TRANSLATION, BETRAYAL, CONVIVIUM

When reading authors such as William Faulkner, Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce and João Guimarães Rosa, just to speak of a few – we get the impression that they didn’t write for being read or for being translated, that they didn’t even write for being understood. They wrote perhaps in order to send language back to the retreat which remotely contained it since some immemorial time; in order to send language  back to its original location, to some grotto at the bottom of the farthest removed ocean, an inexpugnable place from which it should never have departed. Very possibly the works by these authors could be characterized for inhabiting the limits between mere obscurity and the most complete darkness, between the rarefied and precarious production of sense in the human community and the most perfect and radical incommunicability, between the stuttering, the stammering, the feeble elocution and the voice forever suppressed, before they enter the realm of silence. Questioning the destiny taken by language in the body of these works or, by an inversion of the terms, questioning the destiny taken by these works in the body of language, we intend to approach the subject of literary translation. This is our way of acknowledging that multiple issues and intense controversies determine the scope of the arch sheltering theoretical and critical production on the subject.

Let’s begin by recalling Walter Benjamin’s ideas about the divine origin of human language, about the unity of Adamic language that the fall of the Babel tower would turn into fragmentary multiplicity. Translation for Benjamin would be invested of the function of religare – reconnect – a religious function therefore – these fragments in order to restore the broken unity: “Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel [Benjamin here invokes the Kabalistic doctrine of tsim-tsum, the breaking of the vessels and the gathering up of the ‘sparks of light,’ which will usher in Messianic time, one of Benjamin’s life-long concerns]”. ^[a();1]

Translation for Benjamin is not only possible, it is necessary. As Rita Diogo has observed in an article presented at the XVIII International Congress of the ICLA, the image of the rupture of the vases, whose origin is the mysticism of Isaac Luria, figures the profound relationship between history and exile: “the day of creation marks the passage from the prevalence of divine fullness, of a space occupied by the unnamable, to the beginning of an era of chaos, identified with the emergence of the world, and with the world the emergence of history, the original disorder, of which the disintegration of the linguistic unity is part; out of this breaking apart of all things there emerges the need for translation, coinciding thus with the birth of history.”^[a();2]

Instead of a linear concept of history what Benjamin offers is the conception of a time saturated with “nows”, of a culture whose fragments reveal a harmonic time that translation strives to recover. On the other hand, however, translation is possible but it reveals the imperfection of a lacunate tissue, of a fabric filled with holes through which another world, a different reality, a small sample of the state of nature, might be envisioned. In order to speak of such world, one would naturally need a different language, the one created in translation.

Haroldo de Campos’^[a();3] speaks of poetic translation as creation, re-recreation or transcreation. Following the anthropophagic movement and drawing on Max Bense, Campos reminds us that being aesthetic information and aesthetic realization the same phenomenon, in the sense that the information conveyed by the work of art is the work of art itself, it is impossible to translate it. Aesthetic information is equal to its original codification. Works as Joyce’s, Faulkner’s, Rosa’s, Mallarmé’s and almost the total of poetry render visible the impossibility of translation: “Such impossibility itself engenders the corollary, also as a principle, of the re-creation of these texts”. ^[a();4] Thus for Campos the translation of creative texts is always synonymous of re-creation, or parallel, autonomous although reciprocal creation. The translation of a creative text supposes its disassembling in order to make it reappear in a strange language, a devilish enterprise which intends to “efface the origin, obliterate the original”^[a();5], as Susan Basnett has put it, a problematic assertion since it sends us either to translation as destruction and reconstruction or translation as reproducibility of a form in itself original and singular, one of its kind. Therefore translation studies cannot be developed apart from the issues of aesthetics and the philosophy of form; more specifically from the nature of the poiésis implicated in the act of translation, if originality is to be understood in the sense attributed to it by Giorgio Agamben – not only as uniqueness, difference from everything else, but as proximity regarding origin. The work of art is original because it maintains a particular relationship with its origin, its formal arché, from which it stems out and with which it maintains a relationship of permanent proximity, excluding the possibility of being reproduced.  ^[a();6]

