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Reviewed by:
  • Translating Camões: A Personal Record by Landeg White
  • George Monteiro
White, Landeg. Translating Camões: A Personal Record. Lisbon. Universidade Católica Editora. 2012. 150 pp.

Included in the series “Estudos de comunicação e cultura—Translating Europe Across the Ages,” the book under review is the latest of Landeg White’s many worthy contributions to Camoniana. It is a lean and trim collection of pieces on translation by the honored poet-translator of Camões’s epic poem Os Lusíadas, published by the Oxford World Classics series in 1997 and Camões’s Collected Lyric Poems, brought out by Princeton University Press in 2008. Let it be said right off that it is good to have this book, a collection that should be of interest and use not only to any serious student of Camões’s towering contribution to [End Page 229] world literature and the general translator from the Portuguese language but to the translator of any stripe.

Cutting to the chase, one can start with what White saw as his first and foremost problem in undertaking to produce a “new” English-language translation of Camões’s epic: the question of what he designates as “form.” Rejecting the strict ottava rima of the original, the metrical scheme readily adopted by some of Camões’s more prominent prior translators, he found himself faced with the necessity to come up with a workable alternative that would convey the pace, rhythm, and tone of the original. White is dissatisfied, in varying degrees, with all earlier and in many cases still competing English-language translations, going back to Sir Richard Fanshawe’s in the seventeenth-century (1665) and William J. Mickle’s just over a century later (1776) and running through those of Richard Burton (1880), J. J. Aubertin (1878), and the “entertaining” (White’s way of dismissing him) Leonard Bacon (1950), the last being to date America’s only published translator of Os Lusíadas. White ultimately settled on a formularized form in which the original’s ottava rima would survive as the form of the concluding couplet of each of the poem’s many stanzas but nowhere else. Ending in rhyme, these couplets would in effect remind readers of the overall metrical form of Camões’s poem by echoing it as a sort of refrain once removed. I am not sure that it all works out this way to every reader’s satisfaction but it certainly has helped the translator to circumvent the problems raised by the seemingly persistent peculiarities of Portuguese poetic syntax, especially the relatively fixed placement of adjectives after the nouns they modify. This insistently self-examining translator leaves a detailed record of these and other translating problems, a record that becomes dramatic when he quotes from the quotidian journals he kept while working at his translator’s trade, a series of entries that offer him up to us, warts and all, as he faces difficulties, tries out solutions, changes his mind, discovers mistakes, and soldiers on to give the whole enterprise another shot. Gradually, the sympathetic reader of this book may well see his own major concerns shifting away from the specific decisions and solutions to an interest in the mind of the translator as he himself becomes more and more concerned with his own thinking about what he thinks.

On the whole the translating tribe has a goodly membership but relatively few of them have chosen to write about their ways, methods, and particular decisions. As counterpoint to White’s apologia, I would choose Gregory Rabassa’s 2005 memoir If This Be Treason (subtitled “Translation and Its Dyscontents”). Against White’s closely reasoned logic, before, during and after the act of translation, consider Rabassa’s somewhat outrageous revelation that not only has he often begun to translate a book even as he was reading it for the first time but that in the case of Cien años de soledad, he undertook the translation knowing nothing about the book or its author. I am sure that Rabassa’s way of approaching his work is not peculiar to Rabassa.

Translating Camões is (and I do not say...

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