Dass nur im Grab ich Frieden finden kann: "Poesias" by Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage

Published 1943.

Many eons ago, I was delighted with a book selling girl behind one of the counters in a book pavilion at the Lisbon Book Fair. Because of that I wrote a poem that I gave to her. Distant times those were. To tell you the truth, the girl did not deserve that poem, and the poem itself was not that great, well, the usual. In any case, the thing went down like this: in order to have a natter with her, I bought from her this same Bocage edition that I now got from a friend. Who would have thought that many years later I’d hold this same book in my hands? As soon as I picked it up, memories came flooding back. I still remember almost being taken from a thief as I perused books at her bookstand, touching them without really looking at them while at the same I kept looking at her eyes that could be seen from any place in the fair, as a “model like you’re…but oh sadness!”.

I can now hear some of my learned friends saying, after having read the above paragraph, “you expose yourself too much!” What they really wanted to say is, “I admire your courage.” Since I started publishing stuff on my blog, those are the kind of comments I hear more often. Who cares about what I write? No one. I’ve always believed that one shouldn’t remove the personal from the texts. That’s why I said, somewhere else, that what I write is (almost) always embedded in my own personal history. That’s what makes what I write intelligible to me.

And just because I can, below an attempt at translating the untranslatable into German of one of my favourite poems by Bocage:

“Camões, großer Camões, wie ähnlich

Ist mein Geschick dem deinen, wenn man sie vergleicht!

Der gleiche Grund ließ uns vom Tejo weggehn

Und frevelhaft dem Meer-Giganten trotzen.

Wie du am Ganges-Strome dich befandest,

Befind ich mich im Elend einer grauenhaften Not.

Ich sehne mich wie du umsonst nach eitlen Freuden

Und weine so wie du, sehnsüchtig Liebender.

Gleich dir vom harten Schicksal hintergangen,

Erflehe ich vom Himmel meinen Tod, in der Gewissheit,

Dass nur im Grab ich Frieden finden kann.

Mein Vorbild bist du, doch oh Jammer

Mag ich dir auch an bösem Schicksal gleichen,

Ich gleich dir nicht an Gaben der Natur.”

This is one of the reasons why I think German is not only the most beautiful language I learned, but it’s also the love of my life. Much more than Portuguese and English. The German language makes me organize things in my head in a way very different when compared with the Latin and English languages. There’s an enormous cognitive benefit by installing this “tool” in our brains. When installed, the doors of consciousness that open up are tremendous. I’m not only talking about the possibility of reading Rilke, Celan, Hölderlin, Goethe, Kafka in the original. The point is that what these writers put on paper are thoughts inseparable from the language itself in which they were written. No one, I repeat no one, having read Rilke in Portuguese or English has any idea what this represents in terms of the insurmountable geniality of Kafka, Celan and of course Rilke (my favourite trio of German writers). Some translations are simply ludicrous. Lately I've been on a winning streak...

Do we want to live without the real dimension of what these Men left to the world? It’s never too late. Trust me. Learn German. And now, my beloved readers are thinking, "But he just read a book of Poetry of one the most distinguished Portuguese Poets, but he's still haranguing us on the fact that we all should learn German! How can that be??" Well my friends, you should have been paying close attention to what I've been writing for almost 10 years on this very same blog, i.e., for those of you who are still with me after all are these years...

NB: "Dass nur im Grab ich Frieden finden kann." This is "Hamlet" tapping into Bocage...I won't bother explaining. Go read your "Hamlet" please.

Camoens vs Shakespeare: "Retratos de Camões" by Vasco Graça Moura

Published 2014.

Disclaimer: As I’ve stated elsewhere, classics-wise, my literary heroes have always been Camoens, Pessoa, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Celan, Hölderlin, Rilke, way too many to enumerate here. Read the following review/essay at your own peril.

This is one of the most beautifully designed book I've ever had the pleasure of holding in my hands. For the visual learners, creative thinkers, and arty types among you, who need a kick in the pants to get motivated and express themselves to the fullest, this book is for you. Unfortunately only available in Portuguese.

It's because of books like these that books in print will never die. I'm all for visceral takes on things, and holding a book in my hands is one of those things. I've always said there's something wonderfully weird about holding a book in one's hands (and smelling it:  the scent of physical books, the paper, the ink, the glue...Book sniffing is still a major kick for me. I just love to crack open a book and catch a whiff of the pages.)

I don't know. There's something about books stacked everywhere that gets to me every time. Going to a bookshop I immediately feel a sense of nostalgia. It's good for the soul... This visceral act of physically turning a page that, for me at least, can't be matched with pixels on a screen. For me the need to possess the physical copy of a book like this one, and not merely an electronic version of it, is something akin to a sacred object (maybe I'll do a post about it one of these days if I'm in the mood...)

