‘A rhythm of another speech’. Pessoa’s theory and practice of poetry translation

ABSTRACT

Fernando Pessoa devoted part of his prolific creative life to the practice of literary translation, mostly from his native Portuguese and English. He also wrote about this craft, as loose posthumous unfinished essays and scattered notes in his archive attest. Reading this material closely alongside a metrical analysis of selected published and unpublished poetry translations, we aim to: (1) understand the extent to which his thoughts on literary translation align with his poetry translation practice, primarily defined by his approach to poetic rhythm; (2) revisit some key ideas proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Walter Benjamin on translation, as well as Plato's concept of anamnesis, all of which, arguably, resonate with Pessoa’s poetry translation theory and practice. The article also includes critical transcriptions of unpublished material from Pessoa’s Archives held at the National Library of Portugal (Pessoa’s Papers) and the Fernando Pessoa House (Pessoa’s Private Library), both located in Lisbon.

KEYWORDS:

• Fernando Pessoa
• translation theory
• poetry
• poetic rhythm
• archive
• anamnesis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. (Archive 3, 14²–67 ^r). Unpublished. Datable to August 1921. This passage is part of a 5-page document titled ‘O Imperio | O Conflicto Linguistico do Futuro Maior’) [The Empire | The Linguistic Conflict of the Great Future] (Archive 3, 14²–64 ^r to 14²–68 ^r). The majority of the Pessoa autographs are held at the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal/Espólio 3 [National Library of Portugal/Archive 3], located in Lisbon. Words underlined by Pessoa are reproduced in italics. The translation of this passage into English is our own. The same applies to all translations when not indicated otherwise.

2. Pessoa lived in Durban, South Africa, from February 1896 to August 1905. In April 1899, he entered Durban High School, Form II-B; he was promoted to Form II-A in June of the same year. In August 1901, he returned to Portugal where he remained until September of the following year, when he embarked once again for Durban. He completed his high school studies (Form VI) in December 1904. For information regarding his British education see Monteiro’s ‘Works and Days’ in From Lisbon to the World. Fernando Pessoa’s Enduring Literary Presence (2018: 1–13; especially 1–3) and Hubert D. Jennings’ Fernando Pessoa, The Poet with Many Faces, edited by Carlos Pittella (2019).

3. Books still extant in his private library. The bulk of this library is found at the Casa Fernando Pessoa [Fernando Pessoa House]. Jerónimo Pizarro, Antonio Cardiello, and Patricio Ferrari co-directed the digitisation of Fernando Pessoa’s Private Library, available on-line since October 2010: http://bibliotecaparticular.casafernandopessoa.pt/index/index.htm. The paper publication of A Biblioteca Particular de Fernando Pessoa (2010), which supplements the site, gathers in one volume most of the books, magazines, and newspapers that were in Pessoa’s possession at the time of his death, on 30 November 1935.

4. For Pessoa’s English and French poetry, see, respectively, Pessoa (1993, Pessoa 1997, 1999) and Pessoa (2014). For a biographical description of Pessoa’s heteronyms as well as the other fictitious authors he created between 1901 and 1929, see Eu Sou Uma Antologia (Pessoa 2013). Pessoa decided to remove the circumflex accent from his surname (Pessôa > Pessoa) in September 1916.

5. Pessoa wrote: ‘The only interest in translations is when they are difficult, that is to say, either from one language into a widely different one, or from a very complicated poem though into a closely allied language. There is no fun in translating between, say, Spanish and Portuguese’ (Archive 3, 14¹–99 ^r; Pessoa, 1993: 220). In 1911, Pessoa was paid to translate poems by Garcilaso de la Vega, Luis de Góngora, and Francisco de Quevedo, as well as two Uruguayan authors from Montevideo, Ramón de Santiago and Alejandro Magariños Cervantes (Pessoa, Mensagem e outros poemas publicados em vida, 2018: 190–202 and 212–217). For the poetry translations of Anglophone authors (including selected texts from The Greek Anthology in the translation by W.R. Paton) published during his lifetime, also see Pessoa (2018); for the prose translations he managed to publish, see Monteiro (2018: 5). The earliest known translation from English to Portuguese undertaken by Pessoa in full is that of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’ in 1902 (cf. Pessoa 2009, 110–111).

6. For Pessoa’s auto-translations as well as his transcreations (i.e. works he began in one language and eventually translated into another, thereby transforming the original), see Fischer (2012). For the partial translation of poem 34 from Caeiro’s The Keeper of Sheep, see Pessoa (2016: 311); for partial translations of Campos’s ‘Maritime Ode’ and ‘Opiary,’ see Pessoa (1993: 212–17). The Portuguese originals are critically included in Pessoa (2014).

7. Throughout his life Fernando Pessoa composed verse in three languages where stress – a prosodic feature with a rhythmic distribution – begins at a different level of the prosodic hierarchy (English [foot-based], Portuguese [prosodic word-based], and French [phrase-based]). This prosodic characteristic enabled Pessoa to regulate poetic rhythm differently according to each language. Ferrari (2012) argues that poetic metre and poetic rhythm played an important role in the shaping of Pessoa’s and the heteronyms’ literary styles, including the major fictitious authors he created before 1914, viz., Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search. What is more, he contends that selected literary models were adapted not only in terms of themes and diction, but also through metrics.

8. Olisipo was a commercial agency and publishing house that Pessoa founded in 1921. For its publications (1921–1923), see Monteiro (2018: 7). For Pessoa’s description of and a full list of works projected for Olisipo, which included ten plays by Shakespeare, major works by Poe, Robert Browning, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, Shelley, Keats, as well as minor English Restoration poets (e.g. Sir Charles Sedley, Suckling, and Lovelace) and late Victorian poets (O’Shaughnessy, Dowson, and Lionel Johnson, among others), see Ferreira (1986: 159–62). See, also, the editorial plan conceived by Pessoa in Eu Sou Uma Antologia (Pessoa 2013, 575–76). At the back of the facsimiled image (14²–67 ^v), the text continues: “Dos philosophos muitos ficarão apenas em resumo alheio; como muitos poetas e pensadores apenas em extractos e anthologias.//Este plano excusa de ser secreto, porque depende para seu exito do apparecimento de um grande genio. Podem tental-o, na sua parte secundaria, os traductores, os 2 paizes imperiaes da Europa – a Hespanha e a Inglaterra. [Among the philosophers, many of them will remain in other people’s summaries; like many poets and thinkers who will merely make it to excerpts and anthologies.//This plan does not have to be a secret because its success depends on the coming of a great genius. In its subplot, translators, the 2 imperial countries of Europe – Spain and England – could try it.]

9. Phonic rhythm: the repetition of phonological events such as syllables, feet (with their contrast of stressed and unstressed syllables in English), words (with their contrast of stressed and unstressed syllables in Portuguese), or phrases (with their contrast of phrasal stress in English, Portuguese, and French).

10. Concerning this comparison, Vale de Gato argues that ‘unlike Poe, the theme of Pessoa’s sentence is not music but poetry, and [that] this is telling of a modernist priority of concept over expression and emotion’ (2010: 124). We don’t share this opinion and rather see a maximising of music’s value over the expression of a concept. Pessoa’s thought seems, by the way, to follow more closely Schopenhauer’s comparison between music and other arts, as expressed in ‘The World as Will and Representation’: ‘other arts all objectify the will only indirectly, i.e. by means of ideas. […] Music, which bypasses ideas, […] is far more powerful and [its effect] penetrates far more deeply than that of the other arts’ (Schopenhauer 1994, 67). It is known that Pessoa read Schopenhauer while still a student at the Curso Superior de Letras during his first year in Lisbon: notebooks from 1906 record the reading of ‘Essay on the Freedom of Will’ in French translation and, some months later, the English title ‘The World as Will and Idea’ is mentioned (Pessoa 2009, 264) although, according to another record in the same notebook, it was read in French translation (2009: 273). Only Essay on the Freedom of Will is extant in Pessoa’s private library (Fernando Pessoa House, 1–135). Pessoa’s first mention of the German philosopher occurs in an early note, under the title ‘Notes on Characters,’ next to Edgar Allen Poe’s name (2009: 199). These two names reappear together in a posthumous fragment by Pessoa (14D-45 and 46 ^r) titled ‘Poe,’ where the auditory sensibility of both is put in relation: ‘Poe’s sensibility to music and his perpetual dwelling on the rhythmic side of poetry’ and Schopenhauer´s ‘excessive susceptibility to noises’ (Pessoa 2013, 218). It doesn’t seem farfetched though that, when writing his fragment on poetry compared to music, Pessoa had in mind both Poe’s and Schopenhauer’s takes on this Romantic version of the debate known in the Italian Renaissance as paragone delle arti [comparison of the arts]. For further reading concerning Schopenhauer’s influence on Pessoa, see Antonio Cardiello’s PhD dissertation ‘Vivem em nós inúmeros’: filosofias em Fernando Pessoa (2012: 72–88).

11. This metrical line consists of seven feet, the first four being most commonly dactyls or, alternatively, spondees, and the last three being trochees; the seventh foot may also be a spondee. In Pessoa’s copy of The Revised Latin Primer (cf. Kennedy 1898, 207) we find his attempt to write Portuguese poetry following the exact number of syllables stipulated for the metres that make up the Sapphic (Horace’s Odes, Book I, 2, ll. 5–8) and the Alcaic stanzas (Horace’s Odes, Book III, 4, ll. 61–64), respectively (cf. Ferrari 2012, 184–187).

12. Regarding Pessoa’s unfinished ‘Treatise of Prosody and Poetics’ and his quantitative Portuguese verse attempt left in his copy of Kennedy, see Ferrari (2012: 176–187 and 357–360).

13. For a more detailed metrical analysis of the Quental translations, see Ferrari (2012: 150–159).

14. The metre (or verse design) is an abstraction that consists of a template comprising sub-units that we now call positions and a set of rules or constraints (correspondence rules, also known as realisation constraints) for crafting verse instances. Correspondence rules determine the quantity (e.g. in syllable-based metres there is a maximum size of one syllable per position in the line [except for the last]) and the quality (e.g. except for the first position in an English iambic pentameter, a strong syllable of a polysyllabic word is constrained from occupying weak positions) (Duffell 2000: 286, n. 3 and 2008: 13).

15. Regarding syllabic ambiguities in English poetry, see Duffell (2008: 169).

16. The bracketing condition (Kiparsky 1977, 201–205) is another permissible mismatch within parametric theory and accounts for words (whose stress pattern does not match the template) that correspond with foot boundaries.

17. See, for instance, the English poem ‘Sweet is it and simple’ (Archive 49A¹-58; Ferrari 2012, 157).

18. According to parametric theory, the rendering of lines 2 and 13 is not sound; although the rendering of line 11 is metrical: it is an iambic tetrameter. The translation of lines 3 and 17 was left incomplete (cf. Annexe III).

19. Translated by Monteiro (2000: 118-19).

20. Pessoa did not employ the term ‘heteronimia’ [heteronymy]. He explained the difference between ‘duas categorias de obras’, i.e. ‘orthónymas’ and ‘heterónymas’ in his ‘Tábua bibliográfica’ (December 1928: 10). For a detailed account of these coinages, see Pizarro (2018: 63–84).

21. In Bothe (2017: 244), resemblances between Benjamin’s and Pessoa’s ideas on language and translation are also referred to and linked back to Hofmannsthal’s famous ‘Lord Chandos Letter.’

22. ‘The Task of the Translator’ originally appeared in English in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn; ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1968), pp. 69–82.

23. According to a reading list in one of Pessoa’s notebooks, he read Plato in June – November 1906 (Pessoa 2009, 219–220).

24. See note 10.

25. In his prologue to the Olisipo Project, choosing the extreme example of Shakespeare – an author, as Pessoa ironically mentions, (un)faithfully married to his language –, he admits that the British bard can be understood by a non-native speaker as long as he is ‘inteiramente penetrado do espirito da obra shakespeariana’ [fully imbued by the spirit of Shakespeare’s works] (Pessoa 1986).

26. This is not the only moment in Pessoa’s work where Plato’s idealism is severely questioned: António Mora, for instance, asserts that ‘a ideia de perfeição não é, como Platão, grego decadente, julgava, uma ideia vinda do ideal; a ideia de perfeição nasce da contemplação das coisas, da Matéria, e da perfeição que a Natureza põe nos seres que produz, em que cada órgão, tecido, parte ou elemento existe para o Todo a que pertence, em relação ao todo a que pertence, pelo Todo a que pertence. Assim deve ser a obra de arte. O passo discutido de Aristóteles, de que a obra de arte é comparável a um animal, deve sem dúvida ter este sentido.’ [The idea of perfection is not, as Plato, a decadent Greek, thought, an idea coming from the ideal; the idea of perfection is born of the contemplation of things, of Matter, and of the perfection that Nature puts in the beings it produces, in which each organ, tissue, part or element exists for the Whole to which it belongs, in relation to the Whole to which it belongs. Thus, must be the work of art. Aristotle’s discussed step, that the work of art is comparable to an animal, should undoubtedly have this sense]. Barrento’s analysis of the quoted document (Annexe I), deducing that Pessoa’s ideas on translation are ‘permeated with a platonic-rooted metaphysics’ (2002: 177) and that they constitute a ‘whole restoration of platonic doctrine’ (179), therefore isn’t convincing to us.

27. Regarding Pessoa’s translation of poems from W.R. Paton’s The Greek Anthology, see Haynes (2018). There are a few Greek words in Pessoa’s archive, at times with Alexander Search’s signature accompanying them (e.g. Archive 3/79A-85 ^r). Nevertheless, Pessoa’s enthusiasm to learn Greek soon dissipated; the impetus lasted only the duration of his university experience. (for a detailed account of his Curso Superior de Letras, see Prista 2001).

28. As far as could be discovered, Pessoa only owned one book in German: Die hundert besten Gedichte der deutschen Sprache. (Ed. by Richard Moritz Meyer. London, Gowans, 1909). The copy, which contained some translations done by Pessoa (see Lind 1962: 7), unfortunately disappeared from the private library after Pessoa’s death (see Pizarro, Ferrari, and Cardiello 2010, 422); see also Fischer (2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claudia J. Fischer

Claudia J. Fischer holds degrees from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (BA, 1984; MA, 1990) and from the Universidade de Lisboa (PhD, 2007), where she is an Assistant Professor in the German Department.  She is the author of  Sobre Graça e Graciosidade (Verbo, 2015) and the co-editor of  Fernando Pessoa: Argumentos para Filmes (Ática, 2011). As a translator, she has published Contos Musicais. Wackenroder, Kleist e Hoffmann (Antígona, 2016), a collection of Romantic short stories on music and, more recently, Tempo do Coração (Antígona, 2020), the complete correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.  Fischer has published articles on Fernando Pessoa as a translator (Pessoa Plural) and reader-writer in different languages (Real). In 2013 she curated an exhibit about Pessoa and his relation to the town of Cascais (Museu Condes de Castro Guimarães, Cascais). Thomas Mann, Brecht, Rilke, Kleist, Wackenroder, Hoffmann, Benjamin and Fassbinder are some of the authors she translated into Portuguese. Currently Claudia J. Fischer directs a research line on literature and music at the Center of Comparative Studies of the Universidade de Lisboa, having recently co-edited a special issue (22/23) of Dedalus dedicated to the topic.

Patricio Ferrari

Patricio Ferrari is a poet, editor, and literary translator (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian). He left Merlo (Buenos Aires) at the age of 16 to attend high school and play soccer in the United States through Rotary International. He received his MFA from Brown University, a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, and a PhD. in Portuguese Linguistics at the Universidade de Lisboa. He is responsible for seven Pessoa editions, including the first critical edition of his Poèmes français (Éditions de la Différence, 2014). His recent editions and translations include The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik (co-translated with Forrest Gander; New Directions, 2018) and The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro by Fernando Pessoa (co-edited with Jerónimo Pizarro and co-translated with Margaret Jull-Costa; New Directions, 2020). His work appears in Asymptote, Buenos Aires Poetry, Lit Hub, The Paris Review, Words Without Borders, among others. Ferrari resides in New York City and teaches at Rutgers University. Additionally, he serves as Managing Director of San Patricio Language Institute (founded by his mother in Greater Buenos Aires in 1971) and collaborates with the Endangered Language Alliance in New York City (a non-profit organization focused on linguistic diversity within urban areas worldwide).