segunda-feira, 11 de janeiro de 2016

Elizabeth Bishop and Analysis of her translation of "Morte e Vida Severina" by João Cabral de Melo Neto

Brief Biography of Elizabeth Bishop



Influences on Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry

            The major literary movements that influenced the way Bishop wrote and presented her poetry are the: Modernism, Baroque, Romanticism, Imagism, Surrealism and Symbolism. Modernism has a strong impact mostly when it concerns what is said to be modern themes, shown in her poem “Roosters”, which implies “considerations of the causes and effects of war […] and modern meditations on guilt [and] spiritual poverty” (Travisano, 1988: 73). Some critics assert that Bishop’s “attachment to nature and her experiments with the powers and limits of imagination” (Travisano, 1988: 11) is in fact a response to the romantic tradition. Nevertheless, Bishop managed to incorporate some aspects of the aesthetic of surrealism in her style, especially her fascination with dreamlike states (Travisano, 1988: 42). It would be a “surrealism of everyday life”, that is, “a casual, consciously controlled revision of surrealism based on freshly seeing the unlikely features of ordinary things” (Travisano, 1988: 45). Elements from Imagism can be found in Bishop’s dramatization of the act of seeing, extending the “imagism in time by melding a succession of related images” (Travisano, 1988: 72). Symbolism is also present, but mostly because of her different approach to the doctrine of correspondences of Baudelaire, “she draws her symbols back towards rigorously observed natural fact” (Travisano, 1988: 107). Lastly, the movement with which she identified herself, perhaps, the most is the Baroque. Mainly because of Elizabeth’s interest in the twists and turns of perception, and “the element of surprise, of unlooked for discovery” (Travisano, 1988: 12), which is characteristic of Baroque. Besides, Bishop considered that the aim of poetry was “to present the mind thinking, [which] allowed her to capture transient moments in all their unlikeliness and bring them back alive” (Travisano, 1988: 57).
To sum up the influences on her poetry according to Travisano:
But neither term, classic or romantic, adequately defines her. Her mature work is really postneoclassical, postromantic, postsymbolist, and even postsurrealist in that she derives much from each of these movements – a devotion to craft, a concern for nature, a superiority to rhetoric, an alertness to the promptings of the unconscious – but she is really of none of them. (…) She sees the limitations of each approach with cool detachment, and that she has deliberately chosen her own path. If there is one artistic movement to which she felt closest, it is an older one – the baroque. (...) The element of surprise, of unlooked for discovery, was the quality Bishop most prized in baroque art. (Travisano, 1988: 11-12)

Poetic Themes

            In the words of Thomas Travisano in Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development concerning both the influences on her poetry and the underlying themes:
The three major phases of Bishop’s career imply an evolving response to the important poetic movement of her time. Her early phase shows her as a reluctant master of the symbolist’s private world, a world that renounces history for the ambiguous pleasures of enclosure. Her middle phase reflected years of travel and observation, through which isolation might be at least temporarily bridged. It “extends the Imagist instant”, combining the precision and conciseness of imagism with a liberating dimension of temporal development. Her last phase reverses the earliest, engaging with personal and private history. The yearning for enclosure is still powerful, but it is controlled by a calm and expansive vision. (Travisano, 1988: 7)

            Many of the themes present in Bishop’s poetry are “auto-biographical”. The value she cherished the most was her love of accuracy (Millier, 1993: 80), even in her own life she always strove for perfection, which is perhaps one of the reasons why she did not write many poems, but also the reason why her poetry was so widely respected. Her childhood interest for maps established her themes of history and geography that feature in some of her most famous poems such as in “Questions of Travel” and also in the titles of her books. The loss she experienced most vividly when she was a child, but also during her adult life culminated in her celebrated poem “One Art”. A sense of dividedness and isolation might have arisen from an inability to find a real physical home, as well as a necessity to escape civilization and finding comfort in nature (Travisano, 1988: 21), as in “Crusoe in England”. Some themes such as the passage of time, the mutability of things and the manipulation of perspective are hard to separate from one another due to their convergence in Bishop’s poems, such as is “In the Waiting Room” and “Paris, 7 A.M.”.


