6 REFERENCES
REFERENCES
ALI, Manuel Said. Versificação Portuguesa. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2006.
ALLEN, Gay W. The Solitary Singer: a critical biography of Walt Whitman. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1955.
2.5.6 “Language is fossil poetry”: poetic function, Emerson, Blake, mediums, Adam
2.5.6 “Language is fossil poetry”: poetic function, Emerson, Blake, mediums, Adam
In this chapter we are discussing themes in or related to Leaves of Grass. We shall address now the following subjects: the “poetic function” of the language, which is part of the “Scheme of verbal communication” (discussed in the next chapter, in section 3.2, “The method”); how this function relates to Emerson’s idea of poetry, and how his conception will lead us to another poet, William Blake, and then to religiousness and the mythical figure of Adam, as well as the connection between these topics and Whitman. The fact is that the poetic function has a preponderating position in poetry or in creative prose, such as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, because this is the function where the language is turned upon itself, where the writer searches for the most beautiful or precise configuration possible to express an emotion or an idea. On the other hand, we can not deny the apparently opposite factor, by which we mean the appearance or existence of poetic constructions that show up in a given language, which is inherent to Emerson’s idea that “Language is fossil poetry”, or the creation of proto-poets long forgotten, as we will see in a quotation below. In both cases, modern poetry and “fossil poetry”, the poetic function is the primary linguistic factor under focus. So, this idea of poetry appearing naturally in common speech had been expressed by Whitman’s Master[1], Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet and essayist (1803–82), who was born in Boston and attended Harvard College and Divinity School.[2]
1. Introduction
1 INTRODUCTION
The purpose of our work is to render a considerable part of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in Portuguese, so that the Brazilian reader can have an idea of who the great American poet was and what his poems convey. It is also intended to provide some information on his influence on the following generation of writers. In order to do this, we have divided the central part of our research in three chapters: chapter 2, Criticism and Context, contains a short account of the publishing history of the Leaves in the United States and its Brazilian editions. It also presents a critical review of the authors who have helped us to better understand Whitman and the Leaves, as well as a critical analysis of one major symbol in the Leaves, the calamus, or sweet-flag. In chapter 3, Re-creating Leaves of Grass Into Portuguese; we describe our method of creative translation, which can also be referred to as re-creation, or poetic re-recreation, which is different from literal translation. This chapter also presents our mentors in this type of translation, a discussion on the poetic aspects of Whitman’s verse, some authors who are literarily connected to Whitman and some examples of poetic re-creation. Chapter 4 contains the poems and books which we have been re-creating since 2006. In chapter 5, the conclusion, we shall analyze the result of our work and assess if it has been fruitful. We will give now more details of this research, of Whitman, of Leaves of Grass and creative translation.
Parallelism, enumeration, catalogues, and meter in Leaves of Grass
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.
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