Crossing the Line from Portuguese to English

Author(s): J. S. Dean, Jr.

Source: Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Summer, 1973), pp. 120-140
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3513039
Accessed: 29-08-2016 01:17 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Luso-Brazilian Review

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Crossing the Line from

Portuguese to English
J. S. Dean, Jr.

It is axiomatic that if there are to be poetic translations of quality, they

are best begotten by poets who are able to reveal the intimacies of their
other culture by responding with their own native strengths. Let poets
translate poets, let them have similar artistic sympathies, let translators
be bilingual and let their medium be their own idiom. In An Anthology
of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1972. xxi+181 p.) the editors, Elizabeth Bishop and

Emanuel Brasil, provide proofs of the translator's art. Their bilingual

collection, English flanking Portuguese, has the extrinsic merit of making

more accessible the still generally unknown yet increasingly important
and vital literature of Brazil, which like American literature has assumed
its truly distinctive voice only in this century. The anthology also has the
intrinsic merit of matching the best of the Brazilians with some outstanding American poets as their translators; hence while it encompasses Brazilian poetry for the past fifty years, it catches the state of American poetry
within the past ten years or so, a decade of similar poetic impulses. The
anthology, beyond its titular function, then, helps to give perspective to
American poetry. The editors explain that their choice of fourteen Brazilian poets is necessarily selective and reflects their own tastes. Many of
the translators, alien to Brazilian culture and language, have had to work
from literal prose renditions. Yet with similar artistic temperaments these
poets-cum-translators have often done well, keeping the faith of the original yet producing a "poem," having what Pericles Eugenio da Silva Ramos
has called "propriedade literaria e artistica."
120

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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

mechanized urban industry to those of the backlands. The European

heritage gave way to a Brazilian past rooted in the earth of the "sertao,"
the village, or the "bairro" of the city. The Brazilian experience, somewhat
analogous to that American artistic independence, has helped the translators come forth with "poems."

The themes of reminiscence, nationalism, and primitivism called forth

new styles from the Brazilian poets. Like the poets of the English Renaissance, who fused in their rhythmic style the balanced periods of traditional

Latin construction with the enthusiastic brevity of spoken English, the

Brazilian poets of the twentieth century have similarly created a strong
rhythmic style by joining in their poems the rigid Latinate grammatical
constructs of the Portuguese language with the vital spoken one, the
"giria." That spoken vitality and the ceremony imparted by the construc-

tion should be reflected in English translations. Even when Brazilian

poems are not obviously traditional, they frequently refer obliquely in

theme or device to the past. For the American ear, the most difficult device
to catch in Brazilian Portuguese is the subtlety of the rhythms, where beats

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.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

122

Luso-Brazilian Review

can the translator from Portuguese to English hope to transcend what

Ortega y Gasset has called the misery of translation to achieve its splendor.
In the more successful translations of this anthology the poet works
the Brazilian original into his American original. Any sins, then, are more
likely to be those of commission rather than of omission. They come from
the instinct to create a good poem, whatever the initial charge may have
been. Yet the best pieces here do carry across what Wallace Stevens calls
"the invention of a nation in a phrase." They paradoxically abandon the
literal for the literary, for, in the words of Octavio Paz, recalling Paul
Valery, "the translator, in another language and with different signs, has

to compose a poem that is analogous with the original.... The ideal of

poetic translation, to use Valery's insuperable definition, consists in producing with different means analogous effects."3
The sine qua non of the translator, if he is to belie the Italian quip,
traduttore traditore, is that he know the language and people of his second
culture well, a necessary, if not sufficient, cause in making a good poem.
Understandably the editors of this volume found it "hard to find good
American poets willing to undertake translation," for few good American
poets are familiar with Brazilian Portuguese. Only about half the Amer-

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

and Vinicius de Moraes by Elizabeth Bishop, long intimate with both

cultures, and those poems of Joao Cabral de Melo Neto by W. S. Merwin
and Galway Kinnell, translator-poets relatively new to Brazil. More generally, the essay will attempt to consider some of the inner workings of
translation from Brazilian Portuguese to American English.
Distortion of the original text can come at many stages in the process.
Printer's errors are one form. The necessity for different means to produce

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.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

1. S. Dean, Jr.

123

expense of accuracy when he begins three stanzas of his translation of

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-

light, is always sad," where on the facing page Carlos Drummond de

Andrade, in "Nao Se Mate," has "o amor no escuro, nao, no claro, /
sempre triste," (pp. 64-65), the reading found in the Aguilar edition
(1967) and that of Jose Olympio (1969). Was it typographical oversight
that left out the comma after the English "no" or the translator's will that
gives us this different meaning? These selected quibbles simply show the
hardiness of poems to withstand typos, even in translation. Fortunately,
the life of a poem does not often lie in a comma, nor in the syntax of
things.
Mistranslation, though, does mar the poem. For example, "ha ainda um
que adormeceu" is rendered "still another who slept" (pp. 116-17), "homens indiferentes a comer laranjas" is translated as "men indifferent to

eating oranges" (pp. 120-21), instead of as "indifferent men eating

oranges." Likewise, "a mulher nao lembre / Flores sem mist6rio" is given
as "the woman / would never think of flowers apart from mystery" (pp.

106-07), and "da madrugada o industrial" as it is the industrial dawn"

(pp. 112-13), ignoring the fact that in Portuguese "industrial" is both a

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.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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

of agreement of gender, an aspect of Portuguese grammar that can be

used to knit the poem together. Joaquim Cardozo's "Elegia Para Maria
Alves" begins: "Trago-te aqui estas flores / -Filhas que sao, modestas,
de um sol de outubro" (p. 32). Thanks to agreement in gender and number
it is clear that the antecedent of "filhas" is "flores," that "filhas" refers both

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.

Ter momentos assim em que a gente vivendo

Esta vida de interesses e de lutas tao bravas,
Se cansa de colher desejos e preocupag6es.

(p. 20)

By mischance, English considers such collectives as "people" to be plural;

consequently death does not seem so close in Richard Eberhart's translation:

Dead, gently he lies on the flowers of the coffin.

There are times like this when people living

This life of self-interest and fierce struggles
Tire of the ingathering of desires and worries.

(p. 21)

Note though the Hopkinsian improvement upon the original "colher" in

the Saxonic amalgam "ingathering."
7 Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, I (Paris: iditions Gallimard,
1957),1321.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

125

1. S. Dean, Jr.

In addition to agreement in gender and number, the nature of the verb

in Portuguese can directly affect the translation. Common opinion to the
contrary, English is not always concise. Portuguese can carry in its verbs
substantially more meaning than verbs in English. Take Cassiano Ricardo's
poem "Anoitecer." Barbara Howes titles it "Nightfall" (pp. 26-27) - not
bad, but not so good as the original. As Vinicius de Moraes uses "/ Despontem," in his poem, "Receita de Mulher," "que uns ossos / Despontem,"
it has much richer meanings than "show," the word Paul Blackburn chose
for his phrase "that a few bones show" (pp. 104-05). Notice the verbal life
Elizabeth Bishop introduces into her translation of Carlos Drummond's
"Retrato de Familia," when she Englishes the lines:
Ficaram tracos da familia

perdidos no jeito dos corpos.

Bastante para sugerir
Que um corpo e cheio de surpresas.
as:

Family features remain

lost in the play of bodies.
But there's enough to suggest
that a body is full of surprises.

(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

animation that enables them to speak for themselves. In poetry such a

state is possible through the quality of the verbs of a language to contain
the essence of a person or thing, regardless of time or place. In the more
successful of these translations the amount of verbal activity is most often

high. Ashley Brown, in translating Vinicius' "A Pera," keeps the ambiguity

of the word "entardecer":

Como de cera

E por acaso

Fria no vaso

A entardecer
in:

As if of wax

And by chance

Cold in the dish

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Luso-Brazilian Review

126

Growing late.

(pp. 98-99)

Later in the same poem he perhaps improves on the original in making

"um seio exausto" into a "breast exhausted." In Brazilian Portuguese the
usual colloquial meaning of "exausto" is "extremely tired." That feeling is
transmitted verbally through the onomatopoeic "seio exausto" that sounds
like a fatigued sigh. Ashley Brown, though, has introduced a more literal,
and at the same time more metaphysical, meaning: a breast deflated of air,
of soul, of spirit. In a sonnet that could almost have been written by Emily

Dickinson (who, incidentally, knew the power of verbs), Vinicius de

Moraes in "Soneto de Separa9ao" makes repeated use of "fez-se," as in the

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

one distant." In another of Vinicius' poems, "Receita de Mulher," Paul

Blackburn, attempting the reflexive with "que a mulher se socialize,"
created this awkwardness: "The women get socialized" (pp. 104-05). But
Elizabeth Bishop, for one, is not reticent about carrying over a reflexive
verb into English. In her excellent translation of Carlos Drummond de
Andrade's "Viagem na Familia" she takes the lines:
prendia a sombra severa
e a sombra se desprendia
sem fuga nem reagao
and recasts them as:
I caught at his strict shadow

and the shadow released itself

with neither haste nor anger.

(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

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

I.

S.

Dean,

127
IJr.

refine themselves / in the room's chiaroscuro" (pp. 92-93). The translation

catches what one of the Americans in this anthology, W. S. Merwin, has
elsewhere called "the sense of recurrence in which the unique moment
of vision is set."8 Elizabeth Bishop's translations are distinguished from
most of the others in her ability to reach the heart of the matter. She can
take the historical pulse of things, something she has in common not only
with her compatriot Robert Lowell, but also with Carlos Drummond de

Andrade: "Quem sabe a malicia das coisas, / quando a materia se aborrece?" becomes "when matter becomes annoyed, / who knows the malice

of things?" (pp. 92-93). From her long experience in Brazil, Elizabeth

Bishop knows. This quality has always been present in her original poems
too:

Come closer. You

can see and hear

the writing-paper
lines of light
and the voices of my radio.9
Or:

Back, behind us,

the dignified tall firs begin.

Bluish, associating with their shadows,

a million Christmas trees stand

waiting for Christmas.

...,,,,..............

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

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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

up in the word is an essence that somehow must be transferred in remak-

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

character / he resembles us in seven ways" - and ends with complete

identification in metaphor And tonight I think I prowl broken
skulled or vacant as a

sucked egg in the wintry meadow, softly chuckling, blank

template of myself.13

Elsewhere Kinnell, like Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, sees
in nature's animation evidence of the past. Consider "Spindrift":
In the end

What is he but the scallop shell

Shining with time like any pilgrim?14

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

voice of those cells:

2

From the compost heap

Now arises the sound of the teeth

Of one of those sloppy green cabbageworms

Eating his route through a cabbage,
Now snarling like a petite chainsaw, now droning on ...
A butterfly blooms on a buttercup,
From the junkpile flames up a junco.

11
12
13
14

Oeuvres, I, 1324.
Oeuvres, I, 1449.
In Naked Poetry, pp. 227, 229.
In Naked Poetry, p. 232.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

129

]. S. Dean, Jr.
3

How many plants are really very quiet animals?

How many inert molecules are ready to break into life?15

Another translator of these Brazilian poems, James Wright, also shows a

sensitivity for the past. Metaphysics allows him to reach further back than

his compatriots. His "As I Step over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I

Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor" concludes with:

Where is Minneapolis: I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?16

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

is lost in narrowing the meaning. Vinlcius de Moraes' "Poema de Natal"

has "uma cangao s6bre um berwo"; Ashley Brown gives us "a song about
a cradle" (pp. 100-01), limiting the rich "sobre" ("over," "about") to the
one meaning. The second and third examples are from translations by
Elizabeth Bishop of poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. In the first,
"Viagem na Familia," Carlos Drummond enters the past with his father,
a silent Virgilian guide:
Pisando livros e cartas,
viajamos na familia.
Casamentos; hipotecas;
os primos tuberculosos;
a tia louca; minha av6
traida com as escravas,
rangendo sedas na alcova.

Porem nada dizia.

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

15 In Naked Poetry, p. 240.

16 In Naked Poetry, p. 275.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Luso-Brazilian Review

130

this idea. The translation, however, casts suspicion on the grandmother:

". . my grandmother / betrayed among the slave-girls, / rustling silks in

the bedroom" (pp. 58-59). The second Carlos Drummond poem, "Nao

se Mate," has:

O amor, Carlos, voce telurico,

a noite passou em voce,
e os recalques se sublimando,
la dentro um barulho inefavel,
rezas,

vitrolas,

santos que se persignam,

anuncios do melhor sabao,
barulho que ningu6m sabe

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.

But things decay, reason argues. Real things become garbage....

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

imagine that lemon; one needs to discover it.17

17 In The New American Poetry, ed. Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove, 1960),
pp. 413-14.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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-

lator, then, is to "discover" a comparable image in his language. Such

metamorphoses occur through the symbols found by Ashley Brown in his
translations. Where Vinicius de Moraes in "A Pera" has "em holocausto,"
Brown provides an Eliot-like "burnt offering" (pp. 98-99). Where Joao
Cabral de Melo Neto in "As Nuvens" has "a medicina, branca! / nossos

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)

Through the appropriate symbolic transformation Jean Longland likewise

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

e mais de uma velha revolta

a dividir-nos no escuro.

A mao que eu nao quis beijar,

o prato que me negaram,
recusa em pedir perdao.
Orgulho. Terror noturno.
Por6m nada dizia.
Translated:
I saw grief, misunderstanding
and more than one old revolt
dividing us in the dark.
The hand I wouldn't kiss,
the crumb that they denied me,
refusal to ask pardon.
Pride. Terror at night.
But he didn't say anything.

(pp. 58-59)

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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

in translating Garcia Lorca's refrain in "Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez

Mejias." "A las cinco de la tarde" is just not "at five in the afternoon."
When these translations are successful, it is because the translators, without destroying the rhythm, have been able to work from the concrete
symbols in their own language. A feel for the plastic arts, Ashley Brown's
forte, helps here.
The difficult matter of keeping the spirit and fire of the original requires

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

The present time is a good one to translate these Brazilians. In both

countries the concern is not for form, but is an anti-pamassian thrust that

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

ears) tones down the melodramatics of Vinicius in "Cancao" when he

renders "a filha que tu me deste" as "her whom you gave - my daughter"

(pp. 94-95), though he does not do so well with Bandeira's "Rond6 dos

18 In Naked Poetry, p. 287.

19 In Naked Poetry, p. 357.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

133

1. S. Dean, Jr.

Cavalinhos," where the recurrent phrase, "E n6s, caval6es, comendo" is

given as "while we're horsing around and eating" (pp. 6-7). The translation is poor, but, more important, the spirit of the rhythm is lost. In 1959

LeRoi Jones made a penetrating observation when he said: "'HOW YOU

SOUND??' is what we recent fellows are up to.... this means that we

want to go into a quantitative verse . . . the 'irregular foot' of Williams
... the 'Projective Verse' of Olson. Accentual verse, the regular metric
of rumbling iambics, is dry as slivers of sand. Nothing happens in that
frame anymore. We can get nothing from England."20 The return to a
quantitative meter and the emphasis upon sound lay well with poetry in
Brazilian Portuguese. Translation is propitious when two cultures are set
upon the same course. Some translators, nevertheless, have empathy with
their original writers, some do not. Ashley Brown catches the rhythm of

Vinicius when in "Soneto de Fidelidade" he renders "e rir meu riso" as

"and laugh with my delight" (pp. 96-97), and when in the last lines of

"Poema de Natal," "hoje a noite e jovem; da morte apenas / Nascemos,

imensamente" as "today the night is young; from death / We are scarcely
born, immensely" (pp. 100-01). The similarity of sound between "apenas"
and "imensamente" is kept and freshened in the English "scarcely" and
"immensely." Not so effective is the way Mark Strand takes the line in
Mauro Mota's "0 Galo," "plumas de fogo e de metal," and simply renders
it literally as "plumes of fire and metal" (pp. 112-13). The musical quality
of the original is lost. Contrast Strand's translation with one of his original

Brazilian poems, "The Last Bus," where toward the end he has:
Where have I been?
I look toward Rio-

nothing is the same.

The Christ who stood

in a pool of electric light

high on his hill
is out of sight.

And the bay is black.

And the black city
sinks into its grave.

And I shall never come back.21

Strand's natural mode is lean writing, without the degree of metaphor

found in Mauro Mota.

Jean Valentine is ingenious in what she does with parts of Joao Cabral's

20 In The New American Poetry, pp. 424-25.

21 In The Modern Poets, 2nd edn., ed. John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read (New
York: McGraw Hill, 1970), p. 424.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller

Like the beam of a lightless star.22

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

lies in its own black anonymity and we here on this bed

enact the tides, the swells, your hips rising toward me,
waves break over the shoals, the
sea bird hits the mast in the dark and falls
with a cry to the deck and flutters off.24

22 In Naked Poetry, p. 266.

23 In A Controversy of Poets, ed. Paris Leary and Robert Kelly (New York: Double-

day, 1965), p. 27.

24In A Controversy of Poets, p. 25.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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,

a nau misteriosa la vai.

O tempo passa, a mare cresce,

O vento uiva.

A nau misteriosa la vai.

Acima dela

que mao 6 essa maior que o mar?

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

even than the sea?

(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.

he compresses even further to:

As the companion is dead,
so we must all together die

somewhat.

(pp. 36-37)

25 ABC of Reading (1934; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 198.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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

companheiro e morto" and "um pouco." Such lack of empathy is rare

though. In their own poems both create a metaphysical tension between
a certain hard precision that comes from words signifying scientific coldness, with words cast in an often dream-like mode - the neo-classic seen
post-romantically. I quote the first stanza of Merrill's "Laboratory Poem"
to show his use of cold, hard words:
Charles used to watch Naomi, taking heart
And a steel saw, open up turtles, live.
While she swore they felt nothing, he would gag
At blood, at the blind twitching, even after
The murkey dawn of entrails cleared, revealing
Contours he knew, egg-yellows like lamps paling.26

The rich dream-like quality of his work is evident in his "Foliage of

Vision":

There is no wit in weeping, yet I wept

To head the insect wrath and rhythm of time,
Surround the plum that fell like a leper's thumb.
The hours, my friend, are felicitous imagery,

Yet I became their image to watch the sun

Dragging with it a scarlet palace down.27

The qualities of his own poetry occasionally illumine his translations of

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.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

137

J. S. Dean, Jr.

E viam-se uns cavalos vivos,

altos como esbeltos navios,
galopando nos ares finos,
cor felizes perfis de sonho.

(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:

pois musica e instrumento nao confundo,

que afinador apenas sou, do piano,
a letra da linguagem desse mundo
que me eleva a conviva s6bre-humano.
Oh! que Fisica nova nesse plano
para outro ouvido, s6bre outros assuntos ..."

Merrill catches the antithesis of the first line, and, with a Yeats-like craft,

chooses the word "calligrapher" for "a letra da linguagem":

"Disinterested is my interest:
I don't confuse music and instrument, mere
piano tuner that I am,
calligrapher of that superhuman speech
which lifts me as a guest to its high sphere.
Oh! what new Physics waits up there to teach
other matters to another ear .. ."

(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.

Finally, what of Elizabeth Bishop's translations? These are, on the

whole, the best in the anthology. Her pictorial and rhythmic talents are
sufficient to supply a translation of an entire poem; with others there is
not the staying power. Yet occasionally some of her phrases do not jibe
with their originals. Anglo-Saxonic English likes its cadences stated in
stresses compressed, like diminution in music. Such is not often the way
of Portuguese. For instance, in Vinicius' "Soneto de Intimidade" occurs:
"E se encontro no mato o rubro de uma aurora / Vou cuspindo-lhe o sangue em t6rno dos currais," Englished: "And if I spot in the brush a glow

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

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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

same compression occurs in Elizabeth Bishop's translation of Carlos

Drummond's "Viagem na Familia," where

eram nossas dificeis vidas

e uma grande separagao

na pequena area do quarto

calls forth Marlowe's great riches in a small room:

there were our difficult lives

and a great separation

in the little space of the room.

(pp. 60-61)

Another example of felicitous compression of the sounds of Portuguese,

is found in Bishop's translation of Joaquim Cardozo's "Cemiterio da Infincia," where "auroras de girass6is" is given as "sunrise sunflowers" and

"mulheres rezando as lAgrimas, / Passando as g6tas na mao" becomes

"women praying tears, / Their hands telling the drops" (pp. 28-29). Or
this, from Carlos Drummond's "InfAncia":
Caf6 preto que nem a preta velha
caf6 gostoso

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.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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.

The translation keeps the long sounds of the Northeastern drawl:

and our destiny's the same:
to soften up these stones
by sweating over them,
to try to bring to life

a dead and deader land,

to try to wrest a farm

out of burnt-over land.

(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:

Mundo mundo vasto mundo,

se eu me chamasse Raimundo,
seria uma rima, nao seria uma solugao.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Luso-Brazilian Review

140

Mundo mundo vasto mundo,

Mais vasto e meu coragao.

In English:
Universe, vast universe,
if I had been named Eugene

that would not be what I mean

but it would go into verse

faster

Universe, vast universe,

my heart is vaster.

(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"

and "Eugene" (well-born) both suggest a savior in the context of the

earlier line, "Meu Deus, porque me abandonaste." Where Carlos Drummond has "seria uma rima, nao seria uma solugao," with its repetition of
"seria" and its construction, Elizabeth Bishop gives us a line, "that would
not be what I mean," that to readers of English poetry would imply a
repetition: Prufrock's "That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at
all," which Eliot made an echo to his earlier "I am Lazarus, come from the
dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all." Where Carlos Drummond has a play between "solu9ao" and "cora9ao," Elizabeth Bishop makes
hers between "faster" and "vaster," creating the new lines, "but it would go

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.

What, then, makes for successful translation? The sound in such a

process must echo the sense of the original. In translation from Brazilian
Portuguese to American English the Brazilian sense is to be found in the
symbols or images and in the rhythms. American sounds must be found
that reflect the Brazilian ones; let the symbols and images do the best they
can. If the translator is intimate with both cultures, he will be able to
cross the line from Portuguese to English.

This content downloaded from 115.27.202.50 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 01:17:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms