CHAPTER 35
Robert de Brose
Introduction: The Beginnings1
The history of the Classical Tradition in Brazil begins with the Jesuits, who arrived in 1549 with the Portuguese in what is today the state of Bahia to “save” the souls of the native South Americans. In 1549, the Jesuit priest Manuel da Nóbrega (1517–1570) founded the Colégio de Salvador da Bahia (later promoted to a Royal College),2 where Latin was not only taught, but was indeed the language of instruction, alongside with Tupinambá, the language of the indigenous people which, in an adaptation to the Ratio Studiorum, substituted Ancient Greek. In 1556, the teaching of Latin and Greek, was introduced in the Colégio dos Meninos de Jesus, in São Vicente, São Paulo, as part of the curriculum of Humanities. During the fifteenth century, the first chairs of Greek and Latin were created in the states of Bahia, Espírito Santo, Pernambuco, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Pará and in what was then the Brazilian Colônia do Sacramento (now part of Uruguay). During this whole period the educational system was in the hands of the Jesuits, who soon became very powerful and rich.3 This led to a series of reforms enacted by Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello (1699–1782), the Marquis of Pombal, to snatch away from the Jesuits their possessions in the Colonies and their educational monopoly. Ultimately this led to their expulsion in 1759.
Now the education in Portugal and Brazil was in the hands of the State, whose minister in these affairs should be the General Director of Studies, appointed by the Marquis of Pombal. This caused the teaching of Greek and Latin to be remodeled within the new system of “aulas régias” (royal lectures). In 1774 the Chair of Philosophy, taught in Latin, was created in Rio de Janeiro and that of Latin in São João del-Rei. These were followed, sometime later, in 1776, by the creation of the chairs of Classical Rhetoric, Greek and Hebrew. Despite all these changes promoted by the Marquis of Pombal, Portugal and, consequently, its colonies, lagged far behind in the advances promoted by Illuminist ideas already spread throughout the rest of Europe.4 The printing of books, for example, would be forbidden in Brazil until the end of the Colonial Period (1500–1808), a fact which greatly discouraged the production and publication of books and translations in large scale.5
After the Independence (1822), the Emperor D. Pedro II of Brazil, a poet, erudite, Maecenas of the arts and sciences, and a translator himself,6 made the teaching of Latin and, on a lesser scale Greek, compulsory for all the seven years of the secondary cycle of education, as it was then called. It was with the advent of the Republic, put into motion by the military (who were heavily influenced by the positivist ideas of August Comte), that instruction in Latin and Greek begun to decline. Accordingly, Greek was excluded from the curriculum in 1915, and from 1920 onward, several sectors of the Brazilian society started to question the usefulness of teaching Latin to students in a world marked by the advance of the industry, technology, and science. This eventually put pressure in legislators to modernize the educational system in Brazil. It was felt that students needed instruction in the more practical skills demanded by an industrialized world. In 1962, after several reforms, Latin was made optional to students of the secondary cycle. In 1992, the same allowance was made for those pursuing degrees in Humanities in Higher Education institutions.7
This historical context helps to explain why it was only in the last decades of the twentieth century that the study and translation of classical authors started to steadily develop in Brazil, growing in both quantity and quality. This is not to say that there was no pioneering translation work done before that date, but it was too little and scattered to produce a mass of readers. Moreover, translation of the classical authors before the twentieth century tended to be primarily focused on Homer and Virgil.
Greek Lyric in Translation in Brazil
There are not many studies dealing with the history of the reception and translation of the Classics in Brazil, which, as Duarte (2016) says, is yet to be written, but there are some trends that can be noticed.
Rather unsurprisingly, the importance of epic and tragedy has loomed larger than any other genre, and lyric, especially Greek lyric, has received the least attention. In edited books and special issues of journals dealing with the translation of the Classics in Brazil there is hardly ever any mention to Greek lyric. For example, in a book on the receptions of the Classics in Brazil and Portugal edited by de Fátima Silva and de Moraes Augusto (2015) the word “lyric” comes up only twice and there is not a single chapter dedicated to Greek (or Latin) lyric. In Brazil, a similar, if slightly better picture, emerges from the articles collected in the special issue of the journal Caleitroscópio titled Classical Tradition in Brazil: Translation, Rewriting, and Reception (Agnolon 2016), but even here the articles limit themselves to Latin epic or elegy.
In countries like Portugal and Brazil, with such a long and rich lyric tradition, this lack of interest in Greek lyric is difficult to understand, and it would be hardly possible to try to elucidate the reasons for it in this chapter… One factor that may play a role is that lyric is still felt to be the most aristocratic of the genres and this, in new democracies such as Brazil, may pose a barrier for some academics and students, who may feel uncomfortable with the highly aristocratic, often parochial, and male-centered themes of Greek lyric. Only recently has a more systematic approach to present a synoptic history of Greek lyric poetry in translation in Brazil emerged, such as those of Duarte (2016) and of Brunhara (2019).
Duarte (2016), who leaves out the Colonial Period, for example, distinguishes three eras in the reception and translation of the Classics in Brazil after Independence (1822). The first is that of the Founding Fathers (“Patriarcas”), represented by the first translators of Homer and Virgil such as José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva (1763–1838), Odorico Mendes (1799–1864), João Gualberto Ferreira dos Santos Reis (1787–1861), and the Emperor himself, who produced a translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus.8
The second, that of the “Dilletanti,” is comprised mainly of non-academics, such as Carlos Alberto Nunes (1897–1990), translator of the Iliad, Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid and the dialogues of Plato; Péricles Eugênio da Silva Ramos (1919–1992), who produced an anthology of Greek and Latin poetry, and a translation of Virgil’s Bucolics; Mário da Gama Kury (1922–), a lawyer who taught himself Greek and is one of the most prolific translators of classical texts in Brazil; the poet and translator Guilherme de Almeida (1890–1969), who translated Sophocles’ Antigone; José Paulo Paes (1926–1998), another poet, who translated epigrams from Palladas of Alexandria (Palladas 1992), an anthology of poems from the Palatine Anthology (Paes 2001); Millôr Fernandes (1923–2012), journalist, writer, and editorial cartoonist, translated many of Aristophanes’ comedies.
Finally, the third, that of the “Doctors” (“Doutores”),9 by which Duarte means academics, either scholars, normally professors at Universities, or graduate students who, as part of their requirements to achieve an MA in Classics, usually produce annotated translations.10 There are too many names in this category to be enumerated here. Some of them will appear in what follows.
Narrowing the focus to translations of Greek lyric, Brunhara (2019) informs us that the first anthology of Greek lyric lato sensu (it included only elegies) published in Brazil was that of Vittorio de Falco and A. de Faria e Coimbra (Coimbra and de Falco 1941), based on Diehl’s Anthologia Lyrica (1936). This poetic translation, with an accompanying philological commentary, was in fact one of the first dissertations written at the then recently founded graduate program in Classics of the University of São Paulo. The first volume included elegies by Callinus, Archilochus, Tyrtaeus, Asius of Samos, Semonides of Amorgos, and Mimnermus. The second one, which would include all other archaic elegists, was never published.
In 1964, Pericles Eugênio da Silva Ramos published his Poesia Grega e Latina (Ramos 1964), which included selected poems by Archilochus, Alcman, Mimnermus, Sappho, Ibycus, Anacreon, Pindar (only selected passages from the epinicians), orphic hymns from the Golden Leaves. The second part of the book consists of translations from Latin poets. In the seventies, Malhadas and Neves (1976) published an anthology of Greek poetry from Homer to Pindar. Their selection of lyric poets, however, is fraught by the absence of Alcman, Ibycus, Stesichorus, and Hipponax is represented by a single fragment.
After a large hiatus in which translations were published in isolation, mainly in academic journals and monographs, some anthologies begin to appear. In 1984, a special issue of the journal “Remate de Males” published an anthology of translations done by José Cavalcante de Souza (1984), then professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of São Paulo (USP). De Souza’s translations had already circulated for a long time in carefully typed and mimeographed sheets of paper among the students of Greek Literature at USP, and were instrumental in shaping a generation of translators, many of whom went on to become professors and translators. Among the translated poets included in the special issue are Alcman, Archilochus, Sappho, Solon, Tyrtaeus, poems from the Carmina Popularia, and the Palaikastro Hymn (also known as “Hymn of the Kouretes”). In that same volume there appeared two translations of Sappho done by Jaa Torrano (1984). In 2012, Leonardo Antunes, poet and professor at the University of Rio Grande do Sul, published an anthology of 23 poems from several Greek poets. Following in the footsteps of Carlos Alberto Nunes, he aimed for a poetic translation that would reproduce the rhythm of the original by equating long syllables in the Greek to stressed ones in Portuguese. In 2011, Ragusa published an anthology of Sappho and, later, another of Greek lyric (Ragusa 2013) or, as she prefers to call it, “melic,” that is, lyric to the exclusion of elegy and iambus. In her anthology, each translation is accompanied by a commentary, and notes to guide the reader. In an special issue of the journal Cadernos de Literatura em Tradução (2016), we have the translation of Pindar’s Olympian 1 by Sergio Romero; the “Roman” section (lines 1226–1282) of Lycophron’s Alexandra by R. Brunhara; Theocritus Idyll XVI, by E. Nogueira, and of Idyll XIX by Daniel P. P. da Costa. The last anthology of Greek lyric is that of Vieira (2017). In it he tried to apply Haroldo de Campos “transcreative” principles of translation.11 The poets included are Archilochus, Semonides of Amorgos, Mimnermus, Alcman, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Hipponax and Simonides of Ceos. Finally, there are some anthologies like Martins (2010) and Onelley, de Almeida Peçanha, and Santos (2013). These are organized by academics within postgraduate programs of Classics in Brazilian universities, and are freely available on the Internet in eBook format.
These, then are all the anthologies of Greek lyric poetry of which I know, and I doubt that there are any others.12 As for individual authors, Anacreon (or rather, the poems of the Anacreontea) and Sappho are the ones best represented, with five translations each. For Anacreon, we have translations of the odes by Fancisco da Silva Malhão, one by Almeida Cousin, re-edited three times by different publishers (1948, 1966, 1983), and one by Jamil Almansur Haddad (1952). For Sappho, besides the one by Ragusa (Sappho 2011), already mentioned, there is one by Jamil Almansur Haddad (1942) (most likely the first one in Brazil), another by Álvaro Antunes (1987), two by Joaquim Brasil Fontes (1992, 2003) and the most recent and comprehensive one, including the new discovered fragments, by Guilherme G. Flores (2017).13 Flores also published a translation of Callimachus’ epigrams (Callimachus 2019). Pindar has two translations, one comprising all poems and fragments by Rocha (2018), another only the book of the Olympics by Glória B. Onelley and Shirley Peçanha (2016).14 Lycophron’s Alexandra has been recently translated by T. Vieira (2017).
Since it would be impractical to make a detailed analysis of each one of the translations of these anthologies and authors, and given that I have dealt with the reception and translation of Sappho in another work (de Brose 2020), I thought it would be in the best interest of the reader to look in depth at the trends in translation for a single poet. For this task, I have chosen Pindar, and in what follows I will analyze the works of four different translators, each representative of the aesthetics and translational trends of their time.
Pindar in Brazil
In 1825, José Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva15 (1763–1838), under the pseudonym Américo Elysio, published his translation of Pindar’s Olympian One, the first in Portuguese, in his Poesias Esparsas (“Sundry Poems”).16 Andrada e Silva’s translation was remarkable in at least two ways. Firstly, because he was able to achieve the ever sought, but hardly attained balance between poetic quality and philological accuracy. Secondly, and most importantly, because the theorical principles that underlay and guided his translation anticipated trends in the theoretical thinking about translation that were only incipient in Europe at his time. For example, the idea popularized by Goethe (1813: 705), and later elevated to a principle of translation practice by Schleiermacher (1813 [1969]), that there are only two ways of translating: either by bringing the author close to the reader, or, conversely, the reader to the author. Andrade e Silva, like his contemporary F. Hölderlin (1770–1843) in Germany, is perhaps the first Brazilian to have chosen the foreignizing alternative of Grecizing the Portuguese,17 centuries before the likes of Ezra Pound and Haroldo de Campos.
In the short essay preceding his translation, Andrade e Silva shows a preoccupation in producing an equivalent poetical text that would not only be able to render the meaning of the original, but also reproduce its poetic qualities in terms of verbal artistry and poetical imagery. According to him, he sought to reproduce in the translation the same “electric jolt” (121) of the original. For that to work he believed that the reader should be made aware of the performative aspects of Greek lyric, namely, that what he translated was song, always performed to musical accompaniment, and often choreographed. According to him, this contextualization of the nature of Pindar’s lyrics is important for a fully appreciation of his translation, otherwise
many of the leaps and flights of Pindar’s imagination will seem to some modern readers as the birth of an inebriated mind or of an unbalanced brain rather than the product of Apollo’s inspiration. However, for the Greeks of yore, what a strong electrification would be induced by the mere planning of ideas, the design, the play of light and darkness, and the proportion between thoughts and images, the constant historic and mythical allusions, and, above all else, the poetic rhythm and the melody of a language that did not, nor ever will, have a parallel in the whole world.
(118)
Recognizing the limits of an analytic language such as Portuguese to convey what he calls Pindar’s “laconic character,” which allows the poet to compress so much meaning into few words, he nonetheless believes in the superiority of Portuguese to better emulate this characteristic than other European languages into which Pindar had already been translated. According to him, Portuguese is “beautiful, rich and sonorous; less harsh and dull than the German or the English tongue; more energetic and varied than Italian; softer and natural than Castillian, and superior in everything else to the French tongue” (120–121). Even though he pleads to admire the suitability of French for logic and rhetorical texts, he deplores its inability to convey “bold and new poetical images,” lamenting the fact that the language of the troubadours of South France has submerged under the political and economic weight of the Norman and Piccard dialects of the North.
It is important to understand that Andrada e Silva in this essay is openly rebelling against the influence of French literature and style in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazilian writing, not only because French authors were very popular and widely read by the upper classes in Brazil, but also because a great deal of translations from Greek and Latin were done indirectly through French. This influence has left a strong impression on how translators will deal with the freer and, in Pindar’s case, sometimes convoluted syntax of the original by trying to make it conform to notions of order, clarity, and textual coherence that were imported from French and that clashed with the labyrinthic style of lyric poetry in Portuguese. Because of these views, he excuses himself for not consulting any English and French translations, commenting that he had access only to Gedike’s (1777) and lamenting the fact that he was not able to consult that of Voß (1777), whom he claims to hold in high esteem.
Let us briefly examine the challenges encountered by Andrada e Silva in the original Greek of Pindar, and which he strove to emulate, since he anticipates most of the twentieth-century modernist movement of “Transcreative Translation” of the Campos brothers, Haroldo and Augusto, discussed below. Andrada e Silva’s echoes the notions of paraphrase, imitation, and (similar) effect (Wirkung) developed into a full theory by Schleiermacher18 (1813/1969) when he says that:
If it [the translation] were to be too close to the letter, it would be bad for the barbarism of the phrase and unintelligible for its obscurity in the style; if too loose and free, it would not be a translation, but a paraphrase, or a composition of mine. I have sought, therefore, whenever I could not keep pace with Pindar, either not to deviate too much from his track, following in his footsteps, or, as a honourable debtor not being able to pay him in the same currency in which I had borrowed, I have sought, as much as it was in my power, to pay him back in another coin, equivalent in carats and weight.
(126)
In his translation, he is particularly concerned, for example, with achieving the imagetic effect of Pindar’s compound adjectives, such as ἀκαμαντόπους (“of untiring feet,” said of the thunder in Olympian 3.1). In harmony with his evaluation of Portuguese as a much more flexible language, he believes the translator should strive to enrich the vernacular by coining new words whenever Portuguese lacks an appropriate compound adjective, and whenever the rules of word formation, inherited through Latin, would allow. If only, he adds (124), the epic poet Luís de Camões (1525–1580) had been knowledgeable in Greek as he was in Latin, then translators would certainly be better equipped to face the challenge posed by Pindaric “laconism.” His reference to Camões, known for creating new words calqued from Latin for his epic poem Os Lusiadas (“The Lusiads”), is an attempt to legitimize his practice of coining new terms to “enrich the language” (124). Accordingly, he proposes translations for compound adjectives common in Pindar, such as, “auricómada” (χρυσοκόμης, “golden-haired”), roxicómada (ἰοπλόκαμος, “violet- or dark-haired”), braccirosea (λευκώλενος, “white-armed”), olhinegra (κελαινῶψ, “black-faced or -eyed”), olhiamorosa (εὐώψ, “fair-eyed”), argentipede (ἀργυρόπεζα, “silver-footed” or “-sandaled”), tranciloira (ξανθοκόμης, “golden-haired”), docifallante (ἁδυλογος, “sweet-voiced”) etc., and finishes his essay by saying that
Let them, the future Brazilian engineers [of words], dare give this noble example to the Portuguese language, now that a new epoch opens itself in the vast and young Empire of Brazil; and I believe that, despite the ugly faces of the timid purists, Portuguese, already beautiful and rich, will be able to rival, in power and concision, with Latin, from which it sprung.
(125)
In 1957, Mário Faustino (1930–1962), a young journalist and a poet of only one book—published posthumously, since he died tragically in an airplane crash when he was only 32 years old—, published a translation of Olympian 1 in the Jornal do Brasil’s Sunday supplement, which has been hailed more recently as one of the best translations of this ode. Faustino did not translate directly from the Greek. He produced, instead, an indirect translation, with some explanatory notes, from the translations of Richard Lattimore, in English, and Aimé Puech, in French.19 His translation is clearly inspired by the Poundian praxis of “make it new,” and it is not by chance that, in the same page, he translates some extracts from Hugh Kenner’s introduction to The Translations of Ezra Pound.
Faustino, unlike Andrada e Silva, did not believe that Portuguese was able to reproduce the richness of Pindar’s poems in translation. He sums up his views in a few sentences that would later (and even to this day) become a common place in discussions about the purported (un)translatability of Pindar:
Without knowing Greek, and without being a “métrician,” the translator, in trying the impossible (to reproduce in Portuguese the most complicated of Greek verses), preferred to translate Pindar in the most modern style and verse possible. On the other hand, the advice from some translators, including Lattimore, was adopted according to which there is much that is ironic in this ode by Pindar, which is much more playful (…) than others may think.
This is in harsh contrast to Andrada e Silva’s optimism seen above. The idea, however, that Pindar is untranslatable at the level of the form, and, for Pound and other modernists, unrelatable at the level of content,20 given his subject matter, will be a constant in much of the modern attitudes of academics and translators toward Pindar, leading to an overall lack of interest in his poetry, to the point that the first complete translation of his odes and fragments would appear only in 2018.21
The next, and most influential, translation of Pindar into Brazilian Portuguese is that of Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003).22 In 1969, he wrote a short essay titled Píndaro, Hoje (“Pindar, Today”23) in which he uses, for the first time, the term Transcriação (“Transcreation”) to name his theory of creative translation inspired by Jakobson’s ideas on poetic of translation.24 This would only be possible through the recreation of the verbal equations of the original in the translation. Píndaro, Hoje serves as an introduction to his translation of Pindar’s First Pythian Ode, in which de Campos tries to distance himself from the academic practice of translation. According to him, his translation was not meant “to philologists, self-absorbed in their specialties as if in tombs of lead, unwilling of commerce with the living” (109) but to those who take interest in a poetical text as living poetry.
The argument that de Campos presents for a transcreative translation is based on two main observations: first, that those who wish to know the referential meaning of a poem can consult bilingual texts with prose translations, and, second, that the professional poet is in a better position to translate poetry than the scholar that only occasionally acts a poet. For, he continues, although the latter certainly has a superior knowledge of the formal aspects and specificities of the language (the “língua”) of the poet on whom he is a specialist and whom he attempts to translate, he lacks, on the other hand, the professional poet’s knowledge of the language (the “linguagem”),25 its aesthetic possibilities, stock forms and relations to other languages. All points summed, he thinks the score is in favor of the poet-translator, in his capacity of a “designer of language.”26
Passing on from his program to the practical considerations of his translation of Pythian 1, he acknowledges Faustino’s translation as the “only readable” Pindar in Portuguese, noting however that contrary to Faustino’s translation, his own was made directly from the original, using as a guide the Loeb edition of Sandys (1937) and the French one by Puech.27 He also acknowledges having used the prose translation of Richard Lattimore (1942),28 which he considers “beautiful and fluent, albeit not radical enough” (112).29 As for the versification, de Campos used what he called the “modern polymetric verse,” making use of indentations “to achieve a dynamic effect.”30 Interestingly, for such a wide-read person such as de Campos, he seems to have ignored Andrada e Silva’s essay and translation of Olympian 1 for he presents his solutions as something new and radical:
Whenever I could replicate the sonority of the compounded Greek epithets, I did not shy away from neologisms: thus “gruta polinome” (“polyónymon ántron,” “polynamed cave”31) is what would be most commonly rendered by “of many names,” “famous,” “honored under many names.” Whenever the resulting compound [i.e., in Portuguese] did not seem viable to me, I strove to maintain the plastic force of the epithet by projecting it to the position after the noun that it qualifies, as an interposed clause, in brackets: “…entre o píncaro/ (folhas nêgras) e o plano”32 for “en melanphyllois [sic] korypháis” (alternatively “nos folhinegros píncaros”33). I translated by giving emphasis to literality, “makhana” by “máquina” [machine] (which is so present in our daily concept of “maquinar” [to machinate]) and I dislodged this word, for a better poetical effect in the translation, from its syntactical position in the original (“ek theón gar makhanái pásai brotéais aretaís”: “dos deuses vêm todos os instrumentos para as virtudes humanas”34). (…) Regarding the transposition of the Pindaric melopoeia, I resourced, as it is easy to see, to alliteration and to paranomastic effects (…)
(119)
This all sounds very exciting. However, when the reader contrasts the views and goals expounded in his preliminary essay with the final translation, the result is rather underwhelming. It is, for one thing, much less radical than Andrada e Silva’s and less fluent than Faustino’s; for, except for the few compounds he chooses to transcreate, and which appear in the quotation above, he treads a safe path in an ode marked by extravagant diction and inventiveness in word composition. For example, he does not attempt to recreate beautiful compounds such as ἰοπλόκαμος (“tranças de violeta,” “with violet locks”), ἀγησίχορος (“prelúdios condutores de coros,” “preludes that lead the chorus”), ἑκατογκάρανος (“cem-testas,” “hundred-heads”), ὀπιθόμβροτος (“além-morte,” “death-surpassing”) etc. He opts, moreover, for a pedestrian syntax, avoiding the many hyperbata that characterize Pindar’s diction and particularly this ode. De Campos’s claim that he tried to reproduce Pindar’s melopoeia are also not warranted by the result of this translation: his rendition of Pindar’s echomimetic use of plosives and rhythm in vv. 22–4 (Snell-Maehler) is flat and anticlimactic, without any attempt at reproducing the sound play of the original. He translates the Greek
ἀλλ’ ἐν ὄρφναισιν πέτρας
φοίνισσα κυλινδομένα φλὸξ ἐς βαθεῖ-
αν φέρει πόντου πλάκα σὺν πατάγωι.
as
E púrpura na treva
uma chama rolando
repulse ao mar profundo
um tumulto de pedras.
(And in the purple darkness
a rolling flame
repulses to the deep sea
a tumult of stones).
One cannot help but wonder whether de Campos had any real appreciation for Pindar’s poetry, or whether Pindar only represented to him an exercise in translation which would also give him the opportunity of measuring himself with the poets/translators he so much admired. There is certainly a desire to emulate Pound, indicated not only in the high praise accorded to him in the essay, but also by imitating Pound’s practice of mixing Greek and English (in his case, Portuguese). He does so in this ode by preceding his translation with the words “khryséa phórmincs” (“Golden lyre”) the transliterated apostrophe to the lire in the first verse of the ode.
The latest translation, and the only one so far, of Pindar’s complete works is that by Rocha (2018). This translation is accompanied by a lengthy introduction dealing with Pindar’s life, the nature of epinician poetry and Pindar’s style, a brief discussion on aspects dealing with the original composition of the songs and the organization of the odes made by the Alexandrians. There are also sections dealing with explanations of the games and a brief survey of the main modern interpretations to Pindar’s poetry. Finally, the last section deals with the criteria for the translation of the poems. According to Rocha he tried
to present the clearest possible text while trying to preserve the poetical diction as much as possible. (…) To achieve this goal, I tried to maintain in Portuguese, as far as possible, certain characteristics of the compositions by this poet, such as the frequent use of metaphors and comparisons, chiasmi, and the invention or reuse of composite words. (…) In my translation I tried to find a middