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ABSTRACT
The article provides a brief overview of Georg Rudolf Lind’s ample activity as a translator of Pessoa, analysing his scarce pronouncements on the issue of Pessoa translation and focusing in particular on his version of Campos’ ‘Tabacaria’, which is contrasted with Paul Celan’s translation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. In the year of publication, the translation was selected as ‘best book of the year’ at the Frankfurt Book Fair. As was to happen with other translations of Pessoa by Lind, it was soon reprinted in the pocketbook series of the influential Fischer publishing house, in 1987, selling a large number of copies ˗ my own reprint of this edition, with the publication date 1998, carries the mention of belonging to the series from the 95th to the 99th thousand. For an in-depth study of this translation, see Hüsgen (Citation2005).
2. I was shocked when, in a lengthy conversation with one of the foremost experts on German and Austrian modernism held in 1999 in Vienna, I found out that the name Pessoa was no more than a vague reference to my interlocutor, who readily admitted to not having read, up to that moment, a single line by the Portuguese poet. It is indicative of the rather precarious nature of Pessoa’s reception in the German-speaking countries that, as a glance to book catalogues shows, most published titles are currently out of print.
3. In this regard, see Hansert (Citation2002). In a recent article, Steffen Dix provides an up-to-date, fairly exhaustive, albeit succinct, overview (Dix Citation2019).
4. Lind (Citation1970) and Lind (Citation1981) bring together the main studies on Pessoa by Lind. The edition of Pessoa’s Páginas íntimas e de auto-interpretação (Pessoa Citation1966) and Páginas de estética e de teoria e crítica literárias (Pessoa Citation1967), both prepared together with Jacinto do Prado Coelho, represented a major contribution to scholarship on Pessoa by making available a large selection of hitherto unpublished fragments and essays. They were to provide an essential foundation for important developments in Pessoa studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and well beyond. Despite having been superseded by more recent editorial work, based on a more rigorous research basis than was possible in Lind’s time, their historical significance is undisputed. In 1965, also together with Jacinto do Prado Coelho, Lind had additionally made available the collection Quadras ao gosto popular (Pessoa Citation1965).
5. Where not otherwise specified, all translations are mine.
6. On Celan’s translations, see Delille (Citation1996); Hansert (Citation2002); Nunes 2002; Barroso, Citationn.d.; Dix (Citation2019). Judging from Celan’s translations, Roditi must have had considerable proficiency in the Portuguese language. Indeed, what could be named a translation error in the strict sense is extremely rare. A case in point is Caeiro’s line, in ‘Sou um guardador de rebanhos’, ‘E comer um fruto é saber-lhe o sentido’. Celan’s version, ‘Früchte essen: wissen um ihren Geschmack’, totally misses the point, since ‘Geschmack’ simply means ‘flavour’.
7. Writing in 2002, Ângela Maria Pereira Nunes states that ‘Celan’s Pessoa translations found little resonance at the time and have, in fact, fallen into oblivion’ (Nunes/Pereira Citation2002, 86). George Monteiro speculates, however, that Celan’s translations may have had ‘the unexpected, belated effect of reintroducing Pessoa to the English in the late 60s’, since Michael Hamburger, the earliest Celan translator into English, who was also to play a relevant role in introducing Pessoa to an English-reading audience, may well have earned his first acquaintance with the Portuguese poet through those translations (Monteiro Citation1998, 97).
8. Enzensberger, in Lind’s own recollection, had been ‘one of the first and more enthusiastic readers of the Ode’, for which the translator, notwithstanding repeated efforts, had until then been unable to find a publisher (‘Traduzindo Pessoa’ 155).
9. This is highlighted by Steffen Dix, who pertinently reminds us that the presence in Enzenberger’s anthology integrates Pessoa’s poems into ‘a representative ensemble of Western literature’ (Dix 152).
10. Four final volumes published posthumously carry the names of associated translators: Die Stunde des Teufels und andere seltsame Geschichten (1995, together with Josefina Lind and Frank Henseleit-Lucke); Briefe an die Braut (1995, together with Josefina Lind); 144 Vierzeiler (1995, together with Josefina Lind); Herostrat. Die ästhetische Diskussion I (1997, together with Josefina Lind and Frank Henseleit-Lucke).
11. In his interpretation of ‘Autopsicografia’, which includes a brief comparison between three German translations of the poem (by Lind, Celan and Friedrich Irmen), Rainer Hess clearly favours Celan’s translation, which, by forsaking the rhyme, in his view is able to capture the nuances of the original in a more convincing way (Hess Citation1994, 177)
12. Steffen Dix echoes not just Lind’s opinion, but a current consensus, when he writes that ‘the readers of the translations did not just read seven poems by Pessoa, Caeiro, Campos and Reis, they read – at the same time and unmistakably – also Paul Celan.’ (152) This is a statement concerning the visibility of the translator that any self-conscious translator, let alone someone like Celan, will readily accept, not as a criticism, but as a compliment. In any case, as I intend to show briefly below, Celan’s translations do very much convey the presence of Pessoa and his heteronyms.
13. For a discussion of this notion, see Venuti (Citation1995).
14. In practice, Lind consistently uses rhyme in his versions of Pessoa’s rhymed poetry – with the single major exception, as far as I can see, of his translation of the English sonnets (but not with his fine rendition of Antinous).
15. This is why the starting point of every reflection on translation has to be the very notion of untranslatability. On this notion, see e.g. Large et al. (Citation2018).
16. I am well aware of the fact that this category is included in contemporary typologies of translation (see e.g. Vinay/Darbelnet Citation1995, 33ff). My point is that it is a category not to be taken … literally.
17. Lind refers to Agustina as belonging to that type of authors who ‘throw out their creations in such an elementary manner as a volcano throws out its magma’ (60); under this light, she is, in his eyes, clearly an antipode to Pessoa’s cerebral, reflexive method of writing. Thus, in Agustina’s case – but not in Pessoa’s -, the translator has every right to edit ‘enigmatic reflections […] which perhaps have no meaning at all’ (69).
18. In his translation of the Book of Disquiet, however, Lind is happy to apply more liberal criteria. In his valuable analysis of this translation, Thomas Hüsgen comes to the conclusion that several problems in the text arise from the translator’s declared intent of providing the German reader with a ‘readable’ text. In this case, such an intent is already apparent in the editorial decisions: well aware, as one of the most knowledgeable Pessoa experts at the time, of the essentially fragmentary, sometimes repetitive, experimental nature of the text, he nevertheless endeavours to present the German reader with a coherent ‘book’ through a process of selecting and regrouping the fragments to be included. It is tempting to speculate about whether the success of Das Buch der Unruhe would have been the same if the editorial decisions had been different.
19. ‘The main difference between creative and mechanical translators is that en route from the original to the translation creative translators are able to imagine the realities they are expressing, reaching beyond the text to identify the characters, situations and ideas that lie behind it, whereas non-creative translators merely perceive the text mechanically and merely translate the words.’ (Levý Citation2011, 34).
20. I quote Celan’s translation from the 1983 reprint in the Gesammelte Werke.
21. Incidentally, the translation of ‘Adeus, ó Esteves’ mit ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Stefan’ is, regardless of the question of the name, also not accurate, since the function of ‘adeus’ in this context, as so often in Portuguese, is more to greet and to call attention to the presence of the speaker than to say goodbye. Celan translates ‘Wiedersehen, Esteves’, also not quite accurately, but, through the elision of the preposition, providing also in this instance the colloquial tone that is so often missing in Lind’s version.
22. In this case, Celan’s version is also not accurate: ‘Dann verschwindet auch das Schild und meine Verse desgleichen.’ (591) Nonetheless, the verb ‘verschwinden’, meaning ‘to disappear’, is undoubtedly to be preferred to Lind’s solution.
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António Sousa Ribeiro
António Sousa Ribeiro is emeritus professor of German Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. He is currently the director of the Centre for Social Studies of the same university. He has published widely on several topics in Austrian and German Studies, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Holocaust Studies. He is also active as a literary translator (Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Elfriede Jelinek, Robert Musil, among others).