I don’t know again. Maybe my favourite books define me in some unfathomable way, and e-Books don't seem to convey connections that are quite as meaningful synapses-wise.

Once again VGM (Vasco Graça Moura) shows his erudition. What were Camoens first portraits? How did they get to us? How authentic are they? VGM wrote this little monography in order to help in discovering Camoens' vera effigies.

Camoens could have said of Shakespeare (and vice-versa):

. .. and glad to find a kindred mind

who with my spells I might entwine, 

no earthbound soul who's words extol

the beauty of my off'ring.

The effect Shakespeare and Camoens have on me I like to name as “The Physics of the Impossible”, i.e., our thoughts are linked to an invisible energy and electromagnetic force field and it determines what the energy forms, and the mirror is thus able to reflect. My thoughts literally shift the universe on a particle-by-particle basis to create my physical life and mental perceptions. When I read Shakespeare and Camões the universe changes. Look all around you. Everything I see starts as an idea, an idea that grows as it's shared and expressed. I literally become what I think about. My life becomes what I've imagined and believed in most. My world is literally my mirror, enabling me to experience in the physical plane what I hold as my truth … until I change it again... Physics, Camoens and Shakespeare show us that the world is not the hard and unchangeable thing it may appear to be. It's a very fluid place continuously built up using energy field forces...

What we think is in fact an illusion. That's what Camoens, and Shakespeare embody as far as I'm concerned.

Being Portuguese, I’ve always been intrigued by the similitude between Shakespeare and Camoens. What's with Camoens and Shakespeare? Camoens' lyrical poetry has also a double fascination for me. First, before Shakespeare he was writing lines like "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun", thus also creating poems of wonderfully lucid wit and beauty like Shakespeare. Second, the lyrics show us his progress towards being the poet who would write "The Lusiads" later on.

Thinking about Shakespeare and Camoens always leads me down the path of the limits of translatability. Translating Shakespeare's metaphors is a very difficult subject. I'm also working on translating Shakespeare into Portuguese, and Camoens into German, and I'm tackling problems left and right. For starters, I think that primary conceptual/original metaphors tend to remain intact across translations whereas complex conceptual metaphors tend to be replaced by different complex metaphors specific to the era and cultural background of the respective translators (in my case Portuguese).

I believe that metaphor is translatable. In my view, translating Shakespeare's and Camoens’ original metaphors poses three types of problems: wrong choice of diction, mistranslation, and deletion. On the other hand, translating Shakespeare's and Camoens’ cultural metaphors poses cultural problems resulting from the use of references to a tale that the target audience may not be familiar with. When all these hurdles I chose the cognitive approach translation-wise, because it is modern, actual and more complex than the others. Modern cognitive linguistics regards metaphor as a basic mental operations as a way of knowledge, structure and explanation of the world. Man does not only express his thoughts through metaphors, but also thinks in metaphors, thus creating a world in which he lives. Cognitive approach is the most promising direction, because the study of knowledge transfer mechanism is the main problem in the methodology of acquiring knowledge. Having read a ton of literature concerning this question my ultimate goal is to create my own algorithm of translating conceptual metaphors. With the help of this method and some handcraft algorithms developed in Python I improved the translation of Shakespeare's and Camoens’ metaphors and thus the understanding of their respective works.  Maybe one day I’ll post a technical something regarding this fascinating topic.

Camoens, for me, has always been a vehicle instead of a destination. It’s a vehicle that allows me to understand all the complex texts that I may have to encounter in my world in the future.  But the basic movement through a text, a movement through a complex text, a language that is 400 years removed from our own; if I can do that, I can read law books, I can read medical journals, I can interact with my child’s pediatrician, I can do any number of things, and that, to me, is what Camoens is really for. Becoming reacquainted with him through Vasco Graça Moura’s latest book is always a bonus in itself (he wasn’t among us long enough to see it in print).

What VGM attempts here is an historical study of Camoens’ portraits, identifying the ones which may have been made during Camoens’ lifetime, and the ones derived from the mental image we have of him. As with Shakespeare, we don’t a definite portrait of Camoens:

To my German-speaking friends I cannot resist showing an exercise in translation I did a long time ago when I dared translate it into German. I only chose his most famous stanzas (foolish of me…):

“Amor é um fogo que arde sem se ver,

É ferida que dói, e não se sente,

É um contentamento descontente,

É dor que desatina sem doer.

É um não querer mais que bem querer,

É um andar solitário entre a gente,

É um nunca contentar-se de contente,

É um cuidar que ganha em se perder."

(Liebe ist eine Feuersbrunst, die man nicht sieht,

Ist eine tief Wunde, die man doch nicht fühlt,

Ist unbefriedigtes Zufriedensein,

Ist ein verrücketer Schmerz, der doch nicht qäult,

Liebe heißt nichts zu wünschen als zu lieben,

Heißt unter allen Menschen einsam sein,

Heißt nie sich zu begnügen, zu bescheiden,

Heißt glauben, man gewinnt trozt allen Plagen.)

Richard Zenith also did a wonderful translation into English which I’ll reproduce here for the benefit of my English-speaking audience (taken from my copy of “The World’s Favourite Love Poems” edited by Suheil Bushrui):

Love is a fire that burns unseen,

A wound that aches yet isn't felt,

An always discontent contentment,

A pain that rages without hurting,

A longing for nothing but to long,

A loneliness in the midst of people,

A never feeling pleased when pleased,

A passion that gains when lost in thought.

NB: “Retratos de Camões” in addition to VGM’s text, is also comprised of contemporary portraits of Camoens by some of the most internationally renowned visual and plastic artists: Júlio Pomar, José de Guimarães, João Cutileiro, and José Aurélio.

NB2: Luís Vaz de Camões (1524 – 1580)

Teenage Proclivity for Conjugation: "Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare, J.A. Bryant Jr.

Published 1998.

“I am hurt.

A plague o’ both your houses.”

The first Shakespeare’s play I read in Yonder Days. I remember hating the story and loving the language, i.e., I still retain from that time that I came out the other side absolutely astonished at the beauty and richness of the language:

"How art thou out of breath, when thou has breath to say to me that thou art out of breath?"

The lovely thing about re-reading something is that sometimes I get to see things I didn’t the first time around:

"Two households, both alike in dignity”: I was intrigued by the use of the word "both".  Shakespeare could have written: “Two households, alike in dignity”. Here nothing separates the two households from dignity. But by inserting the word "both' he separates the two households from dignity.  Which is what we see in the next lines in the text. One of the tips I always use when (re)-reading Shakespeare is to focus on the boring words. I think we might miss much of what Shakespeare is up to if we focus only on the big important words. Shakespeare’s use of the word “Both” is a good case in point. Multitasking while reading Shakespeare is not a good idea...

“Two households, both alike in dignity”: to me the wonder of the language is that not only can you have this both ways but that any intimate reading I think demands that we have it both ways... the very literal level (both families "Alike in dignity", that is, both respected, high ranking families of the city), and the ironic undercut (what a bunch of undignified oafs, brawling in the street)...seemingly simple statements echo, double back on themselves, mutate...certainly not something exclusive to Shakespeare, but it happens frequently in his work. I'm a text person not a stage person so I am wondering from the point of view of the actors out there how you handle that in the moment... I would have to think it pulls you in contrary directions as a performer. I have always seen this opening line as setting the stage for the almost identical nature of the two families.  Nothing that I have found in the play, and also what I’ve seen on stage, seems to dispute this fact and much reinforces it.  I also like how Shakespeare avoids what could have been a way to differentiate the two families, explaining the initial cause of the dispute. That seems to be indicative of many conflicts that continue to this day, nobody knows where they truly started, but they have to be continued. I also suggests immediately both separation (opposition) in "two" and essential identity in "alike". There will be no "good" side, no war between "light" and "dark" forces, but a meaningless feud between sides which could see each other in the mirror. The word "in" suggests that both households are in something that exists outside their control. They are both stuck in a conception of dignity from which they cannot break free, thus establishing a symmetry in the families linked together by their dignity and their inevitable doom. They function as objects, i.e., objects being acted upon rather than free willed individuals.

Upon each re-reading I always wonder why Shakespeare does not reveal the reason that the families hate each other. We are told that the households are alike in dignity (social status).  We are even provided with a "spoiler alert" when we learn that the "star crossed lovers" will commit suicide, resulting in a halt to the feuding between the two families. In addition, we receive the clue that the feud has gone on for a long time (ancient grudge) However, the omission of the reason for the feud leaves us wondering and imagining a variety of scenarios--just as Shakespeare must have intended.  I think it is important for an author to leave a mystery for the reader to explore. In Star Wars there was a sense of mystery about the Force, what was it. Are there any reasons needed, ever? The humankind's history is filled with feuds which are completely pointless... "Ancient grudge", servants' street fight -- and general desire to feel better than someone else. Isn't this very pointlessness that Shakespeare intended the viewers to see?

“Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues”: This time around, I’m still flabbergasted that this is one of Shakespeare’s first plays. Queen Mab’s part, being no Titania, is still, for me, the best part of the play (Act 1, scene 4). It also epitomizes the core of the play; it starts in a merry mode, but Mercutio’s language and tone get darker as the play itself, symbolizing the play’s structure.

“Deny they father and refuse thy name”: On a funny note this is my favourite titbit, when Romeo compares Juliet to the sun, and her eyes to the stars, but she more consciously imagines removing him from society. Just priceless! Maybe this is what love is all about...

The play does move through contrasts.  We have the prologue which tells us the ending so there is no suspense even if we didn't know the plot, which everybody did, it was a common story.  So we see a frame which is dignified by the prologue but then is broken by the crude jokes and surly boy servants...who go totally out of control for no reason.  Then the father's jump in and it all escalated until we have as usual plenty of bleeding or dead bodies.  Then by contrast the Duke rides in and yells at everybody commanding them to stop the fighting on pain of death.  And establishes the fact that they have these fights all the time.  But his order, his threats don't work either.  Nothing stops the hatred until we see Romeo and Juliet in love and we contrast their love with the senseless hate.  Finally the tragedy of their deaths breaks through the hatred and ends it.  But we seesaw back and forth, scene by scene between these passions, passionate hatred and passionate love until the suicides.  Some people blame the nurse of the friar for going behind the parent’s backs.  There is great dignity in the final scenes, but at what price?

So. What’s my “truth” about Romeo and Juliet? Romeo and Juliet is a play about the misgivings of wisdom, and the absolute power of the heart over the brain. Here are two young people, who oftentimes are criticized for being immature and inexperienced, yet in the middle of a turf war between two brutal houses resulting in death after death, Romeo and Juliet are the only two brave enough to make peace!  And what inspires that peace?  Socratic Method?  Pontificating?  Cool-headed discussion?  No!  Teenage proclivity for, well, conjugation.  Some good old fashioned animal instinct driven (with a little help from the wheels of fortune) face licking.  Romeo and Juliet dare to defy the ways of their parents who appear to be more than happy with the status-quo.  Tybalt tries to kill Romeo, and what does he do?  Lay up his sword and proclaim his love for his secretly-cousin-in-law - until Tybalt goes and screws that up.

Romeo and Juliet represent the generation younger, the generation ephemeral and passionate, the generation not turned callous in habits cemented during the noon years of life; Romeo and Juliet represent the same generation that would take up twitter as a tool for civil disobedience, or a tool of entertainment, or simply put a tool for romance.  Meanwhile, we The Men and Ladies of Capulet and Montague, sit in our ivory tower telling the Romeos and Juliets what "should be done" and "must be done" because that is "the old way; the right way" being blind to the virtue of immaturity and spontaneity.

I still couldn’t care less for the love story itself. After all these years I still think it doesn't live up to its reputation. For me this time around the crux of the matter was still language (I’m repeating myself…). Love-story-wise it’s one hell of a soap opera. It has all of (the right) ingredients: dying at the end in each other’s arms, everyone going berserk; falling in love with someone that your elders do not approve of; key phrases/words placed in the right places (e.g., ”learn me how to lose a winning match, /played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods”, drawing your weapon, laying knife aboard, forcing women to the wall, thus creating a vivid contrast with the purity of Romeo and Juliet's love and language); your elders repenting of their sins after everyone worth caring for is already dead, etc. 

With so much soap-opera-ness how was Shakespeare able to produce this marvel? I don’t know what you call it, but I call it genius. With the all too common ignorance of ourselves and our motives caused by repression and projection, Shakespeare often gives us people who are saying the exact opposite of the truth.  The Greeks liked to use blindness as a metaphor for repression. Hence Freud's notorious Oedipal Complex.  But this problem of a superficial, ignorant banter that has little to do with reality is very common in theatre because many plays are about crises that force us into the self-awareness that we try to avoid but cannot.  Much of Shakespeare explores this subconscious world.

Read it.

NB: Off-topic. I’ve always been intrigued by the similitude between Shakespeare and Camões. What's with Camões and Shakespeare?  Camões' lyrical poetry has also a double fascination for me. First, before Shakespeare he was writing lines like "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun", thus also creating poems of wonderfully lucid wit and beauty like Shakespeare. Second, the lyrics show us his progress towards being the poet who would write "The Lusíads" later on.

NB2: Also off-topic. I read it in tandem with the latest Blutengel album “Omen”. Probably affected the way I re-read the play in ways I couldn’t even begin to fathom…dark romanticism befitting Shakespeare’s play (“Asche Zu Asche”, “Dein Gott”, Stay with Me).

NB3: Also off-topic. I read the play it in tandem with the BBC version with Alan Rickman (as Tybalt), John Gielgud (as the Chorus) and Anthony Andrews (as Mercutio). Absolute crap. Anthony Andrews and Alan Rickman are absolutely hilarious. At times I thought I was watching a Comedy…