Reading prompts for the class of December 13
Please read at least the preface, and Eirin Moure's "transelations" of Fernando Pessoa's heteronym, Alberto Caeiro (a "heteronym" of the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa), and especially poem I (although the others are fine too :)).
For the non-Portuguese speakers, perhaps you can have "more faithful" (?) glimpses of the "original (?) here: https://books.google.pt/books?id=gzHZDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=pt-PT&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Answer to one or more of these questions.
1. In what ways may we consider Sheep's Vigil as revising Alberto Caeiro's staging of "the pastoral"?
2. How can we view this process from the angle of an ecofeminist critique, and/or of "topopoetics" (see Tim Creswell's essay, on moodle)?
3. Consider the following quotation and speculate how it might relate to Mouré's trans-e-lations of Alberto Caeiro / Fernando Pessoa, exemplifying with literary analysis of examples from the chosen poems.
"What we sometimes sense in the other side of the expected linguistic engineering of literary translating are imaginings of ‘source selves’ and recordings of translators as they write: we have perhaps an uneasy mix of the biographer and autobiographer in literary translation who are not merely replacing one language with another but cannot help trying to inhabit authorial subjectivities as they strive to internalize and preserve the textual selfhood that happened to be born in one linguistic environment, and metempsychose it in another. And there should be further complications if the psychology of translation envolves a simultaneous self-denial, in the willingness to be and write someone else, and, through its intepretative movements, also a cryptic writing of the self in what can serve as an autobiographical detour, a ventriloquism of self-expression through an owning of other textual selfhoods: a sense of self is affirmed even as imports of alterity keep revising it. (Nikolaou 2006:21)"
Albert Caeiro is the heteronym coined by Pessoa, who is famous for embodying different personas in his texts. Pessoa talks about the birth of Caeiro in an essay on the genesis of his heteronyms: "I wrote some thirty poems, one after another, in a kind of ecstasy, the nature of which I am unable to define. It was the triumphant day of my life, and never will I have another like it. I began with the title, The Keeper of Sheep. What followed was the appearance of someone in me whom I named, from then on, Alberto Caeiro. Forgive me the absurdity of the sentence: In me there appeared my master." (https://www.eclectica.org/v9n4/gray.html) For the sake of establishing an important intertextual relation, I should state that this quote with the "master," despite not as a whole, goes back to and rooted in Dante's Inferno, when Virgil is introduced as Dante’s guide. "Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore." (Canto I, line 85) This translates to: "You are my master and my author." Here, Dante acknowledges Virgil as both a literary and spiritual guide, recognizing his profound influence as a poet and mentor, which most likely to show the foundations of this motivation why Pessoa and Moure use the same. The quote above speaks to a moment of introspection and direction both for Pessoa and Moure. To be specific, Pessoa's use of the line reveals his keen interest in the interaction between the internal and external, the self and the other. In her approach to translation, Moure reiterates this idea, arguing that translating a work of another entails bringing their presence or essence into oneself, so establishing a space in which the author and translator co-create. According to Moure, the "master" can stand for the voice of the original author's, or a more profound self that is reawakened through the act of translation. In that, she might be suggesting that translation is not a neutral or self-effacing act but a dynamic interplay where the translator becomes a vessel for multiple voices (perhaps including their own), which is why she describes her work as a “transelation,” (translation & elation) a playful and transformative approach to translation. When it comes to the translation's itself (of the poem I), although I cannot speak Portuguese, based on my ability of following a few words and reading another translation, I can say that Moure's seems like quite a translation/transelation (and I must share that I have found it very funny when she translates his name as Fervent Person, too :)). Regarding Caeiro's "pastoral," the countryside is a realm of simplicity and immediacy. He praises the natural world as pure and self-contained whereas Moure challenges this view by inserting Toronto's urban landscape (e.g. "Vaughan Road") into the poem; and by juxtaposing natural imagery with references to city life, she alters the timeless rural world of Caeiro into a space that grapples with contemporary dislocation and hybridity. In a way, she is acknowledging the tension between humanity and nature but also interconnect and embed them in one another. Ergo, Moure complicates Caeiro's poem with personal and cultural elements that reflect her Canadian setting and linguistic play.
