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Luso-Brazilian Review
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Portuguese to English
J. S. Dean, Jr.
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1. S. Dean, Jr.
121
Perhaps styles and trends can be translinguistic. Certainly the main task
for these poets was to retain the distinctive Brazilian character of the
originals. With the "Semana de Arte Moderna" in 1922, the centennial of
Brazilian political independence from Portugal, Brazilian poetry declared
its independence from the old ways of Europe. Like the artists in America's
New York Armory Show in 1913, Brazil's poets were exuberant in their
nationalism. Like Walt Whitman of an earlier generation, the Brazilians
became attuned to the total output of their country: from the sounds of
are so often implied, as in the music. The translator must hear the sounds,
or the poem will not reverberate. The concise style of Brazilian poetry of
course owes something to the nature of the language. By embodying in a
single word the subject in the verb Portuguese can gain a power not
matched in the English approximation. Moreover, the ambiguity of Portuguese prepositions, a natural poetic device, is likewise frequently lost
in translation.' Concise style in Portuguese further results from the advantage an inflected language has over others in drawing the poem together by exploiting agreement in number and gender and in employing
the reflexive, a positive embarrassment to most translators (aspects that
George Monteiro has shown to be equally troublesome when translating
from English to Portuguese).2 Only through the mastery of these details
1 See Raymond Moody, "Portuguese Prepositions: Some Semantic Categories," LusoBrazilian Review, 9, No. 1 (June, 1972), pp. 36-71.
2Privileged and Presumptuous Guests: Emily Dickinson's Brazilian Translators,"
Luso-Brazilian Review, 8, No. 2 (December, 1971), pp. 39-53.
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122
Luso-Brazilian Review
ican translators here appear to have worked closely with the original
poems, and, as to be expected, that close work often makes their translations the best. Without wishing to sound too archeological, I should like
to examine the means and effects found in the poems of this anthology,
particularly those translations of poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade
analogous effects can be an admissible plea for the translator, but some
variants must surely be simply typographical errors. For instance, in this
anthology, James Merrill, translator of Cecilia Meireles' "Vigilia," has "our
tears are worth," consistent with the 1958 and 1967 Aguilar editions' "o
valor de nossas lagrimas"; but the facing page in this bilingual anthology
has "o calor" (pp. 36-37).4 And is Ashley Brown seeking repetition at the
3 Octavio Paz, "The Literal and the Literary," Times Literary Supplement, 18 September 1970, pp. 1020-21.
4 Documentation of poems in this anthology, cited at the beginning of the essay,
will be made contextually.
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1. S. Dean, Jr.
123
Joao Cabral de Melo Neto's "Imita9ao da Agua" with "a wave that was
stopping," where the facing page, following the author's edition (1965)
and two printings by Edigao Sabia (1967, 1968), has "uma onda que parava" twice before changing to "parara" in the fourth stanza (pp. 140-41).
Finally, Elizabeth Bishop writes "love in the dark, no love / in the day-
noun and an adjective. Its translation calls for what Robert Bly has called
"dragon smoke," a "leaping about the psyche."5
More often, and much more interesting from the standpoint of translation, are the variants resulting from the differences in culture, the nuances
in meaning that require from the translator knowledge that passeth all
mechanical understanding, "connaissance." "The translator's job," writes
George Quasha about renditions of Rilke in English, "far more than with
rhetorical or literary kinds of poetry (where form tends to be a traditionally definitive artifact), is to reenter the original process by way of resources in his own language: a genesis technically analogous to the original, guided by empathy and precise knowledge of it."6 The work of the
translator is to modulate from one key to another so that the effect upon
the listener is to feel the original creation. In reasserting Aristotelian doctrine, Paul Valery writes: "Un poete-ne soyez pas choqu6 de mon propos
5 "Looking for Dragon Smoke," Naked Poetry, ed. Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 161.
6 "Test of Translation VI: Rilke's Third Duino Elegy," Caterpillar, 3/4 (April-July,
1968), p. 200.
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124
Luso-Brazilian Review
-n'a pas pour fonction de ressentir, l'6tat poetique: ceci est une affaire
privee. II a pour fonction de le creer chez les autres."7 Take first the matter
to October flowers and to the girl, Maria Alves, a turn not unlike that
found in Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,"
which begins: "Margaret, are you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving," and ends: "It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you
mourn for." When Elizabeth Bishop comes to translate Cardozo's poem,
however, she cannot have it both ways: We get the idea of the flowers, but
not daughters, in the lines "I bring you now these flowers / -Modest
flowers of an October sun" (p. 33). Consider too her translation of Carlos
Drummond de Andrade's "Poema de Sete Faces," where we find "as casas
espiam os homens / que correm atras das mulheres" (p. 62), correctly
translated as "The houses watch the men, / men who run after the women"
(p. 63) - correct, but lacking the nuance that the feminine gender of
casa" imparts.
Agreement in number allows for a one-to-one relationship between the
quick and the dead in Mario de Andrade's "Improviso do Rapaz Morto,"
as the reader associates "morto," "ele," "a gente," and "se cansa":
Morto, suavemente ele repousa sobre as flores do caixao.
(p. 20)
(p. 21)
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125
1. S. Dean, Jr.
(pp. 92-93)
Still, in rendering "no jeito" as "in the play" she must give up the interplay
of meaning and sound between "jeito" and "cheio." The use of the reflexive makes for a heavier verb. Particularly interesting is what American
translators do with Portuguese reflexive verbs. Many of these Brazilian
poets, particularly Carlos Drummond, Joao Cabral, and Vinicius, imply in
their poems a "thingness": the poet reveals what is apparently already
there; he is like the dramatic artist who endows his characters with an
high. Ashley Brown, in translating Vinicius' "A Pera," keeps the ambiguity
Como de cera
E por acaso
Fria no vaso
A entardecer
in:
As if of wax
And by chance
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Luso-Brazilian Review
126
Growing late.
(pp. 98-99)
line, "de repente do riso fez-se o pranto" (p. 110). Ashley Brown here
gives us "suddenly laughter became sobbing" (p. 111), shying away from
the reflexive idea. "Fazer" has an intimation of an external agent; such is
not true with "become," involving as it does only the transformer and the
transformed. "Fez-se" connotes more than simply "became." "Fez-se de
triste" is not just "became sad" but is also "acted or pretended to be sad."
"Fez-se do amigo pr6ximo o distante" is not just "the near became the
distant friend," but includes the idea that "one made of the near friend
(pp. 60-61)
From his "Retrato de Familia" come the lines: "Se uma figura vai murchando, / outra, sorrindo, se prop6e" which the translator has rendered
as "if one face starts to wither, / another presents itself, smiling" (pp. 9091). True, the pause after "outra" is lost in the English version, but the
connection between the antithetical tropes "murchando" and "sorrindo"
is kept close in the translation through the kinship in sound between
"wither" and "another." In the same poem Elizabeth Bishop uses the reflexive to invest the dead personnages framed in the picture with life:
"Poderiam sutilizar-se / no claro-escuro do salao" becomes "they could
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I.
S.
Dean,
127
IJr.
Andrade: "Quem sabe a malicia das coisas, / quando a materia se aborrece?" becomes "when matter becomes annoyed, / who knows the malice
the writing-paper
lines of light
and the voices of my radio.9
Or:
have
It
is
seen
like
it
wha
dark,
salt,
cle
drawn
from
of
the
world,
forever,
flow
our
knowledg
In
seeing
expe
is
historical,
f
empathy
with
of
time.
Thei
Words
are
th
the
painter
D
mayed
by
how
8
On
Open
Form
9
Elizabeth
Bish
Straus
and
Girou
10
"At
the
Fishh
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Luso-Brazilian Review
128
poet Mallarme: "Votre metier est infernal. Je n'arrive pas a faire ce que
je veux et pourtant, je suis plein d'idees." Mallarme replied: "Ce n'est point
avec des idees, mon cher Degas, que l'on fait des vers. C'est avec des
mots."" Elsewhere Valery wrote: "Si tu veux faire des vers et que tu commences par des pensees, tu commences par de la prose."'2 The insistence
on the integrity of the word is not simply literal fidelity, however. Caught
ing the poem in another language. More than before, American poets
today lay more emphasis on the intrinsic force, the integrity of a thing.
But at times when these poets work upon Portuguese they do not follow
their native instincts, and instead rely on a pallid lexical equivalent. Galway Kinnell is a case in point. His talent for becoming the animal's character is seen in his poem, "The Porcupine," which begins as a simile - "In
Elsewhere Kinnell, like Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, sees
in nature's animation evidence of the past. Consider "Spindrift":
In the end
From his "Cells Breathe in the Emptiness" comes the observation that "It
is an eerie thing to keep vigil, / The senses racing in the emptiness." That
emptiness is quickly filled, however, when Kinnell listens to the small still
11
12
13
14
Oeuvres, I, 1324.
Oeuvres, I, 1449.
In Naked Poetry, pp. 227, 229.
In Naked Poetry, p. 232.
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129
]. S. Dean, Jr.
3
his compatriots. His "As I Step over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I
The Americans in their own poems have much in common in theme and
technique with the Brazilians represented in this anthology. The two
literatures have a contrapuntal relationship. One responds in kind to the
other, though the theme may be expressed at another time, in another
place in the poetic gamut.
In Portuguese, so much depends upon the preposition. This aspect often
proves troublesome to the American translator. A natural poetic device
with its multiple meanings, the preposition loses its pregnant ambiguity in
translation from Portuguese to English. Three examples should show what
happens in the metamorphosis. The first is relatively simple, and not much
The grandfather has obviously been caught in the act by the grandmother,
i.e., "traida [por ele] com as escravas," and the elliptical "com" catches
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Luso-Brazilian Review
130
the bedroom" (pp. 58-59). The second Carlos Drummond poem, "Nao
se Mate," has:
vitrolas,
de que, praque.
(p. 64)
Again, the preposition "em" has rich possibilities. Did love spend the night
by, in, on, or with Carlos to cause such an internal disturbance? Possibly
all of these implications at once brought it about. When, however, we
find the passage Englished as 'love, Carlos, tellurian, / spent the night
with you" (p. 65), the interaction is more remote, as distant as the "with"
in the hymn, "Abide with Me," or as vague as Marlowe's "come live with
me, and be my love," which requires a second line to make it a real offer:
"And we will all the pleasures prove."
In some places Portuguese for all its Latinate constructions can be more
concise than English, thanks to metaphors and symbols. Poetry of this
kind has a good chance to survive in translation, since its metaphors are
charged to illuminate the real in another culture or time. Jack Spicer, in
his "Letter to Lorca" (1957), puts it thus:
Live moons, live lemons, live boys in bathing suits. The poem is a
collage of real.
Yes, but the garbage of the real still reaches out into the current world
making its objects, in turn, visible-lemon calls to lemon, newspaper
to newspaper, boy to boy. As things decay they bring their equivalents
into being.
Things do not connect; they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across language
as easily as he can bring them across time.... One does not need to
17 In The New American Poetry, ed. Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove, 1960),
pp. 413-14.
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131
i. S. Dean, Jr.
The ability of a poem to last through time is no different from its ability
to last through space, from one culture to another. The task of the trans-
dias brancos," Brown gives "the remedy, white! /our white days" (pp.
144-45). Where Joao Cabral in "Imita9ao da Agua" has:
De flanco s6bre o lencol,
paisagem ja tao marinha,
a uma onda deitada,
na praia, te parecias.
Brown has:
On the sheet, on your side,
already so marine a scene,
you were looking like a wave
lying down on the beach.
(pp. 140-41)
captures Manuel Bandeira's spirit in his "0 (ltimo Poema." His phrase
"que f6sse ardente como um solu9o sem lagrimas" becomes "that it be
ardent like a tearless sob" (pp. 2-3). Perhaps best of all is Elizabeth
Bishop's use of symbols in Carlos Drummond de Andrade's "Viagem na
Familia":
Vi magoa, incompreensao
a dividir-nos no escuro.
(pp. 58-59)
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Luso-Brazilian Review
132
The verbal play between "m'agoa" and "escuro" is indeed lost when trans-
lated as "grief' and "dark." "Magoa" ("bruise," "black and blue mark,"
figuratively "grief') has a richness that the English word "grief" does not.
The English does not have the metaphysical stretch between color and
feeling. Applaud, though, "prato" to "crumb." I am not, however, satisfied
with the refrain, "porem nada dizia," translated as "but he didn't say anything." "Porem" is stronger than "but," and here demands a caesura follow
it. Its three words and stresses have a cadential impact lacking in the too
fluid "but he didn't say anything." Almost exactly the same problem arises
from the American translator a good ear for the sounds of Brazilian Portuguese: its rhythms and the changes in diction from one class, one region
to another. To compose a good American translation, to write good American poetry, as James Wright puts it, "one has to have a fine instinctive
sense of music in the American language, the music of speech and the
music of song; and one must have the character of a great man who loves
women, children, the speech of his native place, and the luminous spirit
that lurks frightened in the tortured bodies of the sick and the poor."18
insists: "Look into thy heart and write." To many Americans, from the
time when Charles Olson made his pronouncements on "Projective Verse"
in the 1950's to now, the emphasis is upon the oneness between the body,
soul, and intellect. Gary Snyder anatomizes the poetic being: "Each poem
grows from an energy-mind-field-dance, and has its own inner grain. To
let it grow, to let it speak for itself, is a large part of the work of the poet.
... The poet must have total sensitivity to the inner potentials of his own
language - pulse, breath, glottals, nasals and dentals. An ear, an eye and
a belly. He must know his own unconscious, and the proper ways to meet
with the beings who live there."19 Richard Wilbur rightly (for American
(pp. 94-95), though he does not do so well with Bandeira's "Rond6 dos
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133
1. S. Dean, Jr.
"and laugh with my delight" (pp. 96-97), and when in the last lines of
Brazilian poems, "The Last Bus," where toward the end he has:
Where have I been?
I look toward Rio-
Jean Valentine is ingenious in what she does with parts of Joao Cabral's
21 In The Modern Poets, 2nd edn., ed. John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read (New
York: McGraw Hill, 1970), p. 424.
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Luso-Brazilian Review
134
"Janelas," where the line "outro que se faz de aviao" becomes "another
being an airplane" and "outro que se vai esquecendo," becomes "another
going, forgetting" (pp. 116-17). W. S. Merwin, a poet who in his own
poems is most sensitive to musical tone, is, when translating these Brazilian
poems, not always so careful. Where Joao Cabral in "Poema" has "espiando
a rua" Merwin has "trained on the street" (pp. 118-19), like some harsh
sounding machinegun. Much better is his rendering of lines in Murilo
Mendes' "Mapa": "Detesto os que se tapeiam, / os que brincam de cabra-
cega com a vida" as: "I loathe those who hoodwink themselves, / who
play hide-and-seek with life" (pp. 50-51), where the word-play approximates what Merwin can do in his original work. Merwin's "For the Anniversary of My Death," for example, begins:
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
The lack of intimate knowledge of the Brazilian Portuguese causes difficulties for Paul Blackburn when he comes to translate Vinicius, who is
often, but not always, colloquial. "Receita de Mulher" has "mas que seja
uma nuvem / Com olhos e nadegas. Nadegas e importantissimo" becomes
"but that she be a cloud / with eyes and buttocks. The butt is very import-
ant" (pp. 104-05). Though he obviously wants the pun on "but" and
"butt," the word "n6degas" is not slang, and "butt" destroys the tone of the
original, which calls for lyric delicacy. Take, for example, what Blackburn
does in his own poems. In "Three Part Invention" he shows a weakness
for transverse alliterations embodying tasteless antitheses: "Returning to
work / after the fuck, first / I water the flowers."2 Yet he shows he can,
like Vinicius, employ the musical metaphor:
the sea
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135
1. S. Dean, Jr.
To translate one idiom for another, keeping the spirit of the original, is
what Jane Cooper does in her translation of Joao Cabral's "Cemit6rio Per-
nambucano (Nossa Senhora da Luz)" where she renders the lines "nem
o mar / e cemit6rio de rios" as "nor is the sea / a potter's field of rivers"
(pp. 122-23). The important caesura is retained. But what of June Jordan's
version of Jorge de Lima's "A Mao Enorme," where the lines:
Dentro da noite, da tempestade,
O vento uiva.
are rendered inaccurately, wordily, and without the tone of the original:
Inside the nighttime of the storm,
the mystery caravel goes there.
Time moves, and waters crest,
the wind weeps ugly loud.
The mystery caravel goes there.
Above this ship
what hand is that more huge
(pp. 18-19)
Where is the magic of "maior que o mar" in "more huge even than the
sea"? And why for "o vento uiva" do we get "the wind weeps ugly loud"
in what is supposed to be a translation? Later, why does the translator
render "a nau 1a vai," the repeated statement, as "the caravel continues"
where earlier in the second line it had been given as the "caravel goes
there"?
Ezra Pound once said that "rhythm is a form cut into TIME."25 James
Merrill, as translator and as poet gets the chiseled effect when translating
Cecilia Meireles' "Vigilia." The first stanza:
Como o companheiro e morto,
todos juntos morreremos
um pouco.
somewhat.
(pp. 36-37)
25 ABC of Reading (1934; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 198.
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Luso-Brazilian Review
136
The "somewhat" with its two syllables is even more terse than the three
syllable "um pouco." That compression partly redeems the sounds in the
first line of the translation, where there are too many high, tight sounds,
not at all the effect of the "0" sounds Cecilia Meireles gets with "como o
Vision":
Cecilia Meireles' pieces. Her "Balada das Dez Bailarinas do Cassino" has
"tao nuas se sentem que ja vao cobertas / de imaginarios, chorosos vestidos." Merrill, in tune with the poem, has "they are so naked, you imagine
/ them clothed in the stuff of tears" (pp. 38-39). The image is all important
here. Unfortunately he fell back into classicism when he gave over the
image for the rhyme scheme later in the poem: "Pobres serpentes sem
luxuiria, / que sao criangas, durante o dia" is rendered as "pitiful serpents
without appetite / who are children by daylight" (pp. 38-39). Though "appetite" and "daylight" roughly match "luxuria" and "o dia," the meaning
of luxuria as "lust" is lost. Elsewhere in "0 Cavalo Morto" Merrill employs
the trope of Anglo-Saxon poetry to good advantage. Cecilia Meireles has
"adernava triste, o cavalo morto" and Merrill, "he was listing sorely, the
dead horse" (pp. 42-43), thus anticipating the metaphor of the next
quatrain:
26 In The Modern Poets, p. 286.
27 In The Voice That Is Great Within Us, ed. Hayden Carruth (New York: Bantam,
1970), p. 581.
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137
J. S. Dean, Jr.
(p. 42)
Later, "como em luas de espelho roxo" becomes "as in red mirror moons"
(pp. 44-45), good poetic compression, though "roxo" is more accurately
"purple." Merrill is particularly attuned to the sounds of Cecilia Meireles'
"Metal Rosicler, 9," whose last sestet goes:
"Meu interesse e de desinteresse:
Merrill catches the antithesis of the first line, and, with a Yeats-like craft,
(pp. 46-47)
That one word helps to elevate the poem in English beyond the mundane
tone set by "piano tuner," itself without the overtones of the Portuguese
"afinador de pianos," a refiner, with all the Pythagorean implications.
of red, /A raspberry, spit its blood at the corral" (pp. 102-03). "Vou
cuspindo" becomes simply "spit," good in English, but a different effect
from the original one. "Fico ali respirando o cheiro bom do estrume" comes
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Luso-Brazilian Review
138
out well as "the smell of cow manure is delicious." The last two lines of
the poem are excellently cast. Vinicius: "N6s todos, animais, sem comogao
nenhuma / Mijamos em comum numa festa de espuma." Bishop: "All of
us, animals, unemotionally / Partake together of a pleasant piss" (pp. 10203). The excellence of this passage in making the sound an echo to the
sense is that same excellence Paul Valery sought in the relation between
the words and music in a song: through "la valeur musicale qui tend i
s'evanouir," while the verse "s'etablit dans un equilibre admirable et fort
delicat entre la force sensuelle et la force intellectuelle du langage."28 The
(pp. 60-61)
caf6 bom.
Translated:
Coffee blacker than the black old woman
delicious coffee
good coffee.
(pp. 86-87)
The original and translation are close in form and spirit. Elizabeth Bishop
knows how Brazilians sound, and is able to recreate the linguistic character
of the different regions. The Northeasterers' anxiety toward his land that
yields so little is kept in her translation of Joao Cabrars "Morte e Vida
Severina." Little touches make the difference. She renders "porque o san-
gue / que usamos tem pouca tinta" as "because the blood / we use has
little color" (pp. 128-29). Though "tinta" is stronger, and gives the idea
28 Oeuvres, II (1960), 1257.
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139
1. S. Dean, Jr.
of a dye for staining, the word "color" in English opens the idea of a mixture of races, another aspect of the Northeastern culture. In speaking of
the destinies of such Severinos, Joao Cabral has:
iguais em tudo e na sina:
a de abrandar estas pedras
suando-se muito em cima,
a de tentar despertar
terra sempre mais extinta,
a de querer arrancar
algum rogado da cinza.
(pp. 128-29)
The sense of the futility is caught in "dead and deader land," "burnt-over
land" (compare Steinbeck's dried-out Oklahoma in The Grapes of Wrath).
Occasionally, though, the diction slips into something that characters in
Beckett's Waiting for Godot might use, not the peasant Severino. "Um defunto de nada" as "A defunct nobody" is not quite the tone of a Severino.
Likewise, "essa foi morte morrida / ou foi matada" is not simply "was it
this death he died of, / or was he killed" (pp. 130-31). The Portuguese
has many overtones: the land is implicated too ("mata"), and the corpse
is not only killed, but also had been poorly made or finished, like a fruit
picked too soon ("matada"). The same association of the land with death
lies in the lines "lavoura de muitas covas, / tao cobicada," given as "was
his farm so big / that they coveted it" (pp. 132-33). "Cova" means hole
or pit, excavation, and logically grave. Excellent, though, is "cada casa se
torna / num mucambo sedutor" translated as "and every house becomes /
an inviting refuge" (pp. 138-39), thus keeping the contrasting sense of
woman as seductress and nursemaid ("mucama" or "mucamba"). This is
caught in the English "inviting," and the idea of a poor hovel ("mucambo"
as "shack"). "Creio que nao irradia" as "is off the air tonight" (pp. 138-39)
more than makes up with its succinctness for its slightly impersonal tone.
As a final example of how to domesticate foreign idioms, consider Elizabeth Bishop's translation of Carlos Drummond's "Poema de Sete Faces."
The sixth stanza reads:
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Luso-Brazilian Review
140
In English:
Universe, vast universe,
if I had been named Eugene
faster
(pp. 62-63)
It is significant that in her Complete Poems this stanza is the only one
given with its Portuguese original in an appended note. The translation
is excellent, no question of that. But in order to gain something, one must
lose something. First, the losses. The play between "mundo" and "Raimundo," king of the world, as pronounced, must go. The connection between "universe" and "Eugene" is a visual, not aural one. Yet "Raimundo"
into verse / faster" to achieve the same effect that Drummond gets. As
Ezra Pound would have said, Elizabeth Bishop's poetry cannot atrophy;
it is musical.
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