Translating Camões

11 december 2006 Having settled on which sonnets to translate, the translator must ask something like: what makes this poetry poetry? What, more specifically, are the various formal elements worth preserving, and at what price? The division into two quartets followed by two tercets, a consistent rhyme scheme and the decasyllable stand out as these sonnets’ most obvious formal features. But there are others. Like Shakespeare, Camões was fond of syntactical inversions, purposeful repetitions, and various other kinds of word play. His syntax is often driven by ruthless logic, as if a sonnet were a mathematical proof. This is the case, for instance, in ‘Whoever, Lady, sees plainly on view’, which is also a good example of extended metaphor, with the lexicon of commerce – paying, owing, price, profit, debt – dominating each stanza. Some of Camões’s word choices allude to philosophical concepts (‘The lover becomes the thing he loves’, for instance), and his language is concrete but also concept-oriented, rarely flowery or merely descriptive, and never long-winded.

We would love to bring everything over from one language to another – the rhyme and meter, the syntactical particularities, the lexical specificity, the tautness of the discourse – but that is never possible, and so the translator must make choices, deciding what matters greatly, what matters less. So let’s consider rhyme and rhythm. Can a sonnet (the word comes from the Provençal for “little song”) forego rhyme and not have ten – or at least roughly ten – syllables per verse and still be a sonnet? What defines a sonnet? Surely not the mere circumstance of having fourteen lines.

In his Luís de Camões: Selected Sonnets (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005), translator William Baer has achieved perfect, natural-sounding rhymes for seventy sonnets. No easy feat, and to pull it off he has not worried too much about line length, with verses rarely having less than ten syllables but sometimes stretching out to as many as fifteen or sixteen. (The longer the line, the more room one has to maneuver and produce convincing rhymes.) According to his introduction, Baer has used “the versatile English iambic pentameter for [Camões’s] decasyllabics”. This seems to mean five stresses per line rather than five strictly conceived iambs, but I myself count four stresses for certain verses of ‘Shipwreck’ and six stresses for more than one line of ‘Jacob’. Does this matter? In the latter poem the verb servir is used four times in Portuguese, but ‘serve’ appears just once in English, with ‘slaved’, ‘working’ and ‘starts’ all over doing the job for the other three occurrences. English objectively has a larger vocabulary than Portuguese, so some expansion on Camões’s limited lexicon is to be expected, but the repetition of servir does seem to be quite deliberate. In his defense, Baer has deliberately opted for renderings in contemporary-sounding English, and they read very smoothly, making Camões readily accessible to today’s reader. Too smoothly? Is it still Camões?

Landeg White also rhymes his sonnets but is more relaxed about what constitutes rhyme. In ‘Whoever, Lady, sees plainly on view’, we find, along with some perfect rhymes, resource as a rhyme word for price, and yours rhyming with power. On the other hand, White, far from stretching out the lines, actually shortens them, into basically iambic tetrameter. Most of the lines of his ‘Dear gentle soul, you that departed’, which is Camões’s most translated sonnet, contain only eight syllables (counting up to the last accented one, that is). White had already justified this option in the Translator’s Note to his version (the most recent one in English) of The Lusiads (Oxford, 1997): “Time and again, rendering stanzas of The Lusiads into rough and ready English, I have found myself with feet or whole lines to spare, needing padding to restore the shape of the original.” English does not necessarily take up less space on the page, but it does take up less spoken space, i.e.has  fewer syllables. The Portuguese word soneto has three syllables, while ‘sonnet’ has only two, though both words have the same number of letters. Keeping a short line and making it rhyme to boot, some problematic word choices are bound to occur. In the last poem cited, it does not make much if any difference to say “cut short your days” (the days of your life, that is) instead of the literal “cut short your years”, but “if (in heaven) memories are still allowed to move” is a more than slightly eccentric rendering of the original: “if (in heaven) memories of this life are permitted”. Rhyme so obliges, and didn’t Camões himself, to achieve all his perfect rhymes, occasionally resort to creative, eccentric formulations, which in the end actually had an enhancing effect on the poetry?

Alexis Levitin, translator of Eugénio Andrade and other Portuguese poets, employed perfect rhymes and the decasyllable (though the last two verses have nine and eleven syllables, respectively) in his rendering of ‘May Love seek out new arts, devise a plot’. The result is on the whole admirable, but since my task here is to point out problems, I will mention that several roundabout, less-than-natural expressions – “discover new disdain”, “one cannot pay grief’s toll” – seem to have been employed to fill out (‘pad’) verses and facilitate rhyme. But again: perhaps these expressions are interesting in their own right.

My own sonnet renderings are arguably poor excuses for the form, as they make no attempt to rhyme. I worked at some rhymed versions for quite a while but finally threw in the towel, because the sacrifice seemed too great. There are other elements of Camões’s poetics which I am much more keen to preserve. In the first quartet of ‘Oh how long, year after year', we have the long journey of the narrator’s aging life contrasted with the severe shortening of his brief and useless human discurso, a word that in those days meant not only spoken discourse but also spatial course or trajectory. My choice of ‘ramble’ as an English equivalent is an attempt to convey both those meanings. In the fifth verse we have the narrator’s age or years wasting away at the same rate that his ruin grows. These kinds of double meanings, contrasting expressions and logico-linguistic equations are much more interesting to me than rhyme. By dispensing with the latter I can more closely replicate the former, though not always to my satisfaction… .

The first five verses of one of the sonnets presented here [ to ‘Since my eyes don’t tire…’] would more literally translate as “Since my eyes don’t tire of weeping / sorrows that don’t tire of making me tired; / since nothing softens the fire I burn in / for someone [i.e. my beloved lady] I could never soften [i.e. make more amenable, receptive]; // let blind Love not tire of guiding me”, etc. I preferred to incorporate the fourth instance of ‘tire’ into an adjective, ‘tireless’, and I transformed “making me tired” into “weighing on me”, as the Portuguese cansar comprises – more readily than ‘tire’ – the notions of weariness and tedium. Rather than tire, I considered using the verb ‘weary’ throughout, but it sounds a tad antiquated today. Which of course could be a justification for using it, since the sonnet was written 500 years ago! Getting the right idiom, the right tone, is perhaps the greatest challenge in the case of poetry from a time and culture so distant from our own. And what is ‘right’ for me may strike another translator as completely misguided. That is why I consider it useful and sometimes even necessary to have various translations – based on different ground rules – of one and the same text. Taking all the good but diversely executed translations together, we can perhaps get closer to the original.

Translation is like opera – an ‘impure’ form of art, whose success lies in achieving the right equilibrium of the constituent parts. An opera cannot pursue ‘pure’ music at the expense of the dramatic action, nor focus on the overall visual impression at the expense of the music or drama. Translation, in a similar way, is a balancing act, with the translator slightly fudging on the transmission of the original, literal meaning for the sake of the poetry’s formal devices, and no one of these can be replicated to perfection if this will mean (as it almost always will) giving other poetic devices the short shrift. Translation is the art of knowing how to lose, balancing the losses so that no one part suffers. It therefore makes perfect theoretical sense to preserve rhyme, or some semblance of rhyme, by making concessions in other departments. Tossing rhyme out of the ‘opera’ is, to say the least, a dubious move.