Published
2014
One day I got to my class and after 10
minutes without other classmates arriving, my teacher Winfried Scheulen and I
agreed to talk about anything worth our fancy. Being Poetry one of my long-term
interests, I asked him who his favourite poet in the German Language was. I was
expecting something along the lines of Rilke, Hölderlin, Hesse, but what came
out of his mouth was Paul Celan. My journey of discovery regarding Celan
started that day. The next day I went out and started canvassing all the
bookstores in Lisbon trying to find something with Celan written on the cover,
which I did: two wonderful bilingual collections (German vs Portuguese) by one
of our most distinguished Professors of German Studies: João Barrento. It was
through these collections (“Sete Rosas
Mais Tarde”/”Seven Roses Later” with Yvette Centeno and “A
Morte É Uma Flor”/”Death is a Flower”) that Celan became instantiated in me:
Later on I got to read many more stuff in German concerning Celan, but I’ve
always been keen on understanding on what it means to translate, especially
when we are talking about someone as untranslatable as Celan, and this two
collections were where it all started for me.
Celan is for me synonym with Hermetism. One
might say this is not a “problem” with Celan but with all Poetry in general.
Celan (like Rilke and Hölderlin did before him), transformed (or were
transformed by) the German Language to fit their need to explain their Weltanschauung through poetry.
To talk about Celan is to talk about “Atemwende” -, a title very difficult to
translate into Portuguese; there were several attempts: “Mudança de Ar”,
“Sopro, Viragem” (Barrento’s choice), “Mudança de Respiração”, “Viragem na
Respiração” (Gilda Encarnação’s choice) -, which in the beginning eluded me in
its difficulty at translatability. This fixation was so great that I ended up
translating the all thing using, at the time, my very awful command of the
German Language (and with a lot of help from several dictionaries).
Incidentally this work is still up in the attic; in an Horatian mode, it’s
still waiting for its maturation to see the light of day… It was only when I
made the attempt at producing my own version at translating Celan’s poetry (at that time) that
I truly suffered the impact of the task. This grappling with Celan’s poetry
resulted in a very impetuous, and uncontrolled approach which was the only way to
deal with something that shook me to my inner core. To deal with it I had to
migrate the original to my own mother-tongue. Gilda Encarnação’s version made
me come back to it:
Du
darfst mich getrost
mit
Schnee bewirten:
sooft
ich Schulter an Schulter
mit
dem Maubeerbaum schritt durch den Sommer,
schrie sein jüngstes
Blatt.
|
Podes, consolado,
servir-me neve:
sempre que, ombro a ombro
com a amoreira, percorria o Verão,
a sua folha mais recente me
gritava.
|
(my version)
Encarnação’s version:
Du
darfst mich getrost
mit
Schnee bewirten:
sooft
ich Schulter an Schulter
mit
dem Maubeerbaum schritt durch den Sommer,
schrie sein jüngstes
Blatt.
|
Podes sem receio
Acolher-me com neve:
Sempre que ombro com ombro
Atravessava o Verão com a amoreira,
Gritava a sua mais tenra
Folha.
|
Comparing the two versions, my own attempt does
not strike too discordant a note.
Now, on to the issues I had with Encarnação’s
translation (just a few examples):
1 - "laß es wandern” = “deixa-o errar“ (page 61). “wandern” in its strictest sense means “to go
for a walk” (andar, caminhar in Portuguese); upon reading Encarnação’s
translation of this verse I was to lead to believe that we were talking about
“making mistakes” (“errar” in Portuguese). There’s nothing in the verse that
might put us on that particular instantiation of the original;
2 - “Wär ich wie du” = “Fora eu como tu” (“Were I like you”) (page 65). It’s erroneous to say the
least. I’d have used “Se eu fosse como
tu” (“If I were you”);
3 - “Bei Wortschein” = “ao luar do verbo” (page 131). I’d have translated this as “à Luz da Palavra” using a very common theological expression, be it Portuguese or, for that matter,
English (“at the word’s light”);
4 – “Von
Ungeträumtem geätzt, wirft das schlaflos durchwanderte Brotland den Lebensberg
auf.” = “Pelo insonhado corroída, a terra do pão insonemente percorrida
atira o monte da vida ao ar” (page 141). Celan “wants” to express the inability to put into words some sort of
violent experience that might be beyond what may be dreamed. To rightly
interpret (and translate) this verse one would have to understand the keyword
“Lebensberg” (a “gathering of experience” and not “a pile of life”/”um monte de
vida” in Encarnação’s version). Using this as a clue I’d have translated “Von Ungeträumtem geätzt” as “corrompido
pelo não-sonhado“/“corroded by the undreamed”). This way it sounds like I’m now
reading Portuguese and not some kind of Ersatz-Portugiese;
5 - “Ausgeschlüfte
Chitin sonnen. Die Panzerlurche nehmen
die blauen Gebetmäntel um, die sand-hörige Möwe heisst es gut, das lauernde
Brandkraut geht in sich” = Sóis de quitina brotados do ovo. Os
batráqueos blindados põem os paramentos azuis pelos ombros, a gaivota submissa
à areia aplaude-o, a vigilante erva-fogo entra em si” (page 231). I’d have used the expression
“recém-chocado”/”newly-hatched”. “Brotado do ovo” sounds weird in Portuguese.
My take on this particular stanza:
“Sóis de quitina recém-chocados. Os anfíbios blindados envolvem-se
em paramentos azuis, a gaivota dependente da areia responde na afirmativa, a
furtiva folha-fogo rumina.”
(“Chitin
suns newly-hatched. Armoured
amphibians wrap themselves up in blue liturgical vestments, the sun-dependent
gull calls out in the affirmative, the furtive fire-leaf stops and thinks”).
A common expression in German “in sich gekehrt” should have been the
clue for this part of the poem…
I could have given a few more examples, but you
get the gist. When translating Celan one shouldn’t go for the rhyme. Celan is
not a rhyme type of poet. Celan inhabits another space-time continuum…Celan’s
poetry needs a translator-poet which I’m not. I think In Portuguese only Vasco Graça Moura who translated Rilke, Gottfried
Benn, Walter Benjamin, H. M. Enzensberger, etc. would have been able to render
Celan’s German into Portuguese. Alas, he’s no longer among us to enlighten us
as to the “details” of Celan’s poetry. We still have Barrento’s renderings into
Portuguese, so all is not lost…
Bottom-line: 3 stars for Gilda Lopes Encarnação’s
translation, and 4 stars for the afterword “À luz da U-topia”/”In the light of
U-topia”/Im Licht der U-topie”, which gives us 3.5 stars. Not bad for an
attempt on Celan’s poetry.