ReplyDeleteI wrote it as a short reflection to the 1st prompt. (And the first word is not Albert, but Alberto. Sorry for the typo. Or perhaps I should have also translated it to something like "Noble Light Royalty" :))
ReplyDelete1- Alberto Caeiro's poem plays with the tradition of the pastoral by forging in its poetic "I" the visionary that, within nature, can't get past itself. This could be an allusion to the traditional use of the pastoral of putting what would be a person of low education with a way of speech and thought that are alien to him, strange. This means that there is no immediate relation, or "natural" relation, so to speak, between voice and person. Another allusion would be, at the same time, that the idealization of the rural, speaking forth from its representation, subsumes the supposed speaker who, in its simplicity, can speak the truth, for truth is simple.
ReplyDeleteCaeiro would like to be a poet of nature, being one with it. But he is separate, for he speaks, intelectualizes this will. On the other hand, it is this separation that allows him to be within his own "nature": the flock are his thoughts, and his thoughts, within this fictional economy, are the natural which he can't achieve because he is an "I". This is the source of his mixture between happiness and sadness: his thoughts are happy, he is sad not being them. But, of course, he is them also, he is in unity with fictional nature ("It's a version of being alone"), that is being alone with his thoughts and with the cost of it.
What Eirin Moure's translation does, it seems, is to literalize this tensions with a hint of humor that is true underneath Pessoa's poem. There seems to be, as well, a translation to places that are common to the author, which, in some ways, takes hold, with the translation, of Pessoa's heteronym to herself (but, given it is a translation, then out of herself as well). Caeiro's poem are someone else's thoughts
In Sheep’s Vigil, like Alberto Caeiro’s pastoral, starts out by acknowledging that it is a made up idea – in Caeiro we get “I never kept sheep” and in Moure we have: “I made that up; this is poetry.” Moure goes a step further, describing the soul not as a shepherd but as sheepish, breaking a certain hierarchy, and in that way stating that we are no shephards of nature anymore. In Moures revision, Nature is not peopleless but empty – in a way this might be a reference to how we imagine Nature or the pastoral often without wild animals of any kind.
ReplyDeleteWe also get the contemporary reality of electric lights and parking lots that are part of the environment. As well as the mail truck, since in Caeiro’s poem, there is only an empty road, clanking sheep bells and the sunset. It is a simpler picture that Moure has revised to be more complex – more true to what we know it to be today.
In the thirds poem – the fields are now not beyond the gaze, but in the avenues. The pastoral has come closer, or the urban landscape has come closer to nature, to the pastoral, in her revised version. And in a clever reference – he (Caeiro) is reading a book by her (Mouré). It reminds the reader, again, what kind of translation they are reading. How she looked at avenues is like he looked at trees – and here, the only nature or pastoral that is left is the one in books, flat pressed, or in yogurt jars – she is not sad, since that is normalcy for her. But in his imagination, he still feels sad pressing flowers and putting plants in pots.
3. Derrida said: «There are translators everywhere. Each speaking his own language, even if he has some knowledge of the language of the other. The translator’s ruses have an open field and he does not forget his own interests.». What I like from this quote is how it shows the ambiguity of communication. If we are translating and interpreting at all moments it means that we are “getting” the other’s language, that we share some common grounds for understanding. But it also means that for us to understand completely we have first to transform the other’s language into our own, conquer the other’s words and create for us new sentences each time. Nikolaou’s quote states something very similar but very tricky: translators know that they are doing some creative work that only they could, and that’s why generally we think of a good translator as like a window: we might need to read when it’s too cold outside, but we want the window clean as if there were no window. This connects to Nikolaou’s saying “translation involves a simultaneous self-denial”.
ReplyDeleteCaeiro is trying offer us a window to his thoughts, that is, a translation of his life into a poem to see the sheep, which are a translation of how he feels of himself at sunset. Caeiro is the translation already, because, as we know, “there was no Caeiro”. But maybe that is what poetry is, a window perhaps: not something to look at, but something to look through, and the other side, well, it will appear to us as we read/create it. I think this view of always translating what we receive “in the other side” of literature plays well with ventriloquism: we usurp the other’s words and even if they are the same, we will be the ones saying them. With this view we could conclude that the willingness to receive the other is only produced to make the other say our own thing.
However, Eirin Moure’s transelations are faithful and honest responses to a poet, as lonely as he tells us he is, he’s way of being lonely calls for sharing even that loneliness. She is talking with poems, so why should her creative work of hiding herself should not also be poetic? She does not “translate” the superficial linguistic mantle, I believe, but the possibility of looking through a window with the directions and feelings that Caeiro points to. There is a saying which goes like: “Translated poetry is like taking a shower with a raincoat on”. I think Moure does not translate the sentences into English to keep the thoughts, but, as the thoughts in poetry are the words themselves (the poem is being written in the head), she watches carefully how they came to be, how it feels to see the sun coming down, when the sheep come together at the hill or how to mean being a tree, and with the directions of Caeiro (her shepherd maybe?) guides those thoughts in another field (the English language in this case). Instead of telling us “there are sheeps”, she creates a way for us to be able, for ourselves and in our creative terms, to see them. Eirin Moure’s transelations of poetry is a good political and poetical practice in the face of automatic translation via machines. This is the complete “cryptic writing of the self”, eradicating the notion of self in three ways: in the “original” text when it translates, in the new one as it negated its own self before and in ourselves since we believe no self is given for us to appropriate. We could be angry and the soul eating machine, hoping that humans transelate more and more selves are expressed and preserved. But also, we could either work on the self/sould of the machine, as it had some self’s cracks; or we could admit that actually, if we were interpreting the everything from before, our own self is also a transelation of our nature, of the way the wind pushes us or loved ones makes us feel and accept that there is no final self, just ways of being what we are. Sometimes our way of being is a poet, and sometimes our way of being a poet is being a shepherd.
Literary translation may also focus on the themes of place and landscape. Indeed, Cresswell (2022) mentions, in the definition of topopoetics, “A poem is a place as much as it is about a place, or about place in general” (376).
ReplyDeleteRather than an “uneasy mix of the biographer and autobiographer in literary translation”, Mouré completely transpasses the borders of translation by simultaneously inhabiting the original’s text subject and displacing it spatially to the contemporary city of Toronto. Therefore, Mouré’s acts of ventriloquism of self-expression through Alberto Caeiro’s poetry are visible mostly in the insertion of the city and daily-life occurrences. In “What, me, guard sheep?” it’s possible to identify contemporary city aspects, such as the ‘parking lot’, ‘the mail truck’, and the ‘bus’. As for daily-life occurrences, instead of Caeiro’s “E corre um silêncio pela erva fora”, Mouré relocates to “And my neighbour goes in, after cutting his lawn”, not only transposing the (physical) place but also translating to contemporary perceptions of place. The translation of the (physical) place is visible in the lines, “or when walking Vaughan Road or along the valley”, “And I see my own figure / on the crest of Bathurst”, and “Look, I’m in my own doorway on Winnett / across from another parking lot”. This idea of inhabiting the subject matter but relocating it to contemporary Toronto is also present in the VII poem, instead of “Da minha aldeia vejo quanto da terra se pode ver do Universo … / Por isso a minha aldeia é tão grande como outra terra qualquer,”, Mouré’s translates to “From Garrison Creek I see the earth to the antipodes of the Universe / In this, my street is as big as any planet”.
Additionally, rather than a permanent effort to deny the translator’s self, in the second poem, Mouré jokingly inserts herself in the poem, substituting Caeiro’s “Leio até me arderem os olhos / O livro de Cesário Verde.” for “My eyes burn anyhow but I don’t care, I’m still reading / that Book by Erin Mouré”.