As critical act, poetic translation supposes a choice submitted to a project of cultural activism; in Haroldo de Campos this project was very similar to Eliot and Pound’s cultural activism, with its own lineage of specific terms such as re-creation, transcreation, re-imagination, (in the case of the classical Chinese poetry) tranparadisação or transluminação (Seis Cantos do Paradiso de Dante) and transluciferação mefistofáustica – mefistofaustian transluciferation (Final Scenes of Goethe’s Second Faust). The translator, in his radical task, must avoid the mistake of being caught by the period of his own language, submitting it to the violent impulse of the foreign language.”^[a();7]

Lúcia Sá Rebello^[a();8] accounts  for the dynamics of translation studies in the 20th century as follows: ‘It is in the 80s that theoretical and critical analysis proliferate, coming from Canada, India, Brazil and Latin America, focusing cultural, social and ideological issues, specially those regarding center/periphery relationships.” Susan Bassnett, in her essay “The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies,”^[a();9] explains the advent of this critical issue in the cultural studies through Randall Johnson’s postulations, according to which the anthropophagic movement represents a new attitude in the relationship between the colony and hegemonic center. Imitation and influence are no longer possible since colonial representative intellectuals do not wish to imitate European culture but to devour it, taking advantage of its positive aspects and rejecting its negative ones.” Mr. Randall treats so literally the anthropophagi of the postcolonial countries that it would be comic if it weren’t, at least for us, tragic.

To the Campos Brothers the statute of translation is something quite diverse of the naiveté above manifested. It is something that takes place simultaneously in the scenario of the metropolis of the high modernism and in that of the big cities of not so developed countries, whose intellectuals were in permanent contact with European advancements in arts and aesthetics. This supposed alliance built a posteriori between cultural studies and concrete poetics results from an error in historical interpretation.

Since it is impossible to address the ample gamut of perspectives through which the theme of literary translation is approached nowadays, a theme that takes on the role of a great articulator for more theoretical and philosophical issues, we shall give voice to an author such as João Guimarães Rosa, who was always so directly involved with the problems of translating Grande Sertão: Veredas and his other books to several languages. Let’s begin with Rosa, then, for whom translation is convivium, a Latin word meaning to live with, to appreciate the closeness of someone else’s company, to experience someone else’s society. “To translate is to live with, to have society with”, is how he defined it. He also thought of translation as transplantation, an organic metaphor for translation, and for the work as well. To transplant is to plant in another place. And indeed Rosa maintained almost 10 years of uninterrupted correspondence with his translators Edoardo Bizarri, Italian, Harriet de Onís, American and Kurt Meyer-Clason, German. To Edoardo Bizarri, upon receiving the translated edition of Corpo di Ballo, Rosa reveals his emotion: “Faz três dias, que eu ainda não estava em poder de escrever a você, porque o vibrar era forte demais, eu me achando em ebulição, erupção, emoção – terremoto de alegria.” ^[a();10] When interviewed by Gunter Lorenz Rosa spoke of his reactionary, not revolutionary, language, since what he intended “was to make it return each day to its own origin, there where words are in the bowels of the soul”^[a();11]. Meyer-Clason convinced Rosa that he had found a metaphor in his German translation more convincing than the original one. “Of course I accept that, and in a new Brazilian edition I intend to adapt this passage to the version that Meyer-Clason found in German. To this I call cooperation, co-thought or co-thinking”, answered Rosa. We get a better glimpse of JGR’s attitude toward the translation of his works in words uttered upon the receiving of the proofs from Günther Lorenz’s article to the Humboldt: I had to seek refuge and pray, immediately, in defense of the necessary humbleness.^[a();12]

Let’s see what Meyer-Clason tells JGR when he completes his translation of GSV: “Riobaldo speaks the high German for several reasons. In Germany there is no Sertao (Deserted hinterland). There is no Northeast and we don’t know the speech of the hick. It would be a mistake to use whatever analogy or to try to translate, project, in a dialect of some rural region of Germany, the naive language, the playful rapture, the unmistakable mixture of familiarity and distrust, of melancholy and arbitrariness. . . Riobaldo speaks an artificial language, a freely invented idiom by the pen of this humble servant of yours. One thing, the most important, it shares with the original: the emotive pathos. ^[a();13]

