Sunday, January 08, 2023

Alberto Estima de Oliveira — O Diálogo do Silêncio / The Dialogue of Silence 13

Another tricky one, mainly due to the difficulty of rendering Portuguese wordplay into English. I encountered this problem over and over when I translated Virgílio de Lemos' book of poems Para Fazer um Mar (which I should post here, since I doubt my translation will ever get published), and I couldn't solve it then, either. Part of it is due to my own lack of skill, but I think it's just very, very hard to do in the first place.

Take the first two lines, for example: "ar mar / armar" - the first is clear the latter broken in two, but it's also two distinct words on its own. I can't think of any English words for "air" and "sea" that can be combined to form a word meaning "raise" or "erect" or "build." Now imagine reading this poem in translation without the Portuguese original available. It wouldn't be totally incomprehensible, but you wouldn't think it was a good poem, either. With the Portuguese text included, you at least get the sense of what Oliveira is doing, even if you might not understand it.

There's other stuff going on, but I'll leave it here for now. I just wanted to point out some basic translation issues that are as old as the Tower of Babel.

DAS


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13

ar mar
armar
o cerco

arriba

ala ala
alar
a vela
ao vento

navegar
no tempo.


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13

air sea
raise
the net

pull in

heave heave
hoist
the sail
to the wind

sail
through time.

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