O poeta é um fingidor
October 6, 2011 10:01 AM   Subscribe

13+ ways of looking at Fernando Pessoa's "Autopsychography".
posted by klue (22 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
The third translation, by Ernesto Guerra Da Cal, made the poem clear to me in a way other's hadn't. "Autopsychography" seems to me to be about writing poetry and gently chides poets and their readers. YMMV.
posted by longsleeves at 10:21 AM on October 6, 2011


This fits nicely with Pessoa's own idea of "heteronyms".
posted by chavenet at 10:21 AM on October 6, 2011


Thanks very much for this. I bought a copy of The Book of Disquiet (Alfred Mac Adam translation) a couple of months ago. In the bookstore, I opened it up at random to the entry, "Both fish and Oscar Wilde die because they can't keep their mouths shut," and fell in love right then and there.
posted by otio at 10:22 AM on October 6, 2011


Sorry, full entry is "To speak is to have too much consideration for others. Both fish and Oscar Wilde die because they can't keep their mouths shut."
posted by otio at 10:24 AM on October 6, 2011


Pessoa also wrote poems in English. Here is "35 Sonnets" for download in pdf.
posted by chavenet at 10:26 AM on October 6, 2011 [1 favorite]


This is such a great idea for a web site, reminds me of hofstadter's Ton beau de Marot. Muito obrigado!
posted by villanelles at dawn at 10:27 AM on October 6, 2011


Ah, Richard Zenith came to talk to my class about his work translating Pessoa, he went over this poem in particular and talked about comparing it to previous translationsl! How nifty.

What a good idea to let you see them side by side; I would love to be able to do that for a whole lot of translations.
posted by little cow make small moo at 10:34 AM on October 6, 2011


I like reading them as if they're one long poem.

And those who read his writings,
And those who read his poems
Sense well in the pain they read,
Feel absolutely, not his two
Not his two but only
Separate pains, but only the
The one they lack.
Pain that they do not feel

posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:35 AM on October 6, 2011


also lol at Google Translate's version.

And so the wheel rails
Gira, to entertain the reason
This train rope
Is called the heart

posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:36 AM on October 6, 2011


Being fluent in Portuguese, this is kind of great - no one translation really gets at the meaning, and quite a few are just plain wrong.
posted by pmv at 10:41 AM on October 6, 2011


But which one is closest, pmv? I like Zenith's, but I am monolingual.
posted by kozad at 10:51 AM on October 6, 2011


Hey, I wrote one of those.
posted by bardic at 11:02 AM on October 6, 2011


@kozad,

Edwin Honig and Peter Rickard come close but I think Raymond Sayers and Zenith's are the best ones.

On a second reading of the translations, I was struck by how much of it is bent on trying to reinterpret the poem, instead of trying to give an accurate translation.
posted by pmv at 11:29 AM on October 6, 2011 [1 favorite]


Hey, I wrote one of those.

Go on...
posted by villanelles at dawn at 11:32 AM on October 6, 2011


I remember a great site where the guy had taken it upon himself to re-translate Neruda because he felt so many of the translations out there were really bad. I thought his translations were much better than say Stephen Tapscott's. I think he got copyright infringement notice and had to take the site down.

Monolingual speakers may be amazed at how much poems change in translation because in some sense they are not perfectly translatable. The poet is sometimes playing intentionally with the multiple meanings of a word in one language, for example.. But in the translated language the word has different implications. How do you translate it then?
posted by vacapinta at 11:49 AM on October 6, 2011


Ezra Pound's translations of Chinese classical poetry are as absolutely brilliant as they are "wrong" in a linguistic sense.
posted by bardic at 12:00 PM on October 6, 2011


I was struck by how much of it is bent on trying to reinterpret the poem, instead of trying to give an accurate translation.

While studying Rilke in graduate school, this was the impression I got when reading through many different translations of some of his best known poems. It really pissed me off, feeling like their goal was to make the best poem of their own loosely based on the original.
posted by aught at 12:07 PM on October 6, 2011


Pessoa is one of the most vexing and fascinating writers I've ever come across. Thanks for this.
posted by mykescipark at 12:26 PM on October 6, 2011 [1 favorite]


to make the best poem of their own loosely based on the original

But isn't it a legitimate goal for a translator of poetry to write a good poem in the target language? That's what's so fantastic about this mini-site, exactly: that it gets straight to the heart of the perpetual, unresolvable poetry-in-translation problem. Perfect "accuracy" in reproducing a poem in another language is always impossible to achieve, because fidelity to one linguistic effect implies destruction of another. Even by themselves, all the different choices for fingir here are fantastically interesting — particularly because that seems to be the Pessoan word for what the translators are doing to the poem, just as it's the word for what the poet did before them.
posted by RogerB at 12:26 PM on October 6, 2011


But translation is always interpretation. As vacapinta says an actual translation is impossible; because of the differences between languages the goal has to be recreation rather than reproduction. And as fun and useful as I find this site to be, being able to flip through different translations side by side really drives home the point that you will always be at a remove from a poet whose language you dont share. Of course, as bardic points out, great beauty can come from that distance, but you're never going to erase it.
posted by villanelles at dawn at 12:27 PM on October 6, 2011


"But isn't it a legitimate goal for a translator of poetry to write a good poem in the target language?"

This is what Walter Benjaim thought.
posted by bardic at 9:11 PM on October 6, 2011


See also Antinous for other English work of Pessoa.

I find Pessoa to be a prime counter-example against the argument that anonymity or pseudonymity are inherently bad.
posted by ersatz at 5:51 AM on October 7, 2011


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