from Vol. #9, Issue 1: Spring 2018
Translator’s Note
by Paul Rowe

I do not speak Portuguese. My understanding of the language is at a student's level. For the past year, I have been using a Portuguese/English dictionary and Duolingo to acclimate myself to the sustained beauty of Portuguese. Last fall, I had the pleasure to visit Lisbon for a week, and I fell in love with the mellow, fruitful tones of Portuguese. Through Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, I discovered Cesário Verde. Upon my discovery of Verde's “O Sentimento dum Ocidental,” I learned more about the poem's importance to both Romantic and Modern artistic modes of poetry. I began translating the poem, bit by bit, with the goal in mind to transfer its spirit into the meter of iambic English, something that previous English translations I encountered hadn't focused on with much vigor.

The previous translations I found of the poem were quite good, but less focused on creating a sense of iambic meter and sustained phonic echo throughout. I also wished to substitute some contemporary, synonymous vocabulary to evoke a sense of shock for readers. For example, “impure women” would not come as a shock these days, but would rather offend most readers, so I often substituted phrases like these. My version is quite liberal in terms of complete faithfulness, because sometimes the exact word wouldn't make sense in contemporary English.

The particulars are a bit slippery. The antiquated term for glasses as “lens” makes sense metaphorically, but I use “spectacles.” A previous translation uses “pince nez,” but “spectacles” fit the English alliteration and rhythm of the line. I use this as an example for many substitutions you will no doubt find in my version. The man I learned about translation from in college was David Ferry, one of the more daring, exacting translators out there. That might be where my translation philosophy developed.

Throughout the poem, I intended to avoid overwrought melodrama, and I attempted to make each twist and turn of the poem disturbing through choice vocabulary updates. Moreover, I tried to make the vocabulary a tad less grimy than the original version to avoid making the poem feel like another Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.

Arriving at the soul of the poem itself was more important to me, as was the work of carrying over central themes that I found nourishing to the poem's pumping heart. Thus, you will encounter many walls, and perhaps feel trapped between walls, on reading my version. I tried to reflect on what it means to be caged, and what walls mean today for those living under the Trump regime. In light of the recent travel ban and the health care bill, these walls and sickly hospital rooms are quite disturbing for me. As a young reader learning Portuguese, I discovered meanings of words such as maresia, which means “sea air,” that also evoke opacity, lugubriousness, and languidness. I attempted to use these concrete means for evocative ends.

In terms of meter, I chose iambic tetrameter. To make this work, I had to cut flab and avoid excessive extra-metrical syllables at the ends of lines to protect the cut and thrust of the tetrameters. Portuguese is more inflected than English, giving a greater density of meaning that runs the risk of sounding wordy in English.

Portuguese poems often have what prosody experts of a certain era would call “feminine” cadences. These can be often difficult to transfer into musical English. After I became fairly confident with the meaning of the poem I tried to forget the original and turn my version into something fresh, with metrical snap. After that, I went back to the original to check if I had strayed too far from the source's meaning.

As an aspiring Romanticist, this translational undertaking has helped me obtain a firmer grasp on the cross-cultural ennui of the 19th century European city, and deepened my understanding of how the European legacy of Romanticism encompasses not just taken from England, France, and Germany, but also from the Iberian Peninsula.

I would heartily encourage other Portuguese-language tyros to translate this poem as an apprentice piece. However, I would recommend that they preserve the spirit of the poem through update vocabulary while adapting the rhythms of the Portuguese to the often-iambic meter of English. No need, I think, to preserve the line order of the original too strictly, if a bit of reordering is called for in order to create a smooth English syntax.

As a final note, I'd like to observe that as a student new to this language, I found the methodical work of translation quite constructive to my understanding of Portuguese, not least because the translation of a poem in stanzas is broken up naturally into manageable, self-contained small chunks.

>> read the English translation of this poem
>> read the Portuguese text of this poem

About the author: Paul S. Rowe (@paulsrowe) is an adjunct Lecturer in English at Suffolk University and co-editor of The Charles River Journal. His critical essays, book reviews, poems, and interviews appear in Literary Imagination, The New England Review of Books, Berfrois, and Hollow. Paul is an aspiring Romanticist embroiled in the process of a Ph.D. in literature.

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