Brazil

            Elizabeth Bishop struggled with her feelings towards Brazil, one of the places that was truly her home, and its people. On the one hand, she felt a strong sense of belonging in Brazil and was utterly fascinated by its beauty, nature and easiness with which she could be herself and more in touch with her past experiences (Britto, 1999: 10). On the other hand, she refused to learn the native language (Britto, 1999: 41) and repudiated the corruption intrinsic to the politics in the country (Britto, 1999:25). Bishop’s feeling towards the primitivism of Brazil represents this dilemma (Britto, 1999: 22). Although she admired how much closer to nature the people and herself felt there, she also loathed the sense that Brazilians refused to learn new ways and the importance they gave to money (Britto, 1999: 24).
            Poets were deeply admired in Brazil, perhaps excessively so. Bishop believed that Brazil was culturally poor and the intellectuals were overly provincial (Britto, 1999: 17). Moreover, Elizabeth was highly critical of the Brazilian literature as is stated by Paulo Henriques Britto in Poemas do Brasil: “De outra feita, comenta que “de modo geral os livros brasileiros são brochuras muito mal impressas em papel de péssima qualidade, com reproduções execráveis […] são pequenos e escritos sem grande cuidado”. Os poetas são “ruins […] em sua maioria”.” (Britto, 1999: 25).
            Nevertheless, Bishop did admire and acclaim some works of Brazilian writers, such as Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector and Helena Morley (Alice Brant), whose book Minha Vida de Menina, Elizabeth translated into English due to a strong emotional identification with its themes of family, affection and childhood (Britto, 1999: 18).
As far as Brazilian poets are concern, Britto also affirms that:
Em relação à poesia de Manuel Bandeira, sempre fez restrições – numa carta comenta que ele é "muito acomodado”. (…) Mais de uma vez a poeta afirmou sua predileção por Drummond, de quem traduziu vários poemas: “Gosto de Drummond […] mais que de Bandeira, eu acho” (…) Também manifesta admiração por Cabral – “Ele é o único de quem eu realmente gosto muito”. Traduz trechos de Morte e Vida Severina numa revista de poesia norte-americana, e, como observa Regina Przybycien, um ano depois publica “The burglar of Babylon”, um poema em forma de balada popular que sem dúvida revela o impacto da obra de Cabral sobre ela. (Britto, 1999: 17)

Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s translation of “Morte e Vida Severina” by João Cabral de Melo Neto

            “Morte e Vida Severina” is a famous poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto and it deals essentially with the problems of the Brazilian underclass (Millier, 1993: 338) and the theme of travel to change and improve one’s life. The first parts of the poem may give the reader a depressing sense of hopelessness, due to the description of the lives of so many that are toiled with work, who have nothing that can be said to be their own, except the place where they will eventually be buried. The statement that only work related to death is valued and wanted only adds to the already grim misery and despair, and consequently leads to the poetic subject’s belief that only death can save him from such a dreadful future. It is then that José, the man with whom the poetic subject is talking, receives the news that his son has just come to life. The end of the poem represents the hope of life and the feeling of unity that people who have close to nothing which is material, can have so much to give and share emotionally with each other.
            Before I begin my analysis on this translation, I believe it is worth mentioning that translation always implies loss of some kind. It may not be possible to maintain both meaning and form at all times from the ST (source text) into the TT (target text). Furthermore, translation from one language to another, in this case from Brazilian Portuguese to American English involves adaptation of the system and structure of the SL (source language) to the TL (target language). Apart from this obligatory changes, Bishop remained as faithful as she could to the ST (considering that her knowledge of Portuguese was faulty), and the translation she made is quite literal. 

            The analysis will include the first thirty-six lines of the second part of The Death and Life of a Severino.

 

            In these first lines we can see a few small differences, such as the addition of the subject “He” in the first line, because the subject must be explicit in the sentence in the TL, but can be omitted in the SL. The change from gritos (substantive) to “crying” (verb) is an optional transposition, with an addition of meaning because “crying” implies a kind of despair that is not necessarily inherent to the word gritos. An absence of the interjection Ó is present in the TT. In the fourth line, there is an attempt to translate a way of speaking which is characteristic of the Brazilian language. There is also a more obvious alteration of the form of the poem, from three lines in the ST to four lines in the TT, which may be explained by the occurrence of a compensation to make the verses of the poem regular.


            One of the most striking changes in these verses is the use of the conjugation of some verbs, such as estais, dizei and sabeis (the latter in the following slide), which denote a formal tone in the SL, which is not maintained in the TL because it would make it exceedingly hard to do so and it would be, perhaps, unnecessary. Consequently, in the fourth line of the first verse, the original sentence implies an order, in opposition to the TT, which the adding of the adverb “kindly” and the change of meaning in the translation from dizei to “inform”, is suggestive of a request.
            In the second verse presented here there is an optional transposition with the change of defunto (de nada) to “defunct (nobody)”, a conversion of a substantive to an adjective. Furthermore, there is an alteration in the last verse from morada to “resting place”, which changes the meaning implied in the verse, because morada implies the owning of a property, which is important because it is suggested later in the poem that the place where the people of the lower classes are buried is the only “property” they will ever have.


            There is little to be said about these two verses except for three modifications that are made in the TT. The first one is the omission of the word E in the TT, which represents a scheme change from a repetition in the ST to its absence in the TT, because that word in the beginning will be present in some of the following verses of the ST. The second change represents and optional transposition from a verb in the ST chamar to a substantive in the TT “name”. Lastly, there is a generalization from the superordinate Lavrador to the hyponym “Farmer”, which is more specific, but I consider that the change was made in order to maintain the resonance of the choice of words (Lavrador/ lavra → Farmer/farming).


            I consider that there is an unnecessary expansion in the last two lines of the first verse of the TT due to the addition of the words “out”, “on” and “long”, which add nothing to the meaning of the poem. In the second verse the choice to translate onde to “from”, instead of the more literal translation to “where”, is requested by the choice to translate the verb começar to “start” in the previous verse, which is not a meaningful alteration because it does not change the meaning of the verses. A more significant change is the translation of the word Caatinga to “driest of lands” which presents a generalization, since Caatinga is a plant which only grows where the land is extremely dry, hence the choice of translation. Also because it could be quite difficult for an American reader to understand that Caatinga is a plant.


            These last two verses are the most problematic ones so far. In the first verse there is an obvious change of emphasis. Whereas in the ST the emphasis is in the word morte (death) as subject, and in the TT the emphasis is in the word “he” as subject. This poses an evident alteration to the meaning of the poem. In a poem where the place that is being described is so filled with death, in the ST there is an explicit meaning that even death itself dies in such a place. That powerful, yet ominous, meaning is utterly lost in translation, as well as the play with the words morte, morrida e matada. Although the emphasis is maintained in the word “death” as subject in the second verse, the word play and the rhyme of the words morrida, matada e emboscada is not retrieved.
            All in all, I consider that Bishop’s translation is quite literal and faithful to the original. Apart from some aspects, such as the necessary alteration of the order of the elements in the sentence in the translation, changes have not been excessively made. There was an attempt to maintain both form and meaning, but it was not always successful, such as in the last two verses, which is the most obvious example. Perhaps the lack of knowledge of Portuguese had a negative impact on the most difficult parts of Bishop’s translation. However, it is still a surprisingly successful effort to translate a language that is known to be complicated to learn. 

Bibliography

· Bishop, E., & Britto, P. (1999). Poemas do Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
· Bishop, E., & Giroux, R. (1994). One art. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
· Millier, B. (1993). Elizabeth Bishop: Life and Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press.
· Travisano, T. (1988). Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (2nd ed.). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

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