The radicalism of Meyer-Clason’s endeavor leads us to believe that he took to the letter the most inflexible doctrines on the impossibility of translation, like Croce’s, for instance, to whom “it is not possible to reduce that which has already received aesthetic form into another form, aesthetic as well. In fact, every translation either impoverishes and spoils, or creates a new expression, throwing the former into a crucible where it melts with the personal impressions of the individual whom we call ‘translator’”. And we see this belief at work in Meyer-Clason’s “effacement” of “Grande Sertão: Veredas”, a modern Brazilian novel that many would consider never to have been translated at all, in spite of the author and the translator’s close convivium; an issue that doesn’t seem to have bothered Rosa at all, given his own statements about the silence pursued by his words in his works.

Considering that the readers should have a word on this subject, i. e. that they might want to listen to some of the wonderful sounds produced by masterpieces of the world literature before they vanish into darkness and muteness, we will now turn to more flexible ways of looking at the translation enterprise, such as Jorge Wanderley’s, who qualifies it as a process of endless and sustained negotiations. Let’s give way to his own words: “When we translate, we must resign ourselves to a feeling of amputation and to the hope that some future will allow us to go back to certain sectors – to certain translations of the same work if not to all of them. On the other hand, all translation is a coup de force, although the more successful the translation is the more it will deny it, so that the terse muscle doesn’t show in the soft movements of the dance. The act of translating a poem is something carried on against the intellectual impotence of conceiving the poem as untranslatable and in certain cases (as in translating Shakespeare) against the reverential fear in face of an author so canonized and mythical. Nevertheless, whoever the author was, he wrote with a pen, on a white sheet on top of a flat surface, just like the translator. It is by sticking to these thoughts that the translator must set out his work, confident that he has the means to succeed. He mustn’t, though, on the occasion, remind himself that the same elements are responsible for all the difficulties that he will find.”^[a();14]

Most of the 154 sonnets written by Shakespeare were unknown to the Brazilian public up to the time when Wanderley, himself a poet, translated the whole collection (1990). The sonnets, says the translator, are circumstantial verses, emerging from the social world where Shakespeare lived. In them we can see that attachment to milieu, to worldly matters, to local demands, and not infrequently to the desire to please his patrons, especially Henry of Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, are the keynotes. In face of Shakespeare’s genius, though, many of the poems surpass their conditions of origin, reaching out of their context to become transcendental, rising up, so to speak, to that constellation where only the finest specimens of art sparkle. Such is the case of sonnet XXX.^[a();15]

Being us all well aware of the difficulties implied in the translation of a poem let’s just comment some of the solutions created by the translation and its effects on content, noticing nevertheless that the Portuguese version, composed also in iambic pentameters, follows the original form in almost all levels, or at least in several of them. In verse one, for example, the translation sticks to the original except for the suppression of the word ‘sweet’, a wise decision in face of the collocation patterns of the Portuguese language and of the translator’s decision to curb the highly emotive tone of the original through compression and compactness. Another reason that the author gives for compaction is the natural expansiveness of expression in the Portuguese Language vis a vis the synthetic power of English.  The translation of ‘summon up’ for ‘chamo a mim’ in verse two seems the most simple and effective solution, since “call to myself” conveys briefly and energetically the meaning of the English phrasal verb. Lines 1 and 2 of the translation are almost as rich in alliterations in “s” as are the original. In 3 – ‘E porque há faltas ao meu chamamento’, for ‘I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought’, we observe that the alliteration which goes on in Shakespeare’s verse is substituted by “chamo” and “chamamento” in lines 3 and 4 of the translation. A literal translation of the 4º line would give us “suspiro a falta do muito que buscava”. Thus, we see that the translated verse lacks some of the meaning of the original, due to the necessity of keeping the unity of the poem. This loss of meaning will be compensated for in other verses. Nevertheless, the translator seems to have decided for a much sober diction than Shakespeare’s. The original ‘sigh’, for instance,  will be never reappear except very mildly in the statement “há faltas ao meu chamamento”, that could be read as some sort of complaint: my calls have not been answered. And verse 4 – and with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste – gains a rather compacted and simple translation, flowing naturally with the opposition old/new maintained but not the lamenting mood, which is suppressed for the sake of keeping the alternate rhyming scheme. Other compressions that are worth noting appear in verse 5 – then can I drown an eye, unused to flow – unused to flow brightly translated as raro umedecidos. Death’s dateless night being translated by ‘noite’, only, night as a sufficient metaphor for death, is another instance of the maneuvers destined to restrain Portuguese’s natural expansiveness and reach out a sharp, distinctive result. Indeed what we observe in the Portuguese version is that the translator’s procedures follow pretty much the poet’s own in this singular poem in which language seems appropriate for a court of law, more specifically to a manorial court, in which some negotiation is necessary to make disagreement between credits and debts in the balance sheet to be compensated for in the final sum. And indeed in the final couplet “all losses are restored and sorrows end”, a perda se restaura, a mágoa finda, we could almost say that the poet and the translator’s stances blend intimately and unobtrusively, rendering the translator’s attitude toward his art harmoniously and indirectly clarified.

Finally we arrive at a posture that we consider to stand at the opposite pole in relation to the one at our point of departure. Paulo Henriques Britto, poet and translator, has been reflecting on the theory and the practice of translating poetry in a series of articles. In “Translation and Creation”^[a();16]he calls into question several of the poststructuralist positions against the differentiation between “original” and “translation” and “author” and “translator”. This is how he summarizes the poststructuralist argument: a) the notion of an “original’ and an “author” presupposes the notion of a “subject”. This notion is in crisis and no more than an Enlightenment myth. Moreover structural linguistics has demonstrated that languages are not homologous systems, thus the homology between original and translation is unfeasible b) Last century’s literary theory has made it a matter beyond doubt that texts derive from other texts, reality itself being a maze of cross-references weaved by texts, which is another blow on the idea of an “original”. c) Texts have no other meaning than those produced by the readers, a notion that ends up effacing the difference between “author” and “reader”, “original” and “translation’, “author” and “translator”.

Britto’s counter- argument evolves as follows: “the poststructuralist position as summarized above runs into serious trouble when applied to translation studies (and, indeed, to most other fields) [. . .] My point here is that this position has had the merit of forcing all who are involved in the discussion of theoretical issues related to translation –even those who do not accept the poststructuralist argument – to reconsider a number of concepts that had been accepted unquestioningly for a long time.”^[a();17] The author then declares his intention of taking as his “working hypotheses the poststructuralist view that both original and translations are texts that derive from earlier texts and undertake a comparative analysis of the processes of writing an original poem and translating a poem, in order to arrive at the differences between the two”. Britto’s conclusion is that translating and writing are indeed completely different activities. But he hopes that the “use of a poststructuralist position as a point of departure will allow me to arrive at this conclusion through a careful and, I hope, illuminating comparison, which may bring out similarities and convergences between the two activities that had not come into attention before the emergence of poststructuralism”. The evidence utilized to dismantle the poststructuralist ‘hypothesis’ is the subjectivity of the author/translator – his own subjectivity – which according to him makes ‘things much easier’. It seems that on Britto’s terrain one is forced to move too swiftly and too randomly from one plane to another – epistemological, abstractional, cognitive, and experimental – to be allowed to assess the validity of his conclusions, notwithstanding the excellence of his own creative work. Just to speak of one of his equivocal moves, he seems, when he takes his own creative processes as evidence, to advocate the unity and the uncontroversial authority of the self, whose character of noumenon has since long banished it from the collection of ‘things’ to be known on earth, much less to be encompassed by any cognitive attempt. Nevertheless, Britto guarantees the detachment of his position when he warns the reader that more than one conclusion to his analysis is possible – a poststructuralist affirmation in itself indeed. The poststructuralist might accept some of his empirical findings but remain impassive in face of their quantitative emphasis. The more traditional reader might agree with him, acknowledging that the difference in quantity is big enough to affect quality. The distinction between creative writing and translation is such that “translation (can be considered) a specific kind of writing characterized by the existence of a privileged source text that deserves the special name of ‘original’.”^[a();18] But then he will step back to the opposite stance once more, trusting that this latter, ‘more traditional’ reader will notice similarities between writing and translating not yet perceived. Considering that the author’s vision remains somewhat undecided and suspended we will turn now to his account of the concrete experience of his translating operations, where he gives us concrete material for observation. The poem he translates is ‘Sunday Morning’, by Wallace Stevens, of which the first stanza is the object of analysis:

We will not delve into all the details of the process of translation – Britto explains how three versions of it were constructed, deconstructed and fixed in its final form within a time span of 5 years – save to note that at each erasure and change of words a pendular, oscillatory movement has been registered. For instance, his original choice for the word peignoir had been quimono, changed subsequently to penhoar in the first draft; then on the second draft he crosses out penhoar and goes back to quimono among a few other substitutions. Some lines were “heavily rewritten again and again, a sign of hesitation and dissatisfaction with the solutions found”^[a();19]. Going back to the poem five years later once again he replaced quimono with penhoar.

What seems to be the point of these observations? To the author they reveal a binary pattern similar to a sort of oscillatory or pendular movement, informing the construction of a second text – the translation, which at times brings translation and original close to one another while at other times it breaks them apart. But in the creation of a poem – Britto speaks of both processes, presenting as evidence his notes on the writing of Pessoana, a poem which draws on Fernando Pessoa’s Autopsicografia as its first source and then on Sá de Miranda’s Cantiga VII as its second source – things are somewhat different:  “In both cases there are moments of autonomization and of approximation, but whereas in translation the two movements are more or less balanced, in the case of a nontranslation – a text created rather than translated – autonomization clearly predominates.”^[a();20]

The oscillatory movement of his own mind that Britto describes sends us immediately to the reflective processes of self-cognition, in which the self pursues a thorough, totalizing view of itself without ever being able to attain it. So the claim to his own subjectivity as guarantor of his findings  What leads us to doubt whether he was or could possibly be able to determine what really lies at the bottom of his own creative activity, either as a poet or a translator. His findings are limited to the description of a sort of mechanical pattern of the mind, which are the base of all binary opposition, either in science, philosophy or language itself. As to the latter, we all know how words display themselves on a sheet of paper, intercalated by empty zones, blank spaces, which could be read as the opposition of presence and absence, of sound and silence, which some have attributed to the acting out of difference.^[a();21] There is no circumventing, thus, philosophical issues that preside at the approach to translation as creative activity, or that allow for an in-depth insight on the nature of original works. As to the workings of mind in their origins, more specifically of the imagination, no matter how chartered this territory has been, it has always escaped cognitive apprehension. What has been taken by the author as the process in its origin has always already been the product, the effect of the labors of his imaginative effort.  Thus, matters concerning translation as creative activity must still be addressed in connection with concepts such as mimesis, poiésis, origin, original, language, imagination, reason and aesthetics, within the shared margins of literature and philosophy. Britto considers that there is a certain mismatch between Augusto de Campo’s theoretical thought relating poetry and his practice as a translator of poetry. While in theory the passion that stirs him is poetic morphology and syntax – he concentrates on the signifier rather than on the signified – as a translator he gives equal attention to all levels of the language: “What Augusto de Campos does to Hopkins’ sonnet may be called transcreation, transhopkinsation or whatever one wishes to call it; but it is nothing more – and nothing less – than a splendid translation.”^[a();22]

We could use the same artifice to come to a similar conclusion referring Britto’s theoretical insights and his practice of poetry translation. “In theory” he professes that translating poetry is a less creative activity than the writing of poetry. But what comes out of his practice fully denies it. We just have to take a look at his translation into Portuguese of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To Night.”

Notas: