Bishop's choices of preserving names and a taste of the original sound can be interpreted as ..... the characters, of the author, of the readers and, more in general, ...... would have me charmed back thereâ, âIts greater charm would hold my ...
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco – UFPE Departamento de Letras Curso: Bacharelado em Letras-Português Disciplina: Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso 2 (TCC 2 / 2017.2) Coord. da disciplina: Profª. Drª. Inara Gomes Ribeiro Orientador: Prof. Dr. Yuri Jivago Amorim Caribé
Um experimento de tradução poética para o inglês: três sonetos de Vinicius de Moraes
Nome do estudante: Marco Barone
Recife – PE Dezembro de 2017
Trabalho de Conclusão do Curso Bacharelado Português,
em apresentado
Letrascomo
requisito parcial para a obtenção do grau de Bacharel em LetrasPortuguês sob orientação do Prof. Dr. Yuri Jivago Amorim Caribé.
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SUMÁRIO
Resumo/Abstract .................................................................................................................03 Justificativa ..........................................................................................................................05 Agradecimentos ...................................................................................................................06
Introduction ........................................................................................................................07 Literature review ................................................................................................................11 Methodology........................................................................................................................23 Analysis and Discussion .....................................................................................................26 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................48 References ...........................................................................................................................50
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RESUMO
Neste trabalho apresentaremos um experimento de tradução de três sonetos de Vinicius de Moraes para o inglês. Os resultados finais, assim como o processo de tomada de decisões que tem levado à tradução final, serão comentados à luz da literatura clássica e moderna sobre tradução poética. Mesmo concebendo a tradução como um processo de negociação entre muitas estruturas a serem preservadas entre os dois textos (CLUYSENAAR, 1976), com certo balanço entre elas, entendemos que um peso privilegiado na tradução poética deve ser dado à reprodução do som e da musicalidade original, operando uma escolha estrangeirizadora no esquema e no estilo. Por isto, colocamos de antemão o vínculo da reprodução fiel do número de sílabas do verso (decassílabo) e da preservação das rimas, que torna o processo de reprodução semântica acima do nível de aceitabilidade um árduo desafio. Além de debater questões teóricas e metodológicas na tradução de poesia, como a definição de tradução, a de traduzibilidade e a domesticação, a análise se deterá na descrição do balanço de perdas e ganhos obtidos e dos fenômenos de compensação (ECO, 2007) que entram em jogo durante as tomadas de decisão. Finalmente, a conspícua variedade de tipologias linguísticas e a imprevisibilidade das questões levantadas mostra como cada tradução deva ser encarada como um caso único e como, mais do que pensar em uma metodologia sistemática a ser aplicada de cima para baixo, uma válida contribuição metodológica tenha que partir do exemplo particular para refinar continuamente métodos sempre imperfeitos, e por isto a quantidade de experiências e desafios deste tipo acumulados se revela um parâmetro determinante na capacidade e profissionalidade do tradutor. Finalmente, serão levantadas considerações específicas do par linguístico português-inglês.
PALAVRAS CHAVE: Vinicius de Moraes; soneto; tradução poética; poesia brasileira
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ABSTRACT
In this work a translation experiment of three sonnets by Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes into English is presented. Its results and the decision-making process that has led to the final translation are commented in the light of the classic and modern literature on poetic translation. Even though we conceive translation as a process of negotiation between several structures to be preserved between the two texts (CLUYSENAAR, 1976), with some balance among them, we understand that a greater weight in poetic translation should be given to the reproduction of the original sound and musicality, adopting a foreignizing choice in scheme and in style. Therefore we apriori set the constraint of faithful reproduction of the number of syllables of the verse (decasyllable) and of preservation of rhymes, which turns the process of semantic reproduction above the level of acceptability a hard challenge. Beyond debating theoretical and methodological questions in poetry translation, such as the definition of translation, of translatability and domestication, the analysis will linger over the description of the gain-loss balance and of compensatory phenomena (ECO, 2007) which come into play during decision-making. Finally, the conspicuous variety of linguistic typologies and the unpredictability of the issues raised shows how each translation must be treated as a unique and separate case and how, more than thinking of a systematic methodology to be applied in a downward fashion, a valid methodological contribution should start from the single example in order to constantly refine always imperfect methods, and therefore the amount of experience gained and challenges of this kind undertaken happens to be a determinant parameter in assessing the capability and professionalism of the translator. Finally, languagespecific considerations on the linguistic pair Portuguese-English are raised.
KEYWORDS: Vinicius de Moraes; sonnet; poetic translation; Brazilian poetry.
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JUSTIFICATIVA
Este trabalho, um experimento de tradução desenvolvido no âmbito dos Estudos Literários e Linguísticos das Línguas Portuguesa e Inglesa, é requisito parcial para a obtenção do título de Bacharel em Letras-Português na UFPE. As disciplinas do currículo desse Curso que dialogam com o trabalho vão desde Literatura Brasileira e Teoria da Literatura II – Poesia no âmbito literário, até Morfologia, Sintaxe, Semântica e Fonética e Fonologia no âmbito linguístico, passando por disciplinas gerais, como Cultura Brasileira 1 e 2. Também faz referência a questões metodológicas, deontológicas e metatextuais relacionadas à área da crítica literária e das teorias de produção de textos. O objetivo principal deste trabalho é apresentar um extrato de cultura literária brasileira preferencialmente para uma plateia anglófona e, ao mesmo tempo, um ensaio de tradução. Devido a esses dois fatores, elaboramos um plano literário e outro metaliterário, que explica o trabalho e funciona paralelamente. Ao abordarmos traduções do português para outra língua que ressaltam a língua e cultura brasileira evidenciamos também a questão da traduzibilidade. Falar de peculiaridades do português a serem traduzidas em língua portuguesa cancelaria no instrumento metalinguístico essas próprias peculiaridades, colocando-as como únicas possibilidades ou as tornaria objeto de uma reflexão forçosamente alocêntrica sobre o português, por isso optamos pela redação do texto em uma língua estrangeira (o inglês nesse caso). Estas razões justificam, em nosso ver, em caráter de excepcionalidade à prática habitual dos trabalhos de conclusão do Curso Bacharelado em Letras-Português, nossa escolha de redigirmos e apresentarmos o trabalho inteiramente em língua inglesa. Em suma, pretendemos manter a finalidade funcional e a coerência do ato linguístico e metalinguístico.
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AGRADECIMENTOS
Nesta última etapa de um percurso breve, porém muito interessante e enriquecedor, quero aproveitar estas linhas para alguns agradecimentos. Primeiramente à minha esposa, amor e melhor amiga, Vanessa, por sua presença, por todo o companheirismo e o apoio nos momentos importantes, por observar de fora e ajudar a compensar minhas tendências, que sozinho não enxergo, e me colocar em um caminho centrado. À minha família de origem, fisicamente distante, mas sempre presente, que faz jus a cem sonetos de separação por dia e por outro lado não os precisa. Ela que fez, de alguma forma, com que eu fosse eu, e que segue vivendo por aqui nesta nova ramificação que eu sou, e sempre terei a honra, o dever e o prazer de ser. Aos professores da UFPE, a todos e a alguns em particular que, de vários modos, mesmo conflitais, em uns poucos casos, me ajudaram a complementar aquele pedaço de formação humanística que me faltava e especialmente ao meu orientador deste Trabalho de Conclusão Yuri Caribé que, com muita paciência, resolveu acompanhar este meu percurso árduo e um pouco peculiar. Quero agradecer as pessoas que desejam o bem do ser humano em si, antes de conhecê-lo, e lutam contra as demais. E o Brasil, minha nova terra à qual, apesar de pequenos pesares, eu devo um papel nesta vida, meu bom humor despertado instantaneamente pelas manhãs ensolaradas e pelas paisagens repletas de verde: nunca imaginado, outrora, como meu destino e tão almejado, mais tarde, durante um longo período.
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1) INTRODUCTION
Translating poetry is a twofold task: on the one hand, the variety of levels at which information is functionally relevant in poetry makes translation a process of recreation from scratch, on the other hand the need of respecting fixed metric proportions, in terms of syllable numbers, accents, and possibly rhymes, calls for a very technical job, restraining beforehand the creative space. The role of the translator therefore ranges from the enhanced responsibility and poetic skills that a high level of authorship requires to the merely technical and somewhat dull abilities in syllable-counting and rhyme puzzle solving, and indeed in most cases an open puzzle with no solution guaranteed, so that Wittgenstein (apud JUNQUEIRA, 2012, p. 13) would claim that “the translation of a lyrical poem […] into a foreign language is quite analogous to a mathematical problem”.
With respect to other literary forms, what becomes relevant in poetry is the very personal and immediate connection between the material value of the word (that is, sound) and emotion, often reflecting an idiosyncratic instinctive relationship with the language and the history of its learning by the author. Such direct contact between emotion and material word is not shared with the reader and it is therefore not part of the linguistic code during codification. Yet, the subsequent act of reading presupposes the recreation of another moment of contact between the (possibly “same”) material word and the reader’s emotional background. The moment of codification, ruled by such an inspirational “apnea”, is in poetry a short lapse of time when something previously unseen comes to life, in line with Emily Dickinson’s belief (1924/2000, p. 89) “A word is dead / When it is said, / Some day. // I say it just / Begins to live / That day.” Translators, with plenty of time and the specific job of rendering someone else’s product, experience this instant of direct connection for the first time as readers. As “faithful” re-creators, they must be able to sell (and enjoy) their product as no more than an illusion of creation.
Poetry as a literary genre also offers a peculiar situation as to methodological issues, in that the history and the sake of the very feasibility of the translation of each poem offer different perspectives of judgment, unpredictable obstacles and often a unique way of getting 7
round them and achieving the solution. It may be worth recalling Susan Bassnett’s (1980, p. 86) complaint about studies on translation of poetry, about most of them being “either evaluations of different translations of a single work or personal statements by individual translators on how they have set about solving problems”. She goes on: “Rarely do studies of poetry and translation try to discuss methodological problems from a nonempirical position, and yet it is precisely that type of study that is most valuable and most needed.” (p. 86). At the same time, going on reading, one notices that the author herself cannot avoid building her reasoning on a number of empirical examples as well. That said, once one understands that not only can the issue of working from an empirical position not be overcome, but that it is no issue whatsoever, every case study can be regarded to as “one more” attempt at testing the role and contribution of empirical examples in (and possibly a step towards) the construction of more general working methodologies and “theories” (rather than one theory) of translation.
In the landscape of Brazilian arts, those literary and artistic forms considered as erudite, including poetry, cannot boast a consistent amount of active translation works and are also scarcely exported abroad, unlike music. According to Tooge (2014, p. 41-42), the image of Brazil abroad, and therefore the simplified labels that allow recognizing Brazilian culture worldwide and imply in some commercial success, are in part responsibility of those Brazilian people who live abroad and retain from the culture those elements that judge to be important for their identification and cohesion. As a consequence of this, many translations happened to undergo a process known as domestication (GILE, 2009, p. 251-252; VENUTI, 1995, among others), leading to the survival of nothing but what can be interpreted in terms of foreign parallel categories, resulting in oversimplification and stereotyping. A famous example of domestication attempt is the repeated plea of the American lyricist of popular songs and translator Norman Gimbel (1927-), declined by the authors, to remove the name Ipanema from the English version of Brazilian poets Vinicius de Moraes and Tom Jobim’s song Garota de Ipanema (TOOGE, 2014, p. 160).
An important contribution towards exporting Brazilian poetry to the Anglophone word is that by the American writer Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) who happens to move to 8
Brazil in her forties and spend there 15 years, getting enough cultural insight to feel “entitled” to present us with a repertory of translations of the work by two main characters and symbols of Brazilian culture of the time, Brazilian poets Manuel Bandeira (1886-1968) and Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) and, even more popular, Brazilian poet and songwriter Vinicius de Moraes1 (1913-1980), whom Elisabeth Bishop had as a friend. Her collection An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry (1972) includes translations of 14 Brazilian poets into the English language. Her translations maintained Brazilian names and toponyms and showed a special effort in rendering the authentic Brazilian sound, preserving syllable length and rhyme, as one does in music, unlike those by her friend Ashley Brown, who does not go past reproducing a somewhat corresponding subdivision of the text into lines. Both Bishop’s choices of preserving names and a taste of the original sound can be interpreted as instances of foreignization: a direct and formal faithfulness to the original, aimed at dreamily teleporting the reader at the feet of a comprehensible Brazilian stage performer (rather than the other way around).
A translator that gives priority to the reproduction of metrics and rhymes at the point to consider them indispensable must also show a considerable dexterity in selecting TL solutions that fit in metrics, even before considering the full array of synonyms in decision making. In part, this requires vocational abilities, in part such an ear can be trained by repeated application of similar tasks. We personally experienced a professional path that helps developing this kind of skills: movie translation and subtitle live screening in festivals, a task requiring special attention to orality, rhythm, synchrony and an aesthetic feel of what the matches between what is heard and what is read should be, due to the constant presence of the audio track, as well as occasionally dealing with translation of poetic language inside screenplays, in the form of songs, jingles or word-game jokes. Besides our professional experience, we are fluent in both English and Portuguese (yet not native in any), and have long been plunged in the Brazilian culture. This type of equidistant foreignness as a reader
1
Translations of Brazilian authors, including Vinicius de Moraes, by Bishop and Brown are available at: https://escamandro.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/elizabeth-bishop-tradutora/ http://www.algumapoesia.com.br/poesia/poesianet039.htm http://www.rtp.pt/acores/comunidades/vinicius-de-moraes-and-elizabeth-bishop-a-meeting-of-the-twaingeorge-monteiro_47670
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and a text producer makes us a potentially special type of actor in sharing and teaching to another audience his experience of slow and gradual familiarization with the sound of Brazilian Portuguese, reproducing it with a neutral (similarly foreign and equally distant from native) ear in the target language (TL, henceforth), avoiding a bias towards either underadaptation or over-adaptation. In other words, we feel in a position to compare our repertory to what George Steiner refers to as “centaur language” (STEINER, 1975, p. 315 apud PÃES, 1990, p. 42-43).
It is for these reasons that we decided to undertake the task of producing metric and rhyme-preserving translations of three sonnets by Vinicius de Moraes “Soneto de fidelidade” (1939), “Soneto do amor total” (1951) and “Soneto da separação” (1938).
This
undergraduate dissertation proposes annotated translations into English of the three poems to the Anglophone audience and analyzes the history and relevant steps of the translation process. As to the issue of domestication/foreignization, although the poems do not contain Brazilian proper nouns, the choice of maintaining faithfully the original rhyme scheme of sonnet, with two quatrains and three tercets of decasyllables, typical of the Lusophone culture, whilst English sonnet forms (e.g. Shakespearian, Spenserian) historically display different rhyme schemes, line length (based on a counting that uses metrical feet rather than syllables) and even a different subdivision into stanzas (4-4-4-2), can be read as an attempt of defending a “structurally foreignizing” type of translation.
This research may possibly serve as a reflection on many debated questions in the theory of Portuguese-English translation of poetry, such as its very feasibility, languagespecific characteristics, gain-loss balance and compensatory strategies, and the differences between the three sonnets’ translation history in terms of these aspects will shed a light on the idiosyncrasy of the translation process in poetry and the issue of impossibility of developing a unique methodology for decision making. The dissertation is divided as follows: in Section 2 we presented the main theoretical guidelines that we choose to follow, among the previous studies on translation theory, and developed the framework in which to locate our research. In Section 3 we presented the methods of the study, and we explained the limitations that the concept of “methodology” (in the classical sense of “apriori ideal set 10
of instruction to follow for implementing the study”) has, in the context of poetry translation. In Section 4 we described and analyzed some selected parts of the actual process of translation of the three sonnets, in all his steps, planned and unexpected significant episodes, discussing all doubts and suggestions that each occurrence raised, all the way to the final proposal, and for the remaining parts we commented the gain-and-loss balance of our final proposal. Conclusions end the paper.
2) LITERATURE REVIEW
This section starts by fixing some notions, terminology, and concepts that will be adopted throughout the paper, such as translation, poetic language, and later on, translatability, domestication, gains, losses and compensation. Many definitions of translation have been given in the literature over the years. Despite the intrinsic polysemy of the word “translation”, we believe that it will always be clear by the context when we are referring to translation as “a process” or as “a product”. We are interested now in commenting the existing definitions of translation as a process: they can be roughly divided into translation as an “art”, as a “craft” and as a “science” (BASSNETT, 1980, p. 15). No definition acceptable for the purposes of the present work can fall in just one of these categories: an art has little possibility of discussing methodological issues and could not have created the type of professional that translators are nowadays, especially in terms of job organization; a craft would be equally accessible to anyone through practice and constant apprentice work, irrespective of the cultural background and talent, whereas it is evident, especially in poetry, that some sort of special talent is required, so that some authors claim that “poetry must be translated by a poet” (CHARENTS apud HOVHANNISYAN, 20122) or even that “No man is capable of translating poetry besides a genius to that art and [...] the master of both of his author’s language and of his own” (DRYDEN apud HOVHANNISYAN, 2012). Finally, a definition of translation as a science is perhaps the least satisfying, as it assumes that, through systematization, its actors can eventually come to an objective agreement about what is correct or convenient.
2
The electronic article, from which the reader can retrieve a wide range of definitions of translation, was taken from website http://www.translationdirectory.com/articles/article1224.htm and lacks page numbers.
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Therefore, it is only possible to defend a definition of translation that resumes at the same time characteristics of all three categories mentioned, being an art in that it involves a (re)creative process and needs some sort of talent, a craft, in the sense that it must be learnt, and empirical experience can help refining its practice, and (partly) a science, as it is possible to abstract some patterns and glimpse, albeit in a minimally way, some regular structures for producing methods. The author of the present dissertation personally defends translation as falling crucially in the three labels, with a substantial preference for the art, in spite of the evidence of having made it his own job (craft) and trying to build up, in this very paper, an analysis, as scientific as possible, of a process of translation.
A reasonable definition of interlingual translation is that given by Katharina Reiss (1981, p. 121): “a bilingual mediated process of communication, which ordinarily aims at the production of a TL text that is functionally equivalent to an SL (source language) text”, understanding a textual object, a set of functions that such object conveys and a definition of translation focused on the “production” (rather than the “transmission”) of a “functionally equivalent text”, which also allows a loose definition of “equivalence”. Considering linguistic functions in the sense of Jakobson (1960/2008), one must recall that not all functions reside in or belong intrinsically to the text as a material, observable object (indeed this is just the poetic function), but in the occurrence where the text in placed into context, communication takes place and its relationship with its surrounding parts and actors (referential context, author, reader, channel) is revealed, that is, in both the moment of writing and that of reading.
Narrowing down to the domain of literature and literary translation, contrasting positions have emerged about the specification of when a text is literary. Kristeva (1988, p. 59-60) defines a “literary text” as one able to function in an intertextual modality, interplaying not only with other verbal texts but also other modes of signification and symbolic structures proper of the context. Michel Riffaterre (1992, p. 204-217) thinks of a literary text as a semiotically self-contained system, in that it contains the signs that prove it
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is a cultural artifact (apud KETKAR, 20053). The formalist and structuralist common understanding of literacy as a system or a superstructure defines a literary text as an expression of a culture and therefore defends that the decision-making in a literary translation be influenced by cultural factors (TOURY, 1985). A refinement of the concept of literature as a system is given by Lefevere (1988, p. 16-19 apud KETKAR, 2005): literature is only a subsystem of society but its actors are in constant interplay and their actions contribute to shape this system and its boundaries, both from the inside (fashions, styles and genres) and from the outside (ideological and financial patronage), therefore a literary translator is always a literary actor, not less than a critic: he “rewrites” a text, with the conscience and responsibility of his task of presenting a given author to a given audience. Before this “social” value of literacy and the role of the genre poetry, we find appropriate pointing out that, if on one hand poetry surely represents a subset of literature, its intrinsic freedom, both in composition and reception, as well as the current economic weakness of the market of poetry, make the process of translating poetry not necessarily subject to the strict constraints of the social system of literacy pointed out by Lefevere and therefore translating poetry should not be treated as a subtype of literary translation. On the other hand, both the source and target cultures will of course influence the decision-making process. If we go back to the definition of translation as “producing an equivalent TL text”, we can roughly define as “equivalent” a text or communication act that, not being equal to another one, still carries a similar (or “as equal as possible”) value, in terms of what both the message and its effects on the reader should be. However, in deciding which values to seek an equivalent of, the translator is often trapped in a conflict, as the relationships between the elements of the source text that are significant to the reader and should have an equivalent in the target language are multiple, of many types (and at a closer look, potentially infinite) and a given, satisfactory translation of one can harm the possibility of rendering another in an acceptable way. Sometimes the original contains a citation of reference to the source culture whose value can only be preserved by a complete replacement with total semantic loss in which re-elaboration from scratch becomes paradoxically an act of faithfulness (ECO, 2007,
3
The paper is available at website http://www.translationdirectory.com/article301.htm and it shows no page numbers. For more on the debate on literary translation see also (EL-DALI 2011).
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p. 150). This is even more evident in poetry which, according to Ezra Pound, is “the most condensed form of language” (apud PÃES, 1990, p. 34) and thus it poses a critical problem for translation. Therefore it is no surprise that, as Bassnet (1980, p. 86) claims, “within the field of literary translation, more time has been devoted to investigating the problems of translating poetry than any other literary mode.” We believe that translation science becomes more intriguing when dealing with poetry because it investigates more closely the conflict that was previously mentioned: the importance of material word in itself and the need of preserving extremely faithfully some phonetic patterns (rhymes, rhythm, length, secondary accentuation and overall fluency of sound) may seriously harm the translation of other levels of the message, until impossibility. A “functional” definition of translation does not conflict with the case of poetry, as long as one understands that the functions of a poetic text, unlike other types of text, do not amount to sheer communication. Rather, what might be problematic with Katharina Reiss’ notion of translation is that it reduces it to a process of communication: if the functions of a poetic text go beyond communication, how could a process of communication possibly produce something that has these same functions? Ivan Junqueira (2012, p. 11) recalls the definition of poetry by Robert Frost (apud JUNQUEIRA, 2012, p. 11; HOVANNISYAN, 2012), as exactly “what gets lost in translation”, and if the notion of translation is limited to a communication process or to communication functions, one must agree with this radical position, in that a translation, by its very definition, cannot avoid altering the so called message, the material word, which encodes the poetic function. Auden (apud JUNQUEIRA, 2012, p. 11), less radical, defends that there are translatable elements in poetry, such as metaphors and similes, because the latter regard the connection between the word and a common multilingual referential, reality, although this poses some issues in the presence of different cultural or social values: in any culture and any language one is able to grasp a metaphor such as “as free and light as a butterfly”, but the same cannot be said of “exhausted and worn out like a public school teacher”. In Frost’s perspective, one may see poetic translation as a process in which semantics, pragmatics and all intentions of the author are preserved, and morphosyntactic relationships, 14
phonetic correspondences are “equivalently” created, the presence or not of rhetoric artifices, figures of speech, word games and the metrical structure can also be maintained, but what unavoidable fails to be there is the material word, which can only be rewritten, or, as Jakobson (1969; 1991, p. 151) defends, “creatively transposed”, in an overall huge process of compensation: as to the message, the whole poem is literally removed and another poem is inserted, in order to compensate the loss. Furthermore, the trance of inspiration, this moment of disconnection where the author does not write bearing the reader in mind, is not communication, it is an epiphany and, in view of this, a translation can only amount to setting the basis for and subsequently performing new occurrences of it.
Mariam Hovhannisyan (2012) distinguishes narrative poetry (stressing story and action) from lyric poetry (stressing emotion and sound): it is important to recognize the type of poetry in order to establish a priority list of the elements to preserve. With respect to prose, she says, poetic translation should give more importance to the form: when the formal factors are judged to be significant, they can acquire priority with respect to the semantics, which can undergo slight modification, provided it does not get spoiled. Subjective and diverse stances have been taken in the literature about this issue, depending on the author’s experience: while Newmark (1981, p. 67) maintains that “semantic truth is cardinal” and should always have priority, Schleiermacher (2007, p. 91) claims that “in musical elements and rhythm resides a most excellent and higher meaning”.
In general, the musical elements to be maintained are rhymes, inner rhymes, assonances, onomatopoeias, alliterations, rhythm, number of syllables in each line, overall structure of secondary accents, and salient form-type figures of speech triggering unexpected pauses, repetitions or accelerations in reading, such as enjambments, chiasms, hyperbatons, anaphoras, anadiplosis, whereas meaning-type figures such as metonymy and metaphor do not necessarily involve the sound level: they are poetic but not strictly lyric. The list of problems from the non-matching of languages in translating poetry is even richer than in prose: to differences in grammar, word order, polysemic ranges of words one must add the different suggestion of the sound of corresponding words in each language and the hard task
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of reproducing inner accentuation and rhymes. Grammar rules are looser in poetry than in prose (the so called “poetic license”) which gives some advantage to the translator.
Nida and Taber (2003, p. 132), for the purpose of translation studies, recommend talking of “poetic language” rather than “poetry”, which is a subclass of it: “poetic language is used in poetry and song, in proverbs, epigrams, aphorisms and so on. Its principal trait is a multilevel parallelism: a) in sound, b) in morphological and syntactic patterns, c) in lexical choices, d) in semantic structures”. The levels proposed correspond to what Anne Cluysenaar refers to as “structures”. She defends that the translator must work with “an eye on each individual structure” for “each structure will lay stress on certain linguistic features or levels and not on others” (CLUYSENAAR, 1976, p. 49 apud BASSNET, 1980, p. 82). In this view, considering Hovhannisyan’s claim that more importance should be given to the form in translating poetry than in translating prose, it remains understood that the genre poetry triggers a specific priority order between structures, where sound features rank higher.
Similarly to Cluysenaar, Lefevere (1975 apud BASSNET, 1980, p. 20) defines seven possible ways of translating poetry (phonemic, literal, metrical, “into prose”, rhyme, “blank verse”, interpretation), according to the structure one is trying, in a given moment, to stress; Pound (2007 apud HOVHANNISYAN, 2012) distinguishes between two entirely different options for working: “interpretative translation”, where the translator guides the reader through the original and “making a new poem”. Duff (1989, p. 11-12 apud SURATNI, 2008, p. 2) points out six principles to take into account (meaning, form, register, source language influence, style and clarity, idioms), many of which correspond to different structures too, and finally Williams and Chesterman (2002 apud SURATNI, 2008, p. 2) refer to three types of strategies for modifying and compensating a non satisfactory translation (syntactic, semantic and pragmatic strategies).
All these definitions and subdivisions in the literature reveal the presence of a number of structures of various functional and linguistic natures and the secret of a good translation is, for each such structure, avoiding overemphasizing or underemphasizing it with respect to their emphasis in the original text, pursuing the same balance. Finally, for another subdivision 16
into structures, the reader might recall the Jakobsonian linguistic functions, each referring to a specific participant or element of the speech: emotive (speaker/author), conative (reader/receiver), referential (reality/context of the author/context of the reader), poetic (message, material word), metalingual (code), phatic (channel/contact).
Then, once all this is said, we may propose a definition of interlingual (poetic) translation as “the practice of producing a text in TL whose sound, morphosyntactic relationships, semantics, pragmatic function, cultural characteristics of the historical time of the characters, of the author, of the readers and, more in general, all relationships between all hierarchies of internal textual and contextual structures mirror those of a given SL (poetic) text in the most faithful and best balanced way, both with respect to those values of the SL culture that are also values in the TL audience and towards an attempt of enriching these by those”. Once a definition of poetic language in line with Jakobson’s linguistic functions is accepted, and therefore Frost’s claim that poetry is what is lost in translation gains perfect sense, one cannot avoid the endless debate about whether translating poetry is possible, because an answer to this question depends on the very definition of translation, in a circular and tautological way, as Ladmiral (1979, p. 85-86) points out: “Even «before» practising the translation, its possibilities are prejudged, opting for a negative bias, as Zenon would do with movement4”. In order to be able to talk about translation of poetry, therefore, one must either speak of “creative transposition” or of “rewriting”, or talk of “translating a poem, and not the poetry present in it, but in such a way as to create a product poetically equivalent”, and therefore simply restating the question: is it possible to translate a poem so as to transpose its (original) poetic function inside a new, rewritten product?.
Even so, the answer may in some cases be negative. Geraldo Holanda Cavalcanti (2012, p. 128) points at a prototypical example: a very short ermetic Italian poem by Giuseppe Ungaretti, Mattina, whose one-line text contains a crucial sound element that
In the original French text: “«Avant» même de pratiquer la traduction, on préjuge de sa possibilité, en tranchant par la négative, comme le faisait Zénon pour le mouvement ” Our translation. 4
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makes 50% of the sound saliency of the poem, that is the proparoxytone word illumino, the other 50% being the alliterations in m. According to this evaluation, translation in French of such a poem would be highly impaired by definition, as the language does not contain proparoxytone words, and therefore impossible. Umberto Eco (2007, p. 109) refers to intranslatability as an “absolute loss” and says, for instance, of footnotes, that they “mark the tranlsator’s defeat”5. He makes a good example of an Italian joke (recall that poetic language includes jokes) in which the ambiguity between third person singular and second person formal oblique pronouns created the humour: this can be only rendered in languages which may use a third person singular pronoun for second person formal treatment, such as Spanish and Portuguese.
The very concept of translatability is only made possible by a concept of minimal target of acceptability of a translation. Following Levý (1969/2012, p. 91), “translators, as a rule, adopt a pessimistic strategy, they are anxious to accept those solutions only whose “value” ‒ even in case of the most unfavorable reactions of their readers ‒ does not fall under a certain minimum limit admissible by their linguistic or aesthetic standards”. It is hard to give an objective definition, even for “deontological” purposes, of what such standards should be. In the analysis section, it will be shown several times how a solution had to be discarded because it would push some element below the limit of acceptability and the reader may try to grasp the idea of what those limits are.
On one occasion, in translating Soneto da separação into English, some very significant elements were so hard to be rendered in an acceptable (equally or partly significant) way that the translator was about to declare his defeat. The sonnet refers to the separation between the poet and his partner, Beatriz Azevedo de Mello, when he moves to England to study literature. The concept of separation is very physical, it does not entail ending the relationship, and Vinicius will actually fight against the ghost of separation and consecrate a higher abstract level of union in spite of physical separation by marrying Beatriz two years later by proxy. The careful choice of words associated to the cold and windy landscape approaching during the boat trip introduces a dichotomy of two separated worlds, 5
Our translation.
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one living in the present and one more and more residing in the mental and sensitive memory and finding the textual resources to express this separation in English. But it is not the semantics that impairs the translation nor the difficulty of rendering the cultural transposition of unfamiliar (to the source culture), cold images such as wind, mist, using English as a familiar (to the reader) language: English has room and vocabulary for it and a foreignizing attitude of the reader will do the rest.
Yet, as we will see later on, what put at stake the very possibility of accomplishing the translation process successfully was, in this case, a single expression from the source text, “de repente, não mais que de repente”: the extremely rich English vocabulary and morphosyntactic inventory was surprisingly unprepared for rendering this one construction in an satisfactory way. Only a greater effort, more thinking, creativity, inspiration, original thought and the recalling of an English expression from a previous work would finally provide a solution for what had almost already been declared a total loss. This example shows how solutions to a translation are actually an open problem, with infinitely many possible choices and neither a guarantee for a solution, nor the certainty of claiming impossibility: even crossing all synonyms, rhymes and accounting for all syntactic equivalences one is never sure to have tested all possible ways.
Original poems with a free structure and without systematic rhyme scheme are growing in number in modern times. It is possible that its sound value be still significant and reside in other mechanisms and effects of sounds than just rhyme and that they happen to carry nevertheless a remarkable musical value. Rhythm, imperfect rhymes, internal rhymes and some figures of speech are among these mechanisms. Robert Frost (1935 apud Kane, 1989, p. 266) defends that writing poetry without rhymes is like “playing tennis with the net down”, meaning that it is too easy. Although this statement might be questionable, what seems certainly true is that translating a rhymed poem without preserving rhymes and metrical elements should be considered below acceptability, in that it surely kills an important intention of the author for the sake of an alleged difficulty of the task.
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On the other hand, translators may end up sacrificing too much of the semantics for the sake of preserving rhymes. Levý (1969/2012, p. 86-87) mentions a series of translations by Max Knight of a German pun about a weasel sitting on a stone by the flowing river. “Acceptable” translations by the author were as semantically opaque as ‘A lizard // shaking its gizzard // in a blizzard’ in which the only semantic skeleton that is not sacrificed for the sake of rhymes is “name of an animal – name of an activity – place where it is done”.
Surprisingly it seems that the number of translators claiming in advance their defeat, and yet playing a lost game, is growing in number. This calls to mind Levý’s (1969/2012, p. 90) statement “The price a translator would pay for complicating his task in this way would, however, be so great, that modern translators prefer to renounce to it [...] though it is probable that, after hours of experimenting and rewriting, a better solution might be found.” The sentence referred to superfluous sound information, such as preserving the same vowels in rhymes, which is surely preferable, if nothing else is lost, that is, ceteris paribus6, but the sentence can be perfectly applicable, especially in its last part, to those instances where the translator is about to give up the translation of an important element: as naive as it looks like, “more effort and more effort” is the simplest, the best and the only advice.
Translation is a game of gains and losses. In a certain sense, due to the impossibility of reproducing the original, translation is a losing game: in the overall tally, there will always be a loss and the task of the translator is minimizing this loss. However, one is able to talk of relative gains, whenever a translation is improved with respect to a previous form, or when a loss gets compensated. Umberto Eco, in his masterpiece essay on translation “Dire quasi la stessa cosa”7 (2007, p. 123-126) provides a good variety of examples of losses with their corresponding compensations, stemming from his experience as an author and a translator. Translators must be careful in distinguishing when, instead of compensating, they are adding elements to the translation that where not present in the original, in order not to compensate but to say something more. Eco (2007, p. 127) suggests that the translators should avoid enriching the translation unless either this is mandatory, or what is being said is undoubtedly 6
All things being equal Title of the original Italian version. The Português version “Quase a mesma coisa” was used for our study. “Experiences in Translation” is the title of the English version. 7
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what the author would have said if he or she had our language at their disposal, something very difficult to verify. Even when interpreting an ambiguity that they face as readers, translators should leave it not only when the author meant it, but also when that ambiguity, not meant, improves the original text and “the intentio operis8 proves to be more malicious than the intentio autoris9” (2007, p. 129). He mentions a list of situations of professionals “sinning” in enriching translations, he himself claims to have been tempted to insert something in order to “improve” the translation or disambiguate a number of times. Sometimes enriching a translation is unavoidable, sometimes it can be interpreted as a compensation of something of totally heterogeneous nature that was taken out somewhere else.
Eco mentions his Italian translation of the French novel Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855) in which a character enrolls in the spahis. The spahis are ‘Algerian cavalry units in the French army’ and the average French reader, unlike others, knows this army takes soldiers overseas and infers that the character will get out of the scene for good. So there is an important piece of information that would get lost through a foreignizing translation, leaving spahis. Also, there is no equivalent domesticating translation for such an army in other culture and, obviously, the author judges very inappropriate such an amount of domestication, for the foreignizing style he has undertaken, in which the historical background is totally significant. While the English translator used a footnote, Umberto Eco decided to add an adverb, oltremare ‘overseas’ and did not feel this as inappropriately adding.
Although the examples by Umberto Eco do not include poetry translation, this gives an idea of how many multiple reasons could imply in a necessary lost, necessary in that it cannot be recovered on the spot, and however, sometimes it is possible to compensate the lost, by the introduction or modification of another unit somewhere else. Sometimes, especially in poetry, by reasons of rhythm and rhymes, an entire piece of a poem which occupies a given position in the original text is moved somewhere else in the target text or
8 9
Latin: “The manuscript’s intention” Latin: “The author’s intention”
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possibly two parts happen to be exchanged in position. These are instances of “material” compensation or “compensation in place” (HERVEY and HIGGINS, 1992, p. 34-40).
Another important issue in the theory of translation is the choice between foreignization and domestication. In presence of a cultural difference filter or any difference between “recognizable ranges” of the SL and the TL audiences that may result in different interpretation (or non-interpretation) of a given excerpt, the translator may either decide to render the atmosphere and taste of the original, and plunge the reader into an unknown, yet understandable context or turn the message more familiar, heavily transforming and adapting it to something more recognizable for the TL culture and reality. Once more Eco (2007, p. 201-211) teaches us, through a number of examples, how domesticating or foreignizing is not a partisan choice, but each option has its pros and cons at each different moment and all of them have to be accurately weighed in view of the final decision.
Unlike the audience of a film festival, worldwide readers of literature are still mostly monolingual. Nevertheless, in the globalized world they are more and more ready for travel experiences of any kind, and the interest in reading foreign literature, although translated, in contemporary days, a time where national literatures offer a vast variety a little bit everywhere, often reflects an attitude of “literary tourist”. Embracing the view that “a translation must look like a translation”, these factors plead in favor of foreignizing choices. This “tourist” condition is in line with Umberto Eco’s definition of strange as opposed to strangeness (2007, p. 203), that is when the reader “finds himself facing a rather unfamiliar way of showing him something he could recognize, but that he really feels like seeing for the first time”10
Domesticating is not only an issue of translating lexical material: the very structure of the text can be readapted: Paulo Henriques Britto (2008, p. 24) recalls the Portuguese translation of English ballad metrics (3 or 4 feet per line, odd secondary accentuation) with the redondilha maior, more familiar to the Portuguese audience, physically different but more representative of popular music. In the present paper lexical elements to be possibly 10
Our translation
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domesticated are little, as the kind of poetry approached deals with universal matters, but the sound of sonnet in decasyllables is of Latin heritage, brought to Brazil from Portuguese renaissance and remounting further back to Petrarca and Italian humanism. The choice is whether to bring the reader to Brazil as in a daydream or to take Vinicius de Moraes abroad in the reader’s bedroom, whether translation should be the exotic element that lets itself be discovered or at the complete reader’s disposal: in fitting English words into the Romance poetic scheme of sonnet (more than in reproducing Brazilian landscape) we opted for the former, we opted for foreignizing.
Last but not least, more technical and language-specific observations about English and Portuguese will arise from our analysis as, to cite one, checking the claim by master translator Norman R. Shapiro that English compensates the lack of density rhymes with an overall larger vocabulary (LANDERS, 2001, p. 98-99), apparently confirmed by the experiment by Balth Van der Pol (1956 apud LEVÝ, 1969/2012, p. 82), about diverging and converging tendencies of English in a translator’s decision making: an English essay was translated into French and back into English twice and the English semantic paradigms of choices proved to be far more rich than the French ones, where the same lexical entries were more recurrent. This warns us about expecting a conspicuous array of semantic equivalent choices in a target language such as English and an extensive work of alternative-checking both while analyzing synonym and rhyme lists.
3) METHODOLOGY
The type of research work proposed can be ascribed to the subarea of Text Analysis and Translation Studies called “Annotated Translation” or “Translation with Commentary”. Following the definition given by Jenny William and Andrew Chesterman (2002, p. 7), a translation with commentary should be at the same time introspective (an inquiry on the translator’s reasoning) and retrospective (after the translation, one must look back at what was done). As to the commentary, it “will include [...] an analysis of aspects of the source text, and a reasoned justification of the kinds of solution you arrived at for particular kinds of translation problems”. Other areas of research the study unavoidably enters are Source 23
Analysis, since the first part of the research consisted in capturing all significant structures in the original texts, Genre Translation, as we dealt with poetry, a specific genre, and, in a minor way, Protocol Studies, as we investigated the translator’s internal decision-making process (WILLIAM and CHESTERMAN, 2002) as a result of the application of sequences of selective instructions (LEVÝ, 1969/2012, p. 76) inside word paradigms, partly objective (based on literary availability) and partly subjective (based on the memory and personal skills of the translator).
Prior to the study, we completed our acquaintance with the biography and main literary work of the author, especially in poetry, in order to better understand his psychological profile, the sociocultural context he lived and acted in, as well as his style and the messages he mostly wanted to vehicle. We focused on the two periods in which the sonnets were composed, namely during his first moving to Europe and later on, in the midst of his greatest success as a musician. Then, keeping in mind the literature on poetry translation, we attacked the problem: first, we provided a first linear, essentially semantic, translation of each poem, which we will refer to, in the analysis section, as “straightforward translation”. Then, for each lexical word, we produced a list of synonyms and, in a parallel way, one of all its rhyming words. We also provided alternative word orders and, whenever they come to mind, possible syntactic re-phrasings through circumlocutions and even direct solutions for a translation, bearing in mind that sometimes a brilliant out-of-the-blue idea for a verse may turn needless the whole lot of methodological work that had been built thereabout. Therefore, parallel to the top-down or “deductive” approach, all solutions that just came to mind during the process of translation, just by the sake of “inspiration”, were likewise welcomed, annotated in a separate list, and taken into account for making the final choices.
While looking at each list of rhymes, we have often considered partially abdicating semantic faithfulness, when this was the unique solution for matching the rhyme and fitting the required metrics. One or more solutions for each strophe were elaborated, either entirely different or just varying in some verse or words, and a pros-and-cons consideration process was undertaken. After making a first choice, more consideration about the way the new poem 24
sounded in its whole ended each experiment. The reader may compare our translation with an existing one that was found on the website https://allpoetry.com11, which did not preserve the rhymes, and check at what price (if any) our enhancements came. The process of annotated translation can be summarized in the following steps:
Proceeding within each line (verse): 1) We made a first straightforward translation, a list of possible synonyms for lexical words, then we made one or more choices for the verse, thought of possible reorderings of the verse both in the source and target language, and rhymes for those words that could end up in a final position, then we made make a list of possible literary translations of the verse. 2) We considered possible syntactic re-phrasings both in the source and target language, do the same and make a new list. 3) We considered solutions arisen by inspiration 4) We compared the possible solutions and keep a handful of them: a new selection criterion will consider the emotional effect of words, the pair sound-emotion.
Proceeding line by line The previous process was repeated for all lines within a strophe and we proceeded strophe by strophe, by looking for verses that would match and rhyme, avoiding repetitions. If no solution were found, we went back and sought more. Overall considerations on the emotional counterpart of each proposal were made. We finally made one preferred choice for a strophe, and keep possible variants.
Proceeding strophe-by-strophe: We moved on to the next strophes and repeated the process. Finally, looking at the whole poem, we made the same considerations and made one final choice accordingly, mentioning a few possible alternatives for some verses, to keep in mind for possible “inter-sonnet” uniformity, a possibly unsatisfied reviewer or for simply producing alternative translations.
11
No English versions of the sonnets published on paper have come to our knowledge. The author of the present study has not even read these translations, in order not to be influenced in any way.
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4) ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
In this section the process of translation of the three sonnets is reviewed, highlighting the main steps, issues and considerations that we found significant for the translation, as well as for the contribution that the present work can possibly give to translation theory. Each sonnet is presented in its original version, and then briefly discussed in the light of its context of writing, meanings, cultural value, and other possible hidden pragmatic functions. A first, “straightforward” translation is given in brackets besides each sonnet, which does not preserve the metric scheme and rhymes, but maintains the meaning, at the semantic level. We prefer to avoid, when referring to such translation, the expressions “literal translation” or “direct translation” which are used to define a word-for-word translation that possibly does not even preserve the meaning. We also avoid to call it “non-poetic” or “prosaic translation”, because it does not follow the same process of linguistic “domestication to the TL prose” that a prose translation would, as it shows a bias towards including, whenever convenient, among a paradigm of semantically equivalent choices, words more similar in sound or sharing with the original a root common to both languages, following an Occam’s razor philosophy of optimization of sound resemblance. In this way, whenever such sound-preserving elements also happen to fit in a metrically equivalent solution, they would already represent a fixed, pre-existent preferential choice, cutting down the number of possible combinations and simplifying the task. Should that not be the case, “prosaic translation” solutions will be considered among the alternatives for building up the final version.
The methodology used to proceed stepwise towards the final version, through all attempts and ideas that came to mind, is described in full details (list of rhymes, list of synonyms and decision-making process) only for the first strophe of the first sonnet, with an explanatory and didactic purpose. For the remaining part of the first sonnet, as well as for the other sonnets, after a contextual introduction, the final version will be shown before discussion, and possible details on the decision-making process will be provided a posteriori: some valid alternatives that arose in the process by following the methodology are also discussed and pros and cons will be weighed in a gain-loss balance evaluation that aims at justifying the choices made among the alternatives. The readers not proficient in Portuguese 26
can understand the task by comparing the two English versions, the straightforward translation and the final proposal. They may look, in the final English proposal, at the more orthographically transparent elements that have been preserved, such as the length of each line and the ending of words, then skip back to the first, semantically transparent, straightforward English translation in order to recover the non-poetic12 meaning of the original text, return to the final English version and make their own gain-and-loss balance.
The first sonnet to be translated was Soneto de fidelidade (1939):
ORIGINAL TEXT
“STRAIGHTFORWARD” TRANSLATION
De tudo, ao meu amor serei atento Antes, e com tal zelo, e sempre, e tanto Que mesmo em face do maior encanto Dele se encante mais meu pensamento.
[Of everything, to my love I will be attentive Before, and with such zeal, and always, and so much That even in front of the greatest enchantment Of it would be enchanted more my thought
Quero vivê-lo em cada vão momento E em seu louvor hei de espalhar meu canto E rir meu riso e derramar meu pranto Ao seu pesar ou seu contentamento.
I want to live it in every vain moment And in its praise I have to spread my song And laugh my laugh and pour my crying At its condolence or its rejoicing.
E assim, quando mais tarde me procure Quem sabe a morte, angustia de quem vive Quem sabe a solidão, fim de quem ama
And so, when as late as possible shall I be found Who knows by death, anguish of those who live Who knows by loneliness, the end of those who love
Eu possa me dizer do amor (que tive): Que não seja imortal, posto que é chama Mas que seja infinito enquanto dure.
I may tell myself about the love (that I had) That it be not immortal, because it is flame But that it be infinite, while it lasts]
Before proceeding to present the annotated translation (WILLIAMS and CHESTERMANN, 2002, p. 7) and trace the path towards the final proposal, it is important
Here “bereft of metric elements and rhymes” but not necessarily and completely bereft of occasional instances of sound similarity that may come from common root between Portugese and English, as for example Latin roots in English words, that could make a straight translation “accidentally” similar in sound to the original without an elaboration process. Ex: A word like “difícil” would be translated straightforward as “difficult” rather than “hard”, “construir” as “construct” rather than “build”. For this reason, in the straightforward translation of the poem, “attentive” for “atento” was preferred to “alert”, “enchantment” for “encanto” was preferred to “charm”, whereas in a prose translation “charm” would have probably slightly prevailed for frequency of use and adequacy to the style. However, “rejoicing” for “contentamento” was preferred to “contentment”, because the difference in adequacy between the two and the preference for the former in the inner esthetics of English over the grey, rather technical and complicated sound of “contentment” is too large to be compensated by plain sound similarity. “Em face de” was rendered as “in front of” rather than “facing”, understanding that compositional transparency of the syntactic structure is also key to instill the impression of material similarity. 12
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to locate the sonnet historically, in the time and context of its composition (and divulgation), analyze the most important meanings the text conveys and understand what elements of the text are responsible for those meanings. A good translation should consider the preservation of such textual and contextual elements as a top priority. The poem was composed in Portugal: 1939 is a time when Vinicius de Moraes is traveling across Europe as a student: earning a degree in literature and one in law, after writing three books, the opportunity to seriously consider the path of writing for a living had come from a fellowship in literature by the English government, which allows him to spend some time overseas. However poetry is still a delightful activity, without the annoying constrains of the professional career and life in Europe is a very intense stream of novelty and encounters, as it will be during his entire life, but Vinicius is engaged to Beatriz: deciding to be faithful is an effort of will that takes the form of a sacred vow, a devotion to the very concept of fidelity, so that fidelity becomes a responsibility of care, attention and ultimately, empathy. Resisting temptation, constantly recalling and experiencing one’s love, by spreading its “song”, even through the very same poem we are analyzing here: these are all ways to define a “love that is meant to last”. This love is not taken for granted until an ideal future called “forever”, yet it has to be cultivated, in a vow of constant care and attention, a vow for a present love in continuous construction. The future is only an undesired moment to come as late as possible, where the poet would be able to tell something about his love, about past love and about love in general.
Against this conception of love one may argue that constant recalling, constant thinking, “not forgetting” one’s love is rather an involuntary than a voluntary act, in the sense that those who really love will recall constantly without an effort, and those who don’t, and hope to oversee or force themselves to attention, won’t manage for long. But the translator knows, facing such an issue, that speculative meta-textual considerations must be avoided at this point and he or she must go back inside the text and try to “be” Vinicius de Moraes, speaking through his mouth, only, “as if he were born an English speaker”. With this in mind, we may analyze our starting point, the straightforward translation, and try to approach, one by one, the big puzzle problem of metric and rhymes.
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As said, we have tried to stick to the syntactic order of the elements inside the clauses, more than we would do in the final version and even more than if we were dealing with prose translation. For instance, the Portuguese expression “ser atento” (literarily, ‘being attentive’) is equally or more frequent than its equivalent “prestar atenção” (literarily ‘to pay attention’), both in a formal and informal use, whereas the choice of ‘being attentive’ instead of ‘paying attention’ may exclude an informal register, and has an overall lower likelihood of occurrence. This is nonetheless justified by the fact that, due to the high expectation of replacing ‘attentive’, as all verse-final words in general, because of a rhyming need, this translation is open to being modified by accepting almost-synonyms of ‘attentive’, such as ‘alert, aware, conscious, vigilant, mindful, concerned, caring’, possibly more informal, and preserving syntax. Only after the failure of this attempt will we start considering other syntactic solutions such as “paying attention to”, “taking care of”, “caring for”, “minding of”, “watching out for”, “taking into consideration”. A syntactic loss like eliminating a noun predicate or switching to passive voice or altering the word order is not to be considered as a loss in itself, in the sense of Eco (2017, p. 110) but in some cases it could impair the rest of the translation (like repeated subject for more clauses, with an anaphoric effect, or repeated adjectivation). If the expression “Of my love I will be attentive, [...]” were followed by a list such as “[…], grateful, satisfied, proud”, then translating “Of my love I will take care…” would be hard to continue. This is not the case here, but the remark is meant to better describe and justify the way the first translation is given.
Another peculiarity of the original text to be taken into account, in providing the translation of the second half of the poem, is the repeated use of subjunctive mood in Portuguese, which may be triggered by different factors, on verbs “procure, possa, seja”. As to “procure”, in future time clauses “quando mais tarde me procure […] a morte” (‘when as late as possible Death will look for me’) where normally the verb goes to the future of subjunctive (“quando mais tarde me procurar”), the use of present is more archaic, more dubitative: if introduced by “quando”, it gives an interpretation of “when” as “if at all” or “whenever”, but it may also have a totally different interpretation, that of an optative value, triggered by the presence of “as late as possible” as “may Death, may Loneliness seek me as late as possible”, or an epistemic value, justified by the rendering of quem sabe, lit. ‘who 29
knows’ as talvez ‘maybe’13: “quem sabe a morte […], quem sabe a solidão” “maybe Death maybe loneliness will look for me”. The same multiple interpretation applies to the subjunctive mood on the main clause possa ‘I be able to’ instead of a simple future poderei ‘I will be able to’: either it is an optative subjunctive “may I be able to say […]!” or it is a dubitative, in that the indetermination of the future situation (“maybe Death, maybe Loneliness”) expressed by the temporal clause extends the modal scope of “maybe” to the main clause (“maybe I will be able to say [...], about to die, maybe I will be able to say […] after my partner has died”). Finally, the subjunctive mood on não seja…seja being used, instead of the past foi or a historical present é (is the author really referring to the love he had or is he claiming something about love in general?) or a future perfect terá sido, means probably an expansion of the optative scope, especially on the second seja ‘May I be able to say of love… that love is (and may it be!) (not immortal but) infinite’. Another possibility is that the scope of the overall dubitative mood enters the scope “Maybe all this will happen and I will be able to say that love is infinite (and therefore maybe love is infinite)”. A third option, although unusual in modern Portuguese, is that we are facing an epistemic subjunctive introduced by dizer ‘say’, reducing the assertiveness of the claim “I will say/argue that, according to my experience, love be infinite”. Before such an intricate network of ambiguities, which the author was surely aware of, the translator’s duty, as Eco (2007, 128129) teaches us, is preserving them in the final version, and more than respecting the strict correspondence between the ranges of each one (a rather utopic goal), what is important is that there be certain ambiguity between optative, dubitative and epistemic interpretations that a partial viewpoint, an uncertain future, the double option Death/Loneliness and the utopia of a final statement on the nature of love (being either universal or particular) may convey, altogether, by using the resources that the English language provides.
The next observation regards a category that exhibits a clear difference across the languages under investigation and is often a reason for chronic difficulties in PortugueseEnglish poetry translation: gender pronouns. The pronoun “it” is being used in the first English version for “love”, unlike the masculine Portuguese that turns it, unavoidably, more animate. This loss seems to be unavoidable, in that English could not metaphorically select 13
Notice that present subjunctive is mandatory in Portuguese after talvez and optional after quem sabe.
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a masculine gender, not supported by the norm, since the object of love is a woman; nor could it select a female gender, in striking contrast with the romance original and with any nuance the original text may suggest but mainly because, in such case, the reference of the pronoun would automatically be to the beloved lady (for the readers who know the story of Vinicius de Moraes) instead of the abstract love.
Let us now proceed with solving the puzzle of preserving metrics and rhymes. The original poem is written in decasyllables, the rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA CDE DEC and inner secondary accentuation is as follows: 2-6, 1-6-(8), (2)-4-8, 1-6 // (1)-4-6-(8), (2)-4-8, 2-4-8, (2)-4-6 // 2-6, (2)-4-6, (2)-6-(7) // 2-4-(8), 3-6, 3-6. The aim of this translation is not to absolutely respect inner secondary accentuation, but to try to maintain a certain alternation between the even (2-6, 2-4), odd (1-4, 1-6), octave ((2)-4-8, (2)-6-8) and accelerated (4-6, 36, 4-8) rhythms, the same that is found in the original version. Priority will be given to the length of the verse and, hardest of all things, to recreating the rhyme scheme in the TL, leaving assonances and near-rhymes as a possible last resources. Without those minimal requirements, the version is surely to be considered below acceptability or, as Levý (1969/2012, p. 91) called it, below a “minimum limit admissible”. Under these assumptions, the translation work on the first strophe started, by first exhibiting the semantic paradigms, a list of all possible synonyms or quasi-synonyms of the lexical words mentioned in the strophe, marking pairs of possibly rhyming words. Grammatical words will be adjusted, mainly to reach the desired number of syllables, whenever possible. In a parallel way, we list all rhymes of our candidates for endings, and cross results. The expression “de tudo” opens the poem: it is desirable that this stylistic effect be maintained, so its ending will not be relevant and the paradigm ‘of all’ / ‘of all things’ / ‘of everything’ luckily embraces different syllable lengths. Also, the word amor is repeatedly used, meaning the primitive concept of (abstract) love, as well as the object of love. Therefore, it seems unlikely to us choosing, likewise repeatedly, any other word but “love” in the English translation. “Love”, as well as amor in Portuguese, is undoubtedly the only unmarked and non-salient choice in its paradigm. The first thing to look at, and the most difficult one, are rhyming endings. As for the candidate to ending the first four lines of the 31
sonnet, the paradigms of synonyms to look at are, in the first line, those of “attentive” and “to be attentive”; in the second line, “before” (in the sense of “in advance, beforehand, preventively”), “always”, “with such zeal”, “so much”; for the third line “enchantment”, since “facing, in front of, before” cannot close a verse; for the fourth line “enchant”, “thought”, and possibly “more” and “of it, of that”. In order to get these sets of synonyms, we looked up in the Thesaurus Online Dictionary (2013) and came up with the following: 1) “Attentive, aware, conscientious, observant, vigilant, watchful, mindful, alert, regardful, concerned, careful, wary, apprehensive”. 2) “Before, ahead, beforehand, previously, sooner, aforetime, formerly, in advance, earlier, precedently, ahead of time, in anticipation14”. “zeal, ardor, determination, devotion, diligence, eagerness, earnestness, fanaticism, fervor, gusto, inclination, intensity, passion, perseverance, sincerity, spirit, urgency, verve, warmth, zest” “always, consistently, constantly, ever, invariably, regularly, repeatedly, perpetually, eternally, everlastingly, evermore” “so much” (consecutive): no synonyms 3) “charm, appeal, beauty, charisma, glamour, grace, magic, enchantment, magic, sorcery, witchery, fascination, allurement, attraction, captivation” 4) “of it”: no synonyms “(to) enchant, beguile, bewitch, captivate, carry away, charm, enamor, enrapture, enthrall, entice, fascinate, gratify, hypnotize, please, thrill, wow” “more, also, better, further, over, too, longer” “thought, attention, hope, logic, reflection, speculation, thinking, understanding, mind, attention, brain, consciousness, genius, head, imagination, instinct, intellect, judgment, mentality, perception, power, psyche, sense, soul, spirit, talent, wisdom”
We must reproduce the rhyme scheme ABBA, finding rhyming pairs between the lists of candidates for ending the first and fourth lines and those of the second and third lines. 14
Words underlined, in different ways, are those that will be considered for rhymes.
32
Therefore, after analyzing the previous lists, we further cross-checked words in the Rhymezone website (2009), looking for further rhymes belonging to the semantic fields of words in the corresponding pairing line15. This method was somewhat dispersive, as huge lists of unknown and very infrequent words would tend to appear. For example, the list of rhyming words with “aware” contains 138 words, which are listed in the table below. None of them belong to the semantic field of the candidates for the fourth line, that is synonyms of either “it”, “enchant”, “more” or “thought”. Nevertheless, it is thanks to this list that we noticed the word “there”, which was later among the list of the strongest candidate for the final proposal, which proves rhyme lists to be extremely helpful to our strategy.
a-share, aer, air, ayre, b-share, baehr, baer, bahr, bair, bare, bear, behr, blair, blaire, blare, braire, caere, caire, care, chair, chaire, chare, cher, cherr, clair, claire, clare, crare, daire, dare, darr, derr, derre, dreher, ere, err, eyre, fair, faire, fare, fehr, ferr-, ferre, flair, flare, fraire, frere, freyre, gair, gare, gehr, glair, glaire, glare, guerre, haare, hair, haire, hairr, hare, hehr, heir, herr, herre, kahre, kehr, khmer, klare, knerr, kreher, lair, laire, lare, lehr, maare, mair, maire, mare, mehr, mer, nair, ne'er, nerre, pair, paire, pare, pear, phair, phare, pkware, plair, plaire, praire, prayer, quaere, quair, quare, rare, reher, sare, sayre, scare, schehr, scherr, sehr, serr, serre, shair, share, sherr, skare, snare, spare, sperre, square, stair, stare, stehr, sterr, sterre, sware, swear, taire, tear, terre, their, there, they're, traer, traire, verre, ware, wear, wehr, werre, where, wrair, zehr Table 1. Ex. Rhyming words with “aware”.
Looking at the list of synonyms, we found no rhyming pairs between the first and fourth line ending candidates, but several rhyming pairs between the second and third line ending candidates, which we have underlined, namely: -“in anticipation” (translating antes), “determination” and “inclination” (translating zelo) rhyming with “fascination” and “captivation” (translating encanto) and -“zeal” (translating zelo) rhyming with “appeal” (translating encanto).
15
In doing this, we limited ourselves or gave priority to classes of words that we believed to have more chance to have a rhyming pair: we preferred, for instance, paroxytone over proparoxytone words.
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Both translations of encanto “appeal” and “captivation” represent a loss with respect to the original concept of “enchantment” and should be probably strengthened by an adjective, like in “magic captivation” or “charming appeal”. Probably “fascination” is less of a loss, but all these translations lack a good referring verb that could translate encante, the subjunctive form that purposely repeats encanto in the fourth line, since “captivate” and “fascinate” are too long to fit in the fourth line and “to appeal” does not have the meaning of “to charm, to enchant”. On the other hand, “zeal” is surely a less marked and more transparent choice for translating zelo. Between “in anticipation” (rather long and awkward), “inclination” and “determination”, the latter is surely preferable. But if we try to put “Before, always and with such determination” we are already above the length permitted so that, in reducing “before, and with such zeal, and always, and so much” to a decasyllable, we must consider suppressing the least significant element of the line, that is, “so much”, already semantically included in “with so much zeal”. Two rhyming solutions for the second and third line pair were suggested, with two variants for each one, in which the author managed to fit in the right number of syllables too. The former leaves the unfinished task of using the repeated verb “fascinate” for the fourth line, the latter leaves the (perhaps easier) task of using the verb “charm” for the fourth line.
Solution 1a: De tudo, ao meu amor serei atento
[…]
Antes, e com tal zelo, e sempre, e tanto
Before, always, with such determination
Que mesmo em face do maior encanto
That even facing a great fascination
Dele se encante mais meu pensamento.
[…]
Solution 1b: De tudo, ao meu amor serei atento
[…]
Antes, e com tal zelo, e sempre, e tanto
Before, always, with such determination
Que mesmo em face do maior encanto
That even fore the greatest fascination
Dele se encante mais meu pensamento.
[…]
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Solution 2a: De tudo, ao meu amor serei atento
[…]
Antes, e com tal zelo, e sempre, e tanto
Beforehand, always, and with so much zeal
Que mesmo em face do maior encanto
That even facing a charming appeal
Dele se encante mais meu pensamento.
[…]
Solution 2b: De tudo, ao meu amor serei atento
[…]
Antes, e com tal zelo, e sempre, e tanto
In advance, always, and with so much zeal
Que mesmo em face do maior encanto
That even fore the most charming appeal
Dele se encante mais meu pensamento.
[...]
The double options beforehand/in advance (almost equivalent) and facing/fore (“facing” is more similar to the original but the smaller length of “fore” allows the superlative degree in the upcoming adjective) in the variants showed can also be mixed to form new combinations.
As was said, for the first and fourth lines no pairing rhymes were found among the list of synonyms of ending words, so that a deeper restructuration of the sentence must be considered, for which no pre-existing methodology can help out, just the experience and imagination of the translator. The translator comes up with two solutions, both requiring a sacrifice: 1) slightly losing the nuance of attentive as “mentally alert”, leaning towards that of “concerned, mindful, careful, caring”, envisaging a rhyming pair “caring for” with “more” and 2) replacing the substantive expression of the fourth line defining love, “by it”, by a locative expression “there” which rhymes with “aware”, meaning love as “a place the author’s thought goes to”.
Two solutions for the rhyming the first and fourth lines were suggested, with several variants for the fourth line, where the author managed to fit in the right number of syllables too. All solutions presented combine with Solutions 2a and 2b of the previous puzzle, as they
35
all use the verb “to charm”. No solution was found using the verb “to fascinate” as this is way too long for the amount of information still to convey in the fourth line.
Solution 1: De tudo, ao meu amor serei atento
Of all, my love will I be caring for
Antes, e com tal zelo, e sempre, e tanto
[…]
Que mesmo em face do maior encanto
[…]
Dele se encante mais meu pensamento.
Still will my thought by it be charmed more
Three decasyllable variants for the fourth line, ending in “more”, are also proposed: “Its greater charm would grasp my thought far more” “Its greater charm would catch my thought much more”, “Its greater charm would hold my thought much more”.
Solution 2: De tudo, ao meu amor serei atento
Of all things, of my love, I’ll be aware
Antes, e com tal zelo, e sempre, e tanto
[…]
Que mesmo em face do maior encanto
[…]
Dele se encante mais meu pensamento.
Its greater charm would send my thought
0
back there Several decasyllable variants for the fourth line, ending in “there”, are also proposed: “Its greater charm makes my thought go back there”, “Thinking thereof, my thought is charmed back there”, “Thinking of it, I’m always charmed back there”, “Its very thought would have me charmed back there”, “Its greater charm would hold my thought right there”.
In view of this, we decide to only retain Solution 2 and its variants for the secondthird line rhyme puzzle problem and then we start our gain-loss balance and negotiation (ECO, 2007, p. 104-107) between the two solutions of the first-fourth line rhyme puzzle problem. Surely “caring for” expresses a feeling of pre-existing concern and sympathy and loses the sense of mental attention and the policy of self-control contained in the original serei atento more than “I’ll be aware”, which is still an imperfect translation (it could just 36
mean “I will know it exists”, not necessarily “I will be thinking of it”), but it stays at least in the “mental” semantic sphere. On the other hand, a though that goes “back there” is a thought that had already gotten away from love and is now returning, whereas Vinicius’ thought seems to only “be (physically) in front the greatest enchantment”, yet his thought “is more enchanted by it (my love)” and therefore it may have never lost its attention or fled away. Therefore a solution such as “Still will my thought by it be charmed more” (the most transparent with the original) and its variant “Its greater charm would hold my though much more” is surely preferable in this sense; however an adverb such as “more strongly” would be more accurate for the verb “to hold” than just “more”. Rhyming with “aware”, the only solution giving the sense of a thought that never escaped would be “Its greater charm would hold my thought right there”, but the expression “right there” may risk to sound too informal. In terms of secondary accentuation, the solution “Before, always, with such determination” forces a clumsy patter (2,3,6,10) with tonal crowding between second and third syllable, and it is impossible to reanalyze “álways” as “alwáys”, in order to avoid it. On the contrary “In advance, always, and with so much zeal”, normally offering a (3,4,8,10) inner accent pattern, is no hardly reanalyzable as (2,4,8,10) in reading (ex. read: “in ádvance”). But the most suitable solution seems to be “Beforehand, always and with so much zeal” which offers directly a (2,4,8,10) pattern. Finally, “of all” is slightly preferable to “of all things”, as it is more faithful to the original. Facing all the possibilities and considerations that we have exposed, of very different nature, from purely metric ones, to semantics, style, those concerning the author’s character or intention, the translator must weigh the gain and losses of each one and choose the one that, in his or her perception, preserves all contextual and textual, semantic and sound structures (in the sense of Cluysenaar, 1976, p. 49) in the best-balanced way. After accurate reflection, the most convenient choice seemed to be:
De tudo, ao meu amor serei atento
Of all, my love will I be caring for
Antes, e com tal zelo, e sempre, e tanto
Beforehand, always, and with so much zeal
Que mesmo em face do maior encanto
That even fore the most charming appeal
Dele se encante mais meu pensamento.
Still will my thought by it be charmed more.
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In a similar way did the author proceed towards the completion of the translation. We decided not to provide a similarly detailed analysis, for it would be exhausting for the reader, but to jump directly to the final version and make some follow-up commentaries thereupon. We would like to stress that sometimes strophe-by-strophe translation is not always conceivable as conclusive, as different strophes can occasionally happen to interact in the process, in issues such as avoiding the repetition of a word, sometimes a line-ending word, throughout the whole poem, and more in general a worry about not losing the overall coherence and faithfulness to the original, by means of too heterogeneous choices across strophes. Here is our final English version of the sonnet “Soneto de Fidelidade”: SONETO DE FIDELIDADE
SONNET OF FIDELITY
De tudo, ao meu amor serei atento Antes, e com tal zelo, e sempre, e tanto Que mesmo em face do maior encanto Dele se encante mais meu pensamento.
Of all, my love will I be caring for Beforehand, always, and with so much zeal That even fore the most charming appeal Still will my thought by it be charmed more.
Quero vivê-lo em cada vão momento E em seu louvor hei de espalhar meu canto E rir meu riso e derramar meu pranto Ao seu pesar ou seu contentamento.
I want to live and praise it every moment And spread my song as much as it feels hollow Laughing my laughter or weeping my sorrow According to its gladness or its torment.
E assim, quando mais tarde me procure Quem sabe a morte, angustia de quem vive Quem sabe a solidão, fim de quem ama
That said, when in the journey of my quest May Death set off, the anguish of the living Or Loneliness, the time lovers retire
Eu possa me dizer do amor (que tive): Que não seja imortal, posto que é chama Mas que seja infinito enquanto dure.
Shall I claim of the love (that I was giving): That it be not immortal, since it’s fire Yet infinite, as long as it may last.
We have already commented exhaustively on the first strophe. Let us therefore analyze the second strophe. The author was forced, by the inexistence of rhymes, to violate the transparency and faithfulness to the original syntactic structure. However, he feels he manages to do this in a harmless way, by preserving all elements necessary to comprehension: the adjective vão was displaced to the third line in the expression “as much as it feels hollow”, on its turn preferred to “albeit it might feel hollow” and, as an effect of length compensation, the expression em seu louvor was sent back to the first line as “and praise”. This is a typical instance of “compensation in place” (HERVEY and HIGGINS, 1992, p. 34-40), in that it involves misplacing of whole segments and it was necessary to 38
produce the (almost-)rhyme “hollow”/“sorrow”. The third line has a little semantic loss in the meaning change of derramar ‘pour’ to “weeping” and a slight reduction of pranto “crying” to “sorrow”, but the general meaning of the expression is fully recovered, as well as the oxymoron-symmetry of the line and the transitive construction with inner object of the verb rir “to laugh”. It was impossible to preserve the X-shaped structure of two last lines (chiasm) riso-pranto-pesar-contentamento, as the translator needed deeply the word “torment” to rhyme with “moment”, but the sole success in preserving the parallel structure (laughter-sorrow-gladness-torment), together with rhymes, makes this a relatively insignificant loss, because the risk of an absolute loss (ECO, 2007, p. 109), which was high, has been averted.
Moving on to the tercets, we must mention, as losses, the imperfect rhyme quest-last that only works in some variants of oral English; the substitution, for rhyme purposes, of the amor que eu tive ‘love I had’ by “the love that I was giving”; that of fim de quem ama ‘end of those who love’ by “the time lovers retire”, and a poetic usage of “or” without “either”, in “may Death […] or Loneliness”. If those were necessary and more than justified sacrifices that allowed the preservation of metrics and rhymes, another apparent loss, namely the nontransparent translation of “E assim” by “That said”, was a purposed and stylistic choice, as this expression best expresses in English a pause of recapitulation of all reasons that led the author to the final reasoning. A most serious, but likewise unavoidable loss (ECO, 2007, p. 112) is the dropping of the original expression quando mais tarde. However, we believe that this has been partially put up with (that is, to use a technical term, compensated) but the use of the word “journey”, that understands an idea of long duration more than its equivalent “trip” or “travel”. Moreover, the fact that Death is only “setting off” in such a “journey” conveys even more the feeling (and, ultimately, the wish) of an allegedly long duration of its voyage. Finally, regarding the already mentioned polysemy of the functions of the subjunctive mood, we may observe how the translator has succeeded in preserving the double interpretation epistemic-optative in “may Death set off[…] or” and that universal-particular in “shall I claim of the love[…] that it be not immortal […]as long as it may last”.
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The second sonnet translated was Soneto de separação “Sonnet of Separation”. It was written in 1938, when Vinicius de Moraes was moving to England, in a sailing ship, separating himself from his recently met girlfriend and future wife Beatriz Azevedo. The poet associates metaphoric elements from the cold approaching European sea landscape with images of separation and transformation of union into loneliness. As promised, we provide both the straightforward translation and our final proposal below16:
SONETO DE SEPARAÇÃO
SONNET OF SEPARATION
De repente do riso fez-se o pranto Silencioso e branco como a bruma E das bocas unidas fez-se a espuma E das mãos espalmadas fez-se o espanto.
[Suddenly from laugh was made the crying, silent and white like the mist and from the joined mouths was made the foam and from the palmated hands was made the fright.
All of a sudden laugh was made a tear, Silent and blurry, like a misty dome And of the joined mouths was made the foam And of the flattened palms was made the fear.
De repente da calma fez-se o vento Que dos olhos desfez a última chama E da paixão fez-se o pressentimento E do momento imóvel fez-se o drama.
Suddenly from calm was made the wind Who from the eyes undid the last flame And from passion was made the premonition From the immobile moment was made the drama
All of a sudden stillness was made storm And blew the latest blaze off our eyes Out of the passion the omen did rise From the still moment the drama took form.
De repente, não mais que de repente Fez-se de triste o que se fez amante E de sozinho o que se fez contente.
Suddenly, no more than suddenly Was made sad who had been made a lover And lonely who had been made content
All of a sudden, of a bloody sudden Was made so sad who made himself a lover Who made himself so glad was made abandon’d.
Fez-se do amigo próximo o distante Fez-se da vida uma aventura errante De repente, não mais que de repente.
Was made of the close friend a distant one Was made of life a wandering aventure Suddenly, no more than suddenly]
In place of the close friend was made the yonder In place of life, a vague ramble of wander All of a sudden, of a bloody sudden.
Looking through the translation, the following points are worth mentioning to our discussion, which can be classified as necessary17 major losses, due to rhyming and metric issues: the insertion of the word “dome”, not present in the original text, triggered by rhyme and space need and justified by the form of a tear it may represent (as well as a water drop), after the word “tear” was inserted, also for rhyming reasons; the insertion of varying verbs like “did rise”, “took form” instead of the further repetition of “made”, just in these two occurrences. We can also cite some minor losses: the insertion of “so” in “so sad”, the insertion of possessive “our” in the expression “our eyes”.
The most difficult decision to make in translating this sonnet was whether to translate the repeated expression de repente by “suddenly” or “all of a sudden”. Both solutions would provide secondary accentuation (on the first syllable and on the first and fourth syllables, 16
The reader not acquainted with Portuguese may compare the straightforward translation (center column) with the final version (rightmost column). 17 Also called “irremediable” losses (ECO, 2007, p. 112)
40
respectively), other than the Portuguese text (which stresses the third syllable) but easier for producing unmarked patterns of decasyllables. Another complicated issue was about rendering the Portuguese verb fez-se, extensively repeated throughout the text, which could have either a reflexive meaning (fez-se = “made oneself”) or an impersonal meaning (fez-se de = “sprouted, was born from, was made out of”), or else a passive meaning (fez-se = “was made, was turned into”), and the ambiguity is sometimes present in the original text, except for unanimated nouns, where the reflexive interpretation is the most unlikely one. We have opted for alternating the passive, impersonal and reflexive interpretations, with the passive form “was made” prevailing in the quatrains. Based on this decision, which together with many monosyllabic solutions for nouns (laugh, tear, storm) happened to shorten the endings of the first lines of the quatrains, the use of “suddenly” would have provided an impersonal solution such as:
De repente, do riso fez-se o pranto
Suddenly from the laugh was made the weep
forcing the use of “from” instead of “of”, whereas “all of a sudden” could provide solutions such as the active form:
De repente, do riso fez-se o pranto
All of a sudden laugh became a tear
or the passive one, which was finally selected:
De repente, do riso fez-se o pranto
All of a sudden laugh was made a tear
At this point of the translation, all solutions were plausible, but only later arguments, which proved preposition “of” to be more suitable in the third and fourth line impersonal constructions “of the joined mouths”, “of the flattened palms”, made the translator opt for the locution “all of a sudden”. Once “all of a sudden” had been chosen, the greatest difficulty to overcome was how to translate the line de repente, não mais que de repente. The problem with this expression 41
is that the word sudden is only syntactically a noun in the very crystallized expression “all of a sudden”, so that constructions like “all of a single sudden”, “all of a simple sudden”, “all of no more than a sudden” are meaningless and not well formed in English, and “no more than all of a sudden” sounds quite heavy. “All of a sudden” is a lexicalized expression, satisfying one of the criteria for recognizing a syntactic word: indivisibility. Expressions like this have normally lost its status of syntactic compounds, though, with remarkable exceptions: extremely high frequency stock phrases may come to interrupt the lexicalized compound and productively break in and modify any construction. Such an expression, in British English, is “bloody”. We were about to give up the attempt, after a long time of thinking, and go back considering the use of “suddenly”, except there were not either good alternatives to adjust “Suddenly, no more than suddenly” to the length of a decasyllable. Finally, an idea dragged us out of the swamp18: “all of a bloody sudden” is a perfectly formed expression in UK English, providing a touch of Britishness that is absent (and yet so latent!) in the original version. If the solution may look as an overcompensating, arbitrary insertion or, as Eco (2007, p. 127) would define it, an attempt at “enriching the original text”, we should take into consideration the very desperate situation and the almost impossibility of completing the task: if this is meant to save the translation from an absolute loss, why should not the translator allow himself to add a small element, and imagine just one word of venting, just one word of rage, associated to the idea of Britain, coming from the author’s mouth? Besides the birth of the line “All of the sudden, of the bloody sudden”, other interesting stories about the translating process are hidden behind the translation. To recover one, we may mention that before we came up with
E da paixão fez-se o pressentimento
Out of the passion the omen did rise
E do momento imóvel fez-se o drama
From the still moment the drama took form
18
It is interesting to observe that the inspiration for the use of bloody as a universal compound breaker came from previous work, in this specific case, from movie translation: the movie “Saturday night and Sunday morning” (1960) by Alan Sillitoe (1928-2010) starts with a metalworker counting his last pieces of work for the week and his miserable wage: “Nine hundred and fifty-four, nine hundred and fifty-bloody-five, another few more and that’s the lot for a Friday. Fourteen pounds, three and tuppence for a thousand of these a day.”
42
the best option for the 7th and 8th lines of the translation had been for quite a while the following:
E da paixão fez-se o pressentimento
From the passion a new omen would rise
E do momento imóvel fez-se o drama
On the still stage a drama would perform
The main loss that would have occurred by accepting such a translation would be the replacement of a momento ‘moment’ by a “stage”, which clearly does not have the temporal meaning of “moment, phase” in the presence of the verb “perform”. We could have opted for other disyllable solutions preserving the meaning of “moment” and the line length, such as “In the still while”, “In the still time”, but we could not avoid the use of “perform”, as it was the only solution found as a rhyme with “storm” until that moment. As the “making” of a drama, here standing for its “beginning” must already have its specific associated verb (“to perform”) explicitly mentioned and the subtlety of the irruption of “drama” as an abstract concept, almost out of context, could not be reproduced in its wholeness anyway, we had judged more convenient to abandon it completely, and add another explicit metaphor, the “stage”, which would make the scene even more explicit and suggestive, enriching in this way the original. But luckily we came up with the solution “In the still moment the drama took form”, clearly preferable to the previous one, due to its semantic transparency, to avoiding enriching the original, to the anaphoric repetition of indefinite article “a new omen…a drama” in the fifth syllable and that of “would” by the line ends, and a repeated secondary accentuation pattern (4,7,10), resulting in a parallel schemes for the 7th and 8th line which reproduce the anaphoric effect of the original: P P the ŃN the ŃN υύ (4,7,10) P the still ŃN the ŃN υύ (4,7,10)19
Another succeeded work of anaphora reproduction can be observed in the sequence “in place of…/in place of…” in the last tercet, that together with the avoidance of repeated verb “was made” produces a physically different effect from the original, but a succeeded 19
N=noun, P=preposition, υ=verb. Word stresses are expressed.
43
pair of decasyllables. In the previous tercet, the parallel repetition de triste o que se fez… / de sozinho o que se fez… was not reproduced but replaced by another figure of speech, a chiasm, in an instance of compensation: “was made…who made himself / who made himself…was made”, alternating the passive and reflexive interpretation of Portuguese original fez-se… se fez. Another possible solution for this part that the translator still considers as valid, in order to preserve the anaphora and get rid of the perhaps bothersome archaic expedient “abandon’d” is the following:
Fez-se de triste o que se fez amante
Whom one had made a lover, one made somber
E de sozinho o que se fez contente
Whom one had made so glad, one would abandon
although a flaw that cannot be gotten round in this construction is the cumbersome presence of the unspecified subject “one”. The most subtle figure of speech that has been preserved, and that might perhaps go unperceived, even in the original, is the alliteration of “esp” in the sequence “espuma/espalmadas/espanto”. This was rendered in English by another allitteration, in “f” luckily in the exact same positions: “foam/flattened/fear”. The rhyme “tear/fear” was finally preferred to the assonance “crying/fright” (cry for “weep” exists but is very informal). Finally, we must mention the imperfect, and nonetheless effective, reproduction of the rhyme scheme ABA BBA in the tercets, as sudden/abandon’d/sudden and lover/yonder/wander, which the translator has judged to meet the acceptability threshold.
Let us switch now to the third sonnet, Soneto do amor total: SONETO DO AMOR TOTAL
SONNET OF THE TOTAL LOVE
Amo-te tanto, meu amor... não cante O humano coração com mais verdade... Amo-te como amigo e como amante Numa sempre diversa realidade.
[I love you so much, my love...shall not sing The human heart with more truthfulness... I love you as a friend and as a lover In an always different reality.
I love you much, so much, my love...may never Sing human heart with greater authenticity I love you like a friend and like a lover In such an ever different reality.
Amo-te afim, de um calmo amor prestante, E te amo além, presente na saudade. Amo-te, enfim, com grande liberdade Dentro da eternidade e a cada instante.
I love you akin, of a calm helpful love I love you beyond, present in longing I love you, finally, with great liberty Inside eternity and every instant
I love you so, of a calm love performer Love you beyond, and long, still in your company Love you, finally, with a total liberty In timelessness, wherever the clock pointer.
Amo-te como um bicho, simplesmente, De um amor sem mistério e sem virtude Com um desejo maciço e permanente.
I love you like an animal, simply, Of a love without mistery or virtue With a massive and permanent desire
I love you like a pet, my love, so easily Love with no secrets, no evil or good Just a massive desire that’s bulging constantly.
E de te amar assim muito e amiúde, É que um dia em teu corpo de repente Hei de morrer de amar mais do que pude.
And from loving like that, much and often It is that one day in you body suddenly I have to die from loving more than I could]
And with such frequency and such magnitude Of love, it’s that one day in your body suddenly I’ll die from loving you more than I could.
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The sonnet was written in 1951, after Vinicius returns from Europe to Brazil on his father’s passing, after his first marriage ends and at the beginning of his career as a samba composer and musician. Although apparently addressed to a specific interlocutor “meu amor”, Vinicius describes love, in abstract, as a desperate and somewhat uncontrollable feeling that has multiple, even contrasting characteristics and might take over the lover’s life beyond his very capacity of loving.
The main difficulty with translating this poem were the repeated use of Portuguese abstract deadjectival nouns in –ade, whose straightforward English translations are proparoxytone words ending in –ity and –ness. As fully faithful proparoxytone rhymes are very hard to achieve, we have decided to allow the use of less faithful rhymes as an acceptable loss
and
provide
matchings
such
as
“authenticity/reality/company/liberty”,
“easily/constantly/suddenly”, as well as assonances like “never/lover/performer/pointer” and we finally suggest a reading reanalysis of “magnitude” as paroxytone “magnitúde”20 providing the sequence “good/magnitude/could”. The translator judges that the very effect of using proparoxytone words is salient sound information that adds a peculiarity to the ending and its preserving across the sequence makes its near-rhyming words, both enriched with this common information, as akin as rhyming words in the ear of the reader.
By looking at the final version, one may also notice the enjambement in the first two lines where, with respect to the original text, the verb “sing” escapes the first line. We mention the harmless extra insertion of the word “such” in the fourth line, for metrical purposes, the translation of Portuguese lexeme prestante as “performer”, respecting the word’s polysemy and its double meaning as “serviceable, helpful, useful” (prestativo) and a its secondary nuance as “noteworthy, outstanding”. Another possible translation, sticking to the first meaning, and still rhyming within the context, could be “supporter”. Also, an alternative to the fourth line “In such an ever different reality” that has been considered by the translator was “In such an everchanging new reality”.
Secondary stress is indeed present in the penultimate syllable of “magnitude” [ˈmægnɪˌtud] (retrieved from online dictionary http://www.wordreference.com. Last accessed: October, 15, 2017). 20
45
The expression presente na saudade is also rather difficult to interpret. Due to the -e ending of presente, that could be either masculine or feminine, it is unclear whether the lover or the beloved is the one who is “present” by the other or in the mind of the other. It is also unclear who is missing whom, but we might suppose that both are missing one another. An alternative solution that has been considered here was:
E te amo além, presente na saudade
Love you beyond and long for, in your company
In both cases, however, we could not avoid the loss of ambiguity as to who misses whom (the English version forces that it is the poet who misses the beloved one), which entails an unavoidable bias as to who is present by whom (the beloved one is providing her company). The solution “wherever the clock pointer” must also be considered as not optimal, as well as “pet”, for translating bicho, due to metrical needs, disambiguating and choosing the interpretation of animal as a domestic animal rather than a wild beast. However, another solution for that line could be provided by:
Amo-te como um bicho, simplesmente
I love you like a beast, my love, so easily
or simply
Amo-te como um bicho, simplesmente
I love you like an animal, so easily
which would represent an instance of semantically more equivalent translation which is nonetheless poetically very scarce and inappropriate to mirror the saliency and markedness of the informal word “bicho”. “No mistery” becomes “no secrets”, “no virtue” becomes “no evil or good”, preposition “com” is omitted and the verb “bulging” is added, with none or acceptable loss. We may also observe how nominalization of adverbs muito e amiúde “and with such frequency and such magnitude” saves the very hard translation of the last tercet: “of loving 46
so much and often…it’s that…I’ll die” is reconstructed as “with such frequency and such magnitude of love… it’s that…I’ll die” with a very satisfactory stylistic effect of the enjambement “magnitude/of love”. Finally, the insertion of “you” for metrical reasons did not completely satisfy us, as the author refers to “dying from loving” in abstract and not of loving someone in specific, so that the translation finally underwent enrichment (ECO, 2007, p.127-130). However the insertion proved to be necessary for maintaining the number of syllables, an alternative being given by
Hei de morrer de amar mais do que pude
I’ll die from loving much more than I could
which has not been chosen, for stylistic reasons and the redundancy, heaviness and relative degree of informality of superlative construction (“much more”) in the very end of the poem.
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5) CONCLUSION
The experience has raised many reflections: firstly, it has been impossible to strictly follow a unique methodological pattern, even in translating three poems sharing author, language and metrical scheme. Language specific idiosyncrasies of Portuguese and English have made the type of problems faced very heterogeneous and the translator had to adopt solutions of very different natures to overcome them. The rhyme and metric preserving translation of Soneto do amor total was in general at higher risk of failure than that of the other two, so that the translator loosened the requirement of strict rhyming, reduced the number of anaphoras, but compensated by introducing different elements in different places (enjambements and an artificial resyllabification) that give the translated version its own musicality and poetic force that made it seem more of a rewriting, with respect to the other two sonnets. The story of Soneto de separação is that of an almost given-up translation which nevertheless, after a brilliant idea eliminating an individual obstacle, became extremely fluid, transparent and perhaps the easiest to conclude.
The empirical work also resulted in many exemplified suggestions on how to get round practical problems in poetic translation, yet the problems that have appeared are of the most varied types and no systematic concise conclusion can be drawn, no overall hint can be deducted other than the variety of examples themselves: the interplay of the different linguistic levels is extremely heterogeneous and therefore the type of compensation strategies that were necessary totally unpredictable: besides simple shortening or lengthening verses by the semantic elimination, replacement or insertion of a small morphological item (ex. “such”, “so”, “my love”), we offered example of macro-compensatory devices, such as switching lines of translated segmental material when its length would change across languages (em seu louvor > “and praise”, anticipated), replacing a word by a longer syntactic locution (vão > “as much as it feels hollow”) or compensating the elimination of a whole segment (quanto mais tarde) by the choice of a specific nuance on another one (“journey”).
Attention has been paid to figures of speech, among which an instance of alliteration, two oxymora, one chiasm and several anaphoras did not pass unnoticed before us; indeed the 48
more complex instances of macro-compensation were the replacements of a figure of speech by another one on two occasions, both in presence of a semantic oxymoron: an anaphora replaced a chiasm in Soneto de Fidelidade and vice versa, a chiasm replaced an anaphora in Soneto de Separação. The most difficult issues in translation, as was expected, concerned several kind of mismatches between the two languages, in the domain of phonetics, morphosyntax and semantics: it is the case of the suffix “-(d)ade” by “-ity”, a sound discrepancy belonging to the domain of stress, of the hard translation of “dele” by “of it”, due to different distribution of morphological categories, translation of “não mais que” by means of “bloody”, due to the (almost) unrecoverable lexicalization of the English syntactic expression with noncompositional semantics “all of a sudden”, forced translation of bicho by either “pet” or “beast”, due to a misalignment of semantic ranges. And we may go on mentioning the semantic sphere of atento, the different use of subjunctives, and so forth.
In general we have found no difficulty in fitting English content into decasyllables, and this is probably due to the great dictionary the language displays. Similarly, impairments coming from cultural divergences were certainly a minority, as the poetry discussed universal themes and feelings, such as fidelity, distance, separation, love, in a life context that can be easily imagined or experienced by the Anglophone audience, so that all cultural discussion on domestication issues can hardly apply to our examples. Perhaps the only slight cultural mismatch may come from the metaphorical combination between elements of nature and feelings in Soneto de separação, as for example the Brazilian perception of “mist” as unfamiliar, which was enhanced to a more threatening “misty dome” for the Anglophone audience. The “objective” method of looking at lists of synonyms and rhymes has worked partially, not because it did not provide solutions but because most of the times the author had already come up with one, either preserving entirely or modifying slightly and in a satisfactory and harmless way the metric structure, so that the list served more as a repository for cross-checking than an actually productive basin of options. We leave this experience more than ever with the feeling that each translation is a unique task, that the skills required to undertake this activity, as well as the factors its success depends on are a wide linguistic 49
culture and proficiency by the translator, his or her optimistic attitude and dynamic inclination towards always looking for better solutions without getting discouraged, confidence, patience and a fair portion of luck.
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