending the poet the most famous letter in American literature, in which the poet-philosopher acknowledged Whitman’s poetic genius (Whitman answered Emerson’s letter in 1856, calling Emerson “Friend and Master”; WHITMAN, 1996, p.1350). Emerson, who was a great influence on Whitman, and would remain a friend for life, gave Whitman this “safe-conduct” into the literary world. In section 2.5.6 I provide 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 there is a discussion on how Whitman’s poetry is connected to William Blake’s at the spiritual level, and what there is of vision and prophecy in their writings. In section 3.4, where there is a discussion about catalogues, I also refer to religiousness, since the Bible is one of the sources of this type of writing.

Also included in chapter 2 is a review of the criticism that has been so important to me in researching Leaves and the poet. Authors such as Ezra Pound, Harold Bloom, Gay Wilson Allen, Henry S. Canby, Ed Folsom, D. H. Lawrence and Fernando Alegría have been tremendously helpful in broadening my view of Whitman. These and many others are featured in section 2.4, with emphasis on their specific contribution to my research. Then there is section 2.5, which examines the meaning and possible mythical origin of the use of calamus, reed or sweet-flag as a major symbol of manly attachment in Leaves, particularly in the “Calamus” cluster, in which it acquires a political meaning, representing comradeship, union (Calamus was a Greek mythological figure), and even nationality, which is an aspect that Whitman shares with the Romantics. By the way, whenever appropriate, I will point out what Whitman has in common with the Romantics and what aspects of Romanticism he rejected or surpassed. As a result of this approach to this literary movement, there will not be a specific section to discuss Romanticism in my dissertation. Moreover, I will examine other meanings and uses of the calamus or reed, such as musical instrument, pen, pipe and even as spice.

Chapter 3 is dedicated to the translatorial method, a study of poetic elements, such as rhythm and meter, and an examination of Whitman’s verse. My method of creative translation is defined at the beginning, in section 3.2, where I summarize the set of ideas that has guided me in my task. In short, I could describe my method as the reconstruction or re-configuring of the original text in the target language in a way that both the meaning and its poetic elements and linguistic properties are maintained, as well as its atmosphere and diction. Naturally, my presentation in chapter 3 is more extensive and detailed, and it shows how I have put this concept of translation together. There I also mention and quote my mentors in this field of activity, what I have learned from them and how I use this knowledge in my work. As I can not cite all the translators whose works have helped me in some way, I have decided to include in my research only the most immediately representative, to me, of what might be called today a Brazilian translation school. Although critics might complain that I have neglected many important scholars in this area, such as Paulo Rónai or Lawrence Flores Pereira, I have decided to narrow a little my focus for theoretical reasons. It does not mean that I am not aware of their work, especially Professor Pereira’s, whose translations of T. S. Eliot’s poems, Antigone (2006) and Hamlet (2007) are outstanding and have been a model to me. However, my choice of authors forces me to keep my attention on the ones I have chosen.

Thus, the poet translators whose concepts I have followed most closely in my research are Haroldo and Augusto de Campos  plus Décio Pignatari, who, together with the Campos brothers, started the Concrete Poetry movement in the 1950′s and renewed our poetry from then to the present. Ezra Pound, as their chief influence, is definitely part of the history of literary translation, or more specifically poetic translation, in the Western world and must be on any one’s curriculum (his books ABC of Reading and How to Read are real manuals for translators and poets). I also mention Odorico Mendes, who was revived by the Concrete poets, who were following Pound’s path of searching for the living parts of the culture in order to integrate it into the current literary movement. Actually, there are other translators who appear in my work, in sections 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9, in which I compare my re-creation of passages from Leaves of Grass and the works of other poets to their translations. In this case, I do not discuss their theoretical view of translation, only their practical results. In this sense, it is not appropriate to relate them to the Concrete poet-translators’ concepts and activities, particularly for the reason that the Concrete poets depart from a different idea of translation. As suggested by Pound, I have just compared results to verify what works best.

As for the poetic elements and Whitman’s verse, I refer in section 3.3 to what I have learned from Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Pound, especially about directness in language and poetic and linguistic correlations that exist between words in a text. When dealing specifically with verse, and in particular with Whitman’s verse, I study parallelism, enumeration, catalogues and meter, and the differences between their expression in English and Portuguese, due to the intrinsic linguistic properties of each language (section 3.4).  In section 3.5, I compare Whitman’s career and production as a man of letters to Oswald de Andrade’s, one of our most combative writers, including in this term its political sense. This is due to my view of Whitman as an author whose attitude and writings are closer to the kind of attitude towards nature, society and industrialization presented by Modernist poets than to most American and Brazilian poets of the nineteenth century. For this reason, I have included in this part of my research the contribution of Fernando Pessoa, speaking as his heteronym Álvaro de Campos, to the spread of Whitman’s reputation as a poet who has inspired many other poets and writers in many different countries. Still in section 3.5, I bring the word of Gilberto Freyre and Aléxis de Tocqueville to help furnish a portrait of the social and political situation in the United States during the years around the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, mainly from 1849 until the end of the American Civil War. This situation was important because it prompted a major shift in Whitman’s life and career, since he resigned politics in 1849, after many years of involvement in party politics, to dedicate his efforts to creating his poetic works.

After that, in section 3.6, I discuss Longfellow’s poetry, which is placed here as a counterpoint to Whitman’s, that is, as a voice that occurs simultaneously, but is independent in form and rhythm. Specifically, Longfellow represents traditional poetry, writing in poetic forms that have been used for centuries, while Whitman is the poet of current times, creating a type of poetry that mirrors the modern time in which he lives (Whitman wrote an article called “Old Poets” (1996, p.1276), in which he gives his view on American poetry of his time, and indicates the main poets: Longfellow, of course, Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, and Emerson). Longfellow was also the most popular poet of that time, he was respected by Whitman and even visited the poet in Camden in 1879, a fact that was remembered with pride by Whitman, who is known for his cultivation of many devoted friends (American and British, who helped him in his last years, when he was physically incapacitated, due to the illnesses caught during the War of Secession).

I have been reading, studying and translating Leaves of Grass for around twenty years now. During this time, I have been not only studying and translating poetry, but also developing this system of translation as well. My translatorial method, which I describe in chapter 3, has been applied to various poetic works. Thus, I have improved my translating skills and have practiced them on texts which can be defined as difficult, that is, attractive to a translator, as is stated in section 3.2. So, before tackling Whitman’s songs, I spent some time learning how to re-create poetry. Samples of this work are shown in sections 3.7, in which there are examples of re-creations from Leaves of Grass, which are compared to other translations published in Brazil. In section 3.8, I offer the reader instances of creative translations of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Whitman loved the Rubaiyat too), James Joyce’s and Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and in 3.9 there are more passages from Leaves of Grass. All these renderings are followed by comments or explanations on technical details or choice of words performed by me.

In chapter 4, the result of my efforts can be appreciated: the poems, re-created in Portuguese according to my idea of re-construction of content and form, of re-building the poetic elements that are the structure that carry the meanings. After I  accomplished the re-creation of three books that are part of the Leaves, “Song of Myself”, “Children of Adam” and “Calamus”, in my Master’s thesis, a task that was completed in 1995 and which is available at the UFRGS library, I resumed my work of bringing Whitman’s poetry into our language. I have chosen the following books and poems to work on this time: “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”; “A Broadway Pageant”; “SEA-DRIFT”; “Memories of President Lincoln”; “Passage to India” and “The Sleepers.”

Finally, in chapter 5, I analyze critically the re-created poems in our language, quoting passages, in order to verify whether I have achieved the desired results. I have also included comments on each book or poem, in order to contextualize them and help the readers a little. Apart from these five chapters, there is a reference section, with all the publications and authors that have contributed to my research and an annex with the text of “Origins of Attempted Secession”, since this document clarifies Whitman’s political view on the United States of his time and is mentioned in section 3.5.

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”:

—

Comrades! I am the bard of Democracy

Others are more correct and elegant than I, and more at home in the parlors and schools than I,

But I alone advance among the people en-masse, coarse and strong

I am he standing first there, solitary chanting the true America,

I alone of all bards, am suffused as with the common people.

I alone receive them with a perfect reception and love-and they shall receive me. [...] (WHITMAN, 2002, p. 580).

—

The man who treated the common people on equal terms, who had bus conductors as intimate friends, as portrayed by Allen: “This was the real Walt Whitman, undiscriminating, easily stimulated by noise, color, and movement, happy to lose himself in the ceaseless flux of people going and coming.!” (1955, p.78). He was also the man who sang Homer in public places on top of buses. We could say that this is an example of his contradiction. The man who worked for many years as a nurse in public hospitals during the War of Secession had previously been an opera lover, was fond of the classics, used to read Homer, Plato, Socrates, Shakespeare and Dante. The poet of the modern who did not despise the past, the man who used all his earnings to buy pen, paper and food for wounded soldiers also admired the President in the White House. The man who said that the Leaves “owed nothing” to Emerson was the same man who called him “master” (CANBY, 1943, p.156), which is also testified by Harold Bloom in his “Introduction” to Modern Critical Views, a volume of criticisms dedicated to the “major American literary myth”, the “national poet” of the United States.

It is not by chance that Bloom calls him “hermetic”. The poet called himself “Hermes” in “Chanting the Square Deific”. Again, contradiction: “hermetic” means sealed, impervious to outside interference; but it also means “Hermetic”, referring to Hermes Trismegistus (the Thrice-Greatest God), magic and alchemy. However, Hermes Trismegistus  is distinct from Hermes, the Greek god/myth, who was the son of Zeus and Maia, the inventor of the lyre and Pan pipe (syrinx), protector of the heroes, travelers (besides accompanying the dead to Hades), god of commerce and flight and Divine Messenger (GRIMAL, 1991). It is worth remembering that Whitman was well acquainted with Egyptology. This position or role of messenger was self-assigned by Whitman, as we can see in part 6 of “Passage to India”: “Finally shall come the Poet, worthy that name; / The true Son of God shall come, singing his songs.”. In this context, he was a blend of both Hermes, a true son of God, bringing His message to this world, and also one who used symbols to do so in a hermetic way.

Whitman’s hermeticism lies on his multiplicity of expression. He did contain multitudes, and this aspect of his personality or soul is what we have learned to admire and respect. Therefore, it is practically impossible for one single person to hold a whole view of the Leaves. From our experience of reading Leaves of Grass and criticisms on it for the past twenty years, we firmly believe that the best one can do to understand the Leaves is, besides reading the book, naturally, to broaden one’s view of the book by reading as many secondary sources of information as possible. The main reason is that the more we read articles, studies and biographies of the poet and the more we enlarge our own comprehension of both poet and book, the more we know that it is absolutely necessary to do so; otherwise our vision of it becomes too limited.

Consequently, no single critic can show us how large and multitudinous this poet and his works are. It is similar to a mosaic, a design that is made up of small and big colored pieces that depicts the spirit of a nation. As the poet himself was so fond of photographs, we could also say that the book is a composite picture of an era, written by a man of exceptional talent and capacity of vision. We need to acknowledge his capacity and ability to convey this vast vision in a multifaceted book, which resembles multiple photographs that overlap one another.

Thus, each criticism, article or biographical study that we read contributes some information to our interpretation of the Leaves, describes to us one of these overlapping photographs. It shows how large and important Whitman was and is for America, not only North-America, but all the Americas. This is why the task of interpreting the works of Whitman can not be assigned to one individual. And many years of study have shown us that the best way is to travel down these different roads, appreciate these pictures offered to us by so many talented critics who have enhanced our comprehension of this vast book and the man, as well as the poet, so that we feel we have grasped something of his works, understood the poet and the man a little. As he sang in “So Long!”, from “Songs of Parting”: “who touches this touches a man”.

Our purpose here is to bring to the reader various viewpoints that have been of invaluable assistance to us in understanding the book, the poet and the man, and have opened our eyes to many wonderful things in them. And our own interpretation and comments on these discoveries as well. We will begin then by our reading of some essays by Emerson and what we have found in the Leaves that we consider as echoes of Emerson in Whitman’s works. We are going to quote Emerson and indicate where we think these ideas appear in the Leaves. In “The American Scholar”, an Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837, Emerson (1909-14, p.1) argues that “Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age [...]“. As soon as we start reading the Preface to the 1855 Edition of the Leaves (WHITMAN, 2005, pp.12-14), we find the poet practically paraphrasing Emerson on the first page, by stating that the “[...] United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” The poet has no doubt that the “Americans of all nations” are poets themselves, actually they have the “fullest poetical nature”, which naturally includes himself,  one of the roughs, though highly intellectual, but one who finds himself to be like one of the “common people” of his nation, because the common people have the “genius” of the United States, more than the “executives or legislatures”, or “ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors”, or even “newspapers or inventors”. They will lead “in a new age” because the “American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races.” They incarnate “its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes”.

Then, we have the following words by Emerson:

—

It is one of those fables which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.  The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man,-present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops and cannot be gathered.

—

which, again echo in the first poem of the Leaves, “One’s Self I Sing”, from “Inscriptions”, where the poet sings “A simple, separate Person;/ Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse.” Here is the corresponding dialectic idea in verse: by singing a “simple, separate Person”, that is, the ideal person or “Modern Man”, who is present in everyone, the poet, dialectically, is bringing everybody together, bringing the “multitudes” comprised by one person into his works, which he is going to sing, for example, in his catalogues, and naturally in himself, since he is “large” and contains these “multitudes”. He sings “a Person”, however, this person will be depicted in a wide variety of pictures, in long catalogues, but each depiction, in the end, will be of the “all”, of the “original unit”. He needs to sing each separate person to compose the masses, because, only by portraying each one of them and putting them side by side, can he be able to paint the portrait of this crowd, this collection of thousands or millions of individual, all of them a separate person in themselves, but not separated from the All, the totality, the whole of mankind.

Then, this movement from person to crowd and from crowd to person, or from the part to the whole and from the whole to the part means that the whole can not exist without its every part, otherwise it is not a whole, and the part can not exist apart from the whole, otherwise it will be lost in itself and will have no meaningful life, because nothing can exist from or outside of itself. Nature is everywhere showing us that every form of life is interconnected and dependent upon each other. Then, Whitman’s inclusion of every man in his catalogues is a way of trying to gather again the drops that were spilled in the fable. Weaving everybody back together into one whole, into a unity that had been lost, his song sews all together, bringing all the creation into a complete union, which is the utmost job of a true son of God.

Here Whitman takes this rather pessimistic view of Emerson’s mentioning of a fable of a divided society and turns it into a quite optimistic view, by showing in his poems that it is possible that this once “subdivided” “fountain of power” can be sewed back together into a whole, through the “lifelong love of comrades”, for example, as he sings in the “Calamus” cluster in the poem “For You O Democracy”, in which he promises to “make the continent indissoluble” and cities “inseparable with their arms about each other’s necks”, and that he will do that “by the love of comrades”. As Emerson himself does in the following lines of his essay:

—

What is Nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find,-so entire, so boundless. (EMERSON, 1909-14, p.2).

—

Actually, like the old sage of Concord, Whitman takes many steps ahead of the dark idea of a subdivision of the “original unit”, which we could simply call “God”, or even “web of God”, this “circular power” that is “so entire, so boundless” that we can not see its limits, its boundaries, but of which we are a part. We think that we are separated from this “continuity” because we only believe what we see with our own physical eyes. The problem with that is that we only see the visible physical world, the “world of appearances”, we do not see what is unseen by our physical eyes. To see beyond that we need to use our intuition, our sensitiveness, our hearts, not our minds, to be able to feel what can not be seen by our eyes. We must remember to use the mind to understand and the heart to feel. This is so obvious and at the same time so forgotten in our daily lives. Apart from what we learn in books, if we just think for a while of a non-religious concept of God, which would be like a whole, a holos (the Greek word that means total, all, entire), a complete thing, we could call it the universe, a number or a thing which lacks none of its parts, we could say that this holos or God can not deny or refuse any of its parts, due to the simple logical fact that if a whole negates one of its parts it is not complete anymore. And if we think that the whole universe is a holos, and if this holos can be called God, then the body of the universe is the body of God. Now, if we think of our own body as a holos, a microcosm, made up of billions of cells, and each cell has in itself the code to make a new body (DNA), equal to itself, why could we not think that each body in the universe has also the code of the whole universe? If the universe has the code to make stars and planets (coincidentally called celestial bodies!) and bodies of living animals, why not think that the universe inserted this code in each one of its creations, as a child carries in itself the code of its parents. Then we could come to the conclusion that each “separate Person” has in him/herself the code of the whole, each person can possibly be any of the other persons of the whole. This leads to the conclusion that we are not subdivisions of the “original unit”, but products of its expansion, because the universe expands itself by multiplication, as any animal or plant naturally does.  We are copies of the original unit, similar to it. We are entire beings, and not subdivisions.

It is not by chance that we are discussing this theme here, for the poet himself was deeply interested in Astronomy and it “[...] was always to be the one branch of science that Whitman knew best, and most accurately.” (ALLEN, 1955, p.124). The study of astronomy fascinated him, and he even became more “philosophical” because of that, which helped him to transcend “time and space and to search intuitively in his poetry for eternal duration.” And if we speak of something “eternal”, we necessarily speak of our souls, our divine souls. For if our physical bodies are mortal, what is eternal in ourselves is surely our souls. And if we consider our souls to be divine, they must be God’s creation. So, we if were created by God, we are His children, and then we are like Him.

Coincidentally, this idea is similar to an idea that exists in the Bible, in the book of Genesis, 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our Image, after our likenesse [sic]“. Thus, God created man in His own Image, “male and female” (verse 27), and He said to them: “Be fruitfull [sic], and multiply, and replenish the earth”. Coincidentally, the first poem of the Leaves sings “The Female equally with the Male [...] under the laws divine, the Modern Man”. Again, Emerson was right there, before Whitman, showing to his pupil that “A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.” By acknowledging that we were created in the Image of God by Himself, it makes us Divine like Him. We are as celestial as the heavenly bodies that float in space. And if each one is divine, all is divine, then, if one citizen is divine, the whole nation is divine. So there can exist a nation where each individual can be inspired by his/her divine soul. This is one of the reasons why Whitman never denied one single person, even if the person was mean, cruel, or devilish, or low. He believed that it was possible to show this divinity in every one (God’s omnipresence). One proof of that is that he wrote a book to mirror this to all. We hardly ever see the light by ourselves. We always need someone to guide us into it, just like a baby needs the care of the parents to learn how to live in this world, we need someone to show us the path to the light (of God, naturally!). As long as Whitman had many Guides, and one of them was definitely Emerson, he also became a master, a creator, a guide to others.

And one way to do it was by including all persons in his works, both in the book and in himself, because he did not separate the book from the man. Then, here is Whitman again merging all things in himself and his book to create this mirror of the whole for the readers, mixing the old and the new, the past and the present, religion and science, the masses and the individual, the part and the whole (the poet as a mirror of a divine omniscient mind). This is the movement of his contradictions or of his dialectics instead. Section 16 of “Song of Myself”, one of the innumerous catalogues that appear throughout Leaves of Grass, shows both the contradiction and a short example of catalogue:

—

A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest;

A novice beginning, yet experient of myriads of seasons;

Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion;

A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker;

A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.

—

He can be one thing and the other, he is one man and he is all men. He is beyond thesis and antithesis; he is already a synthesis, a “creator”, as he sings in Section 41 of “Song of Myself”, where he is “becoming already a creator”. Emerson would agree with that: “Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his” (“The American Scholar”, 1909-14, p.4). This is so because he can be both parts of the equation, interchangeably. This work on synthesis can be traced back to Hegel, whom Whitman used to read, as is testified by one of his biographers:

—

He had been reading Hegel – or more accurately discussions of Hegel – for several years. Traces of Hegelian influence may be seen in Democratic Vistas, in Whitman’s belief that the “dialectic” of conflict and struggle will produce a more perfect society. Or as he re-expressed this idea more poetically in “Song of the Universal” [...]. (ALLEN, 1955, p.460)

—

By being aware of his contradictions and understanding that the case is not of being one thing or the other, that is, he does not have to choose between the thesis or the antithesis. The point is being one thing and the other, the thesis and the antithesis; by doing so he realizes the connection between the two parts of the equation and then unites them into a synthesis. In Section 1 of “Song of Myself”, Whitman sings: “I Celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”, which shows his awareness of non separation between individuals, which he applied to bridging the gap between the “me” and the “other”. The same way he did with good and evil, of which he said he was the singer in Section 22: “I am not the poet of goodness only-I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.” This entry about Hegel’s definition of dialectic will illustrate the point:

—

dialectic (Gk., dialektik?, the art of conversation or debate) [...] According to the different views of this process, different conceptions of dialectic emerge. [...] In Hegel, dialect refers to the necessary process that makes up progress in both thought and the world. [...] The process is one of overcoming the contradiction between thesis and antithesis, by means of synthesis; the synthesis in turn becomes contradicted, and the process repeats itself until final perfection is reached. (BLACKBURN, 1994, p. 104)

—

That is, by reaching a harmony between two opposing positions, which can be things, people, thoughts or ideas, by seeking to join them, Whitman was trying to achieve synthesis. Which is found by looking for what unites and not what separates. This is what made him fight for a united nation, which is used against him, for example, as charge of anti-abolitionism. The fact is that Whitman was looking for something greater than two opposing factions or fractions; he was searching for a way to unite the opposing sides, which has nothing to do with supporting slavery. He was against slavery, but he was also against fratricide war. This is proven by his hard work in the hospitals during the U.S. Civil War, in which he cared for Southern soldiers as well as Northern ones. As well as for the fact that although he was a journalist and poet, he was there working as a wound-dresser, using his income to bring some relief to soldiers from all the country, which was also a way to know his country well. He did not travel all over the U.S., but he met people from everywhere during the war time (ALLEN, 1995, p.374).

By accomplishing a synthesis of opposites, the poet could be inferior and superior; he could be at the bottom and at the top, because he knew that what is below is similar to what is above, which is the teaching of Hermes Trismegistus. This is why he did not despise the common man, because he himself was also the common man. He was the poet and the carpenter, the intellectual in an office and a nurse in a hospital caring for dying soldiers. He was a journalist and a workman. He is not stuck at one side, he is not “contained between” his “hat and boots” (section 7, “Song of Myself”). He is much more, he is “an acme of things accomplish’d”, he is “an encloser of things to be” (section 44, “Song of Myself”). But above all, one needs to acknowledge that one is contradictory, otherwise no step can be taken on the path to becoming a synthesis, that is, the awareness that we can be one thing and the other, alternatively, and that we will not lose track of ourselves, both mentally and psychologically. This very expression, “one thing and the other”, is an example of Hermes Trismegistus’ teaching: we have three elements in this formula: “one thing”, “and”, “the other”. “And” is the main element, because it is the link between the other two. If we are only “one thing” or “the other”, and we miss the “and”, we might get confused, for at a time we are “one thing”, and at another time we are “the other”. If we keep changing positions without being aware of what we are doing, a psychiatrist might think we have a mental problem, or a friend might think we have a double face. However, if we learn that the most important element in this equation is the “and”, because it is the link between the two sides, we have the solution to the problem, and what was two before becomes one, linked by the “and”. As it is was said by Hermes: “That which is above is like that which is below”, but we must be aware that there must be a connection between “above” and “below”, otherwise it is like table tennis, we go from one side to the other and we never know where we are or what we are doing. Whitman was a northerner as well as a southerner (he actually spent three months in the south), and he did not want the two opposing sides of his country to separate. This made him look for a link to connect them, something greater than party politics or finance. This made him leave professional politics and walk the path of poetry, which proved to be more effective than his political writings. As Canby (1943) said, if Whitman had stopped his career in 1850 or continued only as a journalist, today he might be remembered as a good journalist, and nothing else. And perhaps he would not have moved so many people around his country and the world, and led so many to think about unity, and not separation.

Speaking of a Hermetic equation, Jesus Christ said something two thousand years ago that can be viewed in this context too: “I and the Father are one”; actually, Jesus also said in verse 38, quoted below, that “the Father is in me and I in him.”, which makes him a synthesis of the Son and the Father, because only the Father in him can tell him of His presence and make him aware that the Father is speaking in and through him; and only he as the Son can be conscious of the presence of the Father. Therefore, if both are parts of the same holos, they will occupy each position interchangeably, depending basically on the consciousness of whom is speaking, who will then be aware that he is at one moment the Father and at another the Son! This can be viewed in a logic example: if we consider a man here on earth, a common person, who is a father and at the same time a son. In his relationship with his own father, he will be the son. As well as he is himself a father in relation to his own son. And he has the father and the son in himself. The same occurs to a woman, who can be a daughter in relation to her own mother and a mother in relation to her own daughter. If the person realizes this, the person is accomplishing a synthesis in one’s self! This can be applied to personal roles as well as social ones. This even appears in popular sayings, like: “put yourself in the position of another”, meaning that you have to look through the eyes of the other person to be able to see the situation from their point of view. Then, by doing so, you will know how the other person feels and you will not judge the acts of the other person, but rather think or work together with the other person to find solutions to matters. That is what synthesis means, personally or socially. Only by working the differences or oppositions, can we find the common interest that will unite the people. That is the meaning of the “en masse”, of democracy to Whitman. How could he then despise the common man? The uneducated people, if these people were the ones who were building the nation, who were working to make it great as well as any educated men in the country did. Intellectuals and working people, rich and poor, or social or economic differences can not be a barrier to mutual understanding. Whitman did not even despise the criminals, whom he visited in prisons, as well as he visited sick people in hospitals. He was a guest at high class places, like the Tammany Hall, Libraries, Hotels, and also at low class places, like cheap bars and restaurants.

Many critics at his own time never understood why Whitman could prefer to live among uneducated people, such as bus drivers, workers in general, than with educated ones. But that was not a question of preference, that was a question of being aware of the many aspects of his personality, or of his “contradictions”. He was a man of the people; he mingled with them as one of them. His father was a carpenter, his mother was a housewife, his brother George was a soldier, another brother, Jeff, worked at the Water Works department. He grew up among working class people. He made his way to the journalistic world, but he never forgot his background. He became a poet, but he never forgot his past. Although he gained knowledge and taught himself the classics, and could be among high class people, he did not erase his life with the low class people. He did not use knowledge as a mask to hide himself and his past behind it. This is why he always called himself “one of the roughs”! He was a rough as well as a poet/journalist/intellectual. And for being so, a common person never felt uneasy in his presence. He would be warm and friendly with anyone, with the president as much as with the mechanic.

Let’s look then at another passage by Emerson, from the “The American Scholar” (p.3), which states that “The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also.” Divine is a word that is present all through the Leaves, from the first poem in the volume, “under laws divine”, to section 24 of “Song of Myself”, where the poet sings his own divinity: “Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,” and in many other passages where he sings “divine man”, “divine wife”, “divine materials”, “divine power”, the famous “divine average” in the “Song at Sunset” (from “Songs of Parting”), etc., until the end of the book, where the heavenly word divine appears in “Good Bye My Fancy” in the title of a poem called “The Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete”. As he sings in “Laws for Creations” (from “Autumn Rivulets”):

—

What do you suppose creation is?

What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior?

What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God?

And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?

—

What else could the “true son of God” say of his fellowmen, of mankind itself, of the earth and nature? Being himself divine, and considering everybody else and everything else divine, there is no other way of viewing the whole world as that, as “the Divine Ship” (from “Old Age Echoes”), an idea that is conveyed in a poem (quoted below) from this book, which was added to the tenth edition of Leaves of Grass (1897), and which actually echoes that “[...] vast Rondure, swimming in space!” from “Passage to India” (Section 6):

—

One Thought Ever at the Fore

One thought ever at the fore -

That in the Divine Ship, the World, breasting Time and Space,

All Peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage, are bound to the same destination. (WHITMAN, 2002, p.486).

—

Whitman could not separate his destiny from anybody else’s destiny on the face of this planet. He was there, more than a hundred years ago, worried about our common future on the globe, not leaving anybody out of the Divine Plan. For what “destination” would he be talking about? What destination would the “true Son of God”, “the Poet”, be pointing to us all, in justifying all the persons that inhabit this earth? He was necessarily talking about a Divine Destination, a common destiny, a common salvation. For the only deed worthy that name to the “true Son of God” is to take His brothers and sisters and parents and children to His Father, which is what the Son came here to do. As the poet sang in “Think of the Soul” (from “Poems Excluded from Leaves of Grass“): “Recall Christ, brother of rejected persons-brother of slaves, felons, idiots, and of insane and diseas’d persons.”, a mirror reflecting Walt himself, when he looked on his “[...] own crucifixion and bloody crowning.”, and especially during the Civil War, when he worked as a volunteer nurse at hospitals in New York and Washington, dedicating his efforts to help so many diseased and desperate soldiers, and after having been multiplied by the “grave of rock”, he saw “Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from [him].“[...] troop forth replenish’d with supreme power, one of an average unending procession;” (Section 38, “Song of Myself”), reviving those lost souls in his poems, trying to save them from forgetfulness, from oblivion, which is a kind of death, in order to help them and himself be reborn, and finally enter heaven.

