After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics Across the Atlantic

Notes

Notes Introduction. Poetry after Translation 1. See Richard Sieburth’s introduction to Ezra Pound’s The Spirit of Romance, Haun Saussy’s “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, and Steven Yao’s Translation and the Languages of Modernism. 2. At the end of this sentence, Gaonkar and Povinelli use author-date citations (“Asad 1986, Povinelli 2001b”) to refer to two essays that tackle the specific problem they are addressing: Talal Asad’s “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology” (in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986]); and Povinelli’s “Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability” (Annual Review of Anthropology 30 [2001]: 319–34). As I will discuss later, their reference to Asad’s essay is particularly relevant for my analysis of their notion of “transfiguration.” 3. By focusing on the work of influential British cultural ethnographers of the second half of the twentieth century, such as Ernest Gellner and Godfrey Lienhardt, Asad points out the way in which the anthropological act of interpretation tended to “preempt the evaluation” of particular foreign cultures (“Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” 21). For Asad, this is particularly problematic in ethnographic writing characterized by the linguistic phenomenon he refers to as “unequal languages,” in which “the languages concerned are so remote that it is very difficult to rewrite a harmonious intentio” (21). 1 / Heteronymies of Lusophone Englishness 1. Pessoa’s own analysis—written in English—of his transpersonal tendencies is worth quoting in full: “My interest in Francis Bacon’s horoscope is due to several circumstances, of which the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy is only one. The chief interest arises from a desire to see what in Bacon’s horoscope registers his peculiar 190 / notes characteristic of being able to write in different styles (a fact which even non Baconians admit) and his general faculty of transpersonalisation. I possess (in what degree, or with what quality, it is not for me to say) the characteristic to which I am alluding. I am an author: and have always found impossible to write in my own personality; I have always found myself, consciously or unconsciously assuming the character of someone who does not exist, and through his imaginary agency I write.” Fernando Pessoa, Correspondênça Inédita, ed. Manuela Parreira da Silva, 92. 2. Some Pessoa scholars have recently emphasized the relevance of the fact that Fernando Pessoa developed as a writer through a bilingual interaction with the canon of Anglo-American literature during the early 1900s—for example, George Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature and Maria Irene Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism. But only a few critics have actually emphasized the importance of Pessoa’s own English poetry. Two important exceptions are Jorge de Sena with his groundbreaking introduction and edition of Pessoa’s English Poems in Poemas Ingleses : Obras Completas de Fernando Pessoa—and Georg Rudolf Lind, with his article “Oito poemas ingleses inéditos de Fernando Pessoa,” in Estudos sobre Fernando Pessoa , 385–425. 3. As demonstrated by João Gaspar Simões, Pessoa excelled academically at Durban High School, winning a series of prizes in English composition, among them the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize in 1904 for best English essay at Pessoa’s matriculation examination for admission to the University of the Cape of Good Hope. See João Gaspar Simões, Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa. For a more recent study of Fernando Pessoa’s formation at Durban see also Alexandrino E. Severino, Fernando Pessoa na África do Sul. 4. An extremely detailed analysis of Pessoa’s different readings of English literature as well as the actual poetry books by English authors he owned while living at Durban is carried out by João Gaspar Simões in his Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa. 5. See D. J. Palmer’s study of the rise of English literature as an academic discipline during the Victorian era, The Rise of English Studies. 6. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Portuguese and Spanish original texts included in this book are my own. 7. “Sebastianismo” refers to the myth within Portuguese history and literature of the messianic return of the young Portuguese king Dom Sebastião who died in the battle of Alcácer-Quibir in 1578...