Instead of attempting the impossible erasure of the translator in the translated work, in Sheep’s Vigil, the poet converses with the poems, through a method she names trans-e-lations. This type of translation goes beyond linguistic relocation, but cultural and topographical relocation, maintaining the thematic as the connection. In Caeiro’s work, the mention of Cesário Verde is intentional, as his observational poetic style inspires Caeiro’s teachings. It also inspires Eirin Moure’s translation. Sheep’s Vigil can be seen as an exercice of Verde’s observational style in Toronto, guided by Alberto Caeiro’s poetry. In the preface, the poet describes following the Taddle Creek under the streets until Vaughan Road, a moment also recounted in section III, when she relocates the observation of Verde’s Lisbon to her own observation of Toronto. This is the section where there is a bigger linguistic diversion from the original poems, however the core of the poem is found in the translation, through “ a cryptic writing of the self”. One could argue that due to the readers’ cultural gap, this change creates more understand than a literal translation, making the translation successful.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I am sorry for the belated comment on this question. Life has been overwhelming with so many things happening at once, and I somehow forgot to post a comment on the blog.
ReplyDelete1- Alberto Caeiro, one of the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, focuses on simplicity and pure things and was in contact with nature, extracting from it the naive values with which he fed his soul. Also, Mouré's trans-e-lation (a term denoting her creative involvement with the text) does not really translate Caeiro’s pastoral into English; it accomplishes much more. She metamorphoses it with consideration for contemporary urgencies and its inherent poetic voice.
For instance, Mouré's references to highways and urban infrastructures – 'Over the field, the highway roars, / a hymn to modernity' – disrupt the conventional boundaries between the rural and the urban, thereby challenging the rigid separation of the human and natural worlds that is characteristic of Caeiro's poem. Mouré situates her version within a hybridised, urban-natural setting, drawing attention to the Canadian landscape and its interrelationships with urban life. In contrast, Caeiro's pastoral relies heavily on an idyllic rural setting. Caeiro's poetic pastoral is frequently regarded as a refuge from the complications of modern life, essentially constituting a retreat into the immediacies of sensory experience. Mouré, conversely, has accepted that it is impossible to retreat from the Anthropocene. Consequently, her corpus of poetry is characterised by the embodiment of a hybrid space wherein pastoral and urban elements coexist in a state of unease, thereby challenging the escapist tendencies that are conventionally associated with the pastoral tradition. Caeiro's pastoral often considers the universalisation of the male poet's sight, by which nature becomes an objectivity of detached contemplation (Mouré, 2019). However, Mouré (2019) revises this with a more incorporated, ecofeminist perspective, creating a relational intimacy and mutual power as regards the human and the natural. An illustration of this phenomenon can be observed in Mouré's writing, as exemplified by the following excerpt: "The grass bends its body to the weight of dew / as my body bends to the weight of its own words." In this passage, Mouré infuses nature with a corporeal dynamism, underscoring the human-nature interconnection. This juxtaposition stands in contrast to Caeiro's inclination to perceive Nature as a single external reality to be observed rather than inhabited and experienced. Caeiro's use of language serves to emphasise his pastoral ideal, which is that of the world being perceived "in its true state". Mouré complicates this simplicity by echoing Portuguese in her English and foregrounding the process of translation itself. This disjunction serves to counteract the immediacy that renders Caeiro's pastoral ideal possible. Mouré's invocation of the act of naming both celebrates and troubles pastoral ideals, as illustrated by the following excerpt: "The field, o campo, calls me / in tongues I've borrowed but cannot own." By underscoring the act of translation, Mouré suggests that the pastoral is not simply always present; it is mediated, both linguistically and culturally. This renders the universality of Caeiro's pastoral questionable, for it is, in fact, always culture- and language-bound. Caeiro's poems usually have a more static-like vision of a harmonious nature. Mouré, however, supersedes this with a much-matured depth of ecological vulnerability and humanity's exposure to culpability. "The river chokes on its plastic," as the phrases might refer to the degradation of environments, refers to a pastoral that can no longer exist apart from human impact. Mouré's pastoral is thus a site of mourning and resistance, and has been aligned with contemporary eco-critical and topopoetic approaches.