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  • Man Talking to a Mirror:On the Attempt to Translate Yusef Komunyakaa's Vibrant Verbal Landscape into the Mild Undulations of Brazilian Portuguese
  • Flávia Rocha (bio)

1.

"The sea falls short again. Claws unfold," Yusef Komunyakaa writes in "Dreambook Bestiary." The sea in Brazil is gentle and vulnerable, much like the music it inspires. The deep melancholy truth of the blues mirrors and reverses the hyperbolic cheerfulness of samba—though both were generated almost simultaneously from the African experience in the Americas.

2.

Komunyakaa's poetry has claws, deep voices, and roots. To translate his work one needs first to learn how to listen. Listen to the internal music of the poem, its rhythm in context, since sound is the immediate medium lost in translation. Contemporary poetry is, in some ways, held together by an authophagical net of cultural patterns, metalanguage of metalanguage, poetry of poetry, poetic matter in constant digestion. This continuous recycling of language makes the task of finding correspondences in other languages even more complex. The task is particularly difficult for a translator of Komunyakaa's poetry, with its African-American accent (more precisely, its Louisiana accent) and its universal scope. His inventive writing has nearly the effect of a personal dialect.

3.

Komunyakaa shows very clearly the mechanisms to which he has access in poems like "Changes; or, Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country Road, with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen," written in two columns: the left column in the voices of two women, with its vernacular music ("Joe, Gus, Sham . . . / Even Edward / Done gone, Done / Gone to Jesus, honey"), and the right column in the poet's voice, [End Page 725] with its precise, lyric structure ("The mainspring of notes & extended / possibility—what falls on either side / of a word—the beat between & underneath"). The contrast between these two worlds is further exemplified by its form: all the left column's initial letters appear in upper case—giving a ritualistic tone to the poem—while the right column obeys the natural sequence of the sentences, using both upper and lower cases.

Sitting down to render the poem in Portuguese, one immediately asks: will the left column make the translation impracticable? Will this really be one of those classic examples of impossible translation? Translators tend to greet an "impossibility" like this as a challenge. But the questions about how to accomplish the impossible remain. Even anthropological aspects come to mind—in the case of "Changes," this means attempting to find corresponding patterns in the culture into which the poem is being translated; one feels that by identifying the correct parallel, one might reconstruct the poem in the new language. Another option, safer and less appealing to any translator, is to write footnotes on entire passages—footnotes specific to the culture portrayed in the poems. And there is still a third option, which is in my opinion the least attractive and fair: to translate everything strictly according to the literal meaning, using the established structure of the language into which the poem is translated.

The interesting choice—for it is the most controversial—is perhaps the anthropological one. In translating Komunyakaa's diction into the Brazilian reality and the Portuguese language with this approach, it is necessary to consider that the African experience in Brazil produced linguistic expressions that were slowly incorporated into the informal and formal language of the dominant Portuguese culture. Something similar to this happened in the southern United States. But in Brazil the incorporation was affected by a very complex case of segregation. During early modernism, especially in the twenties and thirties, the intellectual elite, in a wave of nationalism, took great and growing interest in mixing white, African, and indigenous elements to define a pan-Brazilian culture. This move toward integration had the unexpected effect of corroding the very basis of the component cultures, since they were assimilated from a Western perspective: noticeably, Brazil didn't produce an official spoken or written language/dialect /vocabulary/accent that could be identified with the black culture. And the indigenous languages disappeared almost completely. This is in contrast to what happened in other Latin American countries, such as Paraguay, which managed...

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