The point is that only by not being afraid of death, which means one is not afraid of life, can one live a good life. While a person is afraid of dying, this person is afraid of living, and when one is free from this fear, one can lead a fruitful, prosperous life. Prosperous is used here to refer to people who share what they have, no matter how little or how much that is. Because what really matters is that the person has an open heart and mind, ready to give them to others (when we give of ourselves, it is our true will that counts, not how much the gift cost). And to give of oneself to others is to share the love of one’s heart, and to share love is to unite, to bring the other person to heaven, which is similar to “Recall Christ”, who said that “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy selfe. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour [sic] [...]“. This is the ultimate task a person can have here on this vale of tears: when one is shown or is conscious of his divinity or deity, one must tell the others about it, one can not omit this to others: his neighbors. And although Whitman ran the risk of being misunderstood in his self-acknowledgement of being a true Son of God, he never gave in to criticism, and undertook his task with all the joy he felt in his broad loving heart. He assumed his position as poet and Son of God, which for him were the same.

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Allen (1955, p.121-2) writes of Whitman in his biography of the poet: “And by this time [1855] Whitman had met a learned and distinguished man in New York who was to have a deep and lasting influence on his mind. This was the owner and curator of the Egyptian Museum at 659 Broadway. [...] By 1855 Dr. Abbot had found his Museum such a burden that he was trying desperately to sell it to the city, and to help the cause Whitman wrote an article about it for a magazine called Life Illustrated. This article reveals not only an intimate knowledge of the collection, but also a surprising familiarity with the literature about Egyptology, including books recently published abroad. Undoubtedly Dr. Abbot had called Whitman’s attention to some or all of these publications-perhaps loaned him books in English-and the echoes, allusions, and references to Egyptology in Leaves of Grass are so numerous that one must conclude that Whitman read the works closely and took notes on them. In fact, some of the notes have survived.”

Whitman indicated that in Section 21 of “Song of Myself”, when he sang: “I chant the chant of dilation or pride”.

“That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above, working the miracles of one. As all things were from one. Its father is the Sun and its mother the Moon.” Available at: <http://www.sofiatopia.org/equiaeon/emerald.htm> Accessed on October, 11^th, 2006.

Whitman said to Horace Traubel, one of his literary executors, these famous words, which are worth mentioning here, as he was asked by Traubel what he was supposed to do with Whitman’s last pieces of writing: “[...] So far as you may have anything to do with it I place upon you the injunction that whatever may be added to the Leaves shall be supplementary, avowed as such, leaving the book complete as I left it, consecutive to the point  I left off, marking always an unmistakable, deep down, unobliteratable division line. In the long run the world will do as it pleases with the book. I am determined to have the world know what I was pleased to do.” (WHITMAN, 2002, p.485).

The Holy Bible: King James Version, 1611 Edition. [A reprint of the edition of 1611.] Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2005. Romans; XIII, 9-10.

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King James Version. New York: American Bible Society: 1999; Bartleby.com, 2000. ON-LINE ED.: Published May 2000 by Bartleby.com; © Copyright Bartleby.com, Inc.  The Gospel according to St. John, Chapter 10: “Jesus Rejected by the Jews:

22 ¶ And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter.
And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon’s porch.
Then came the Jews round about him, and said unto him, How long dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly.
Jesus answered them, I told you, and ye believed not: the works that I do in my Father’s name, they bear witness of me.
But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you.
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:
and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.
My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.
I and my Father are one.
¶ Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him.
Jesus answered them, Many good works have I showed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye stone me?
The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.
Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods ?
If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the Scripture cannot be broken;
say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?
If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.
But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works; that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him.
¶ Therefore they sought again to take him; but he escaped out of their hand,
and went away again beyond Jordan into the place where John at first baptized; and there he abode.
And many resorted unto him and said, John did no miracle: but all things that John spake of this man were true.
And many believed on him there.”

Available at: http/www.bartleby.com/108/.  Accessed on: March, 13^th, 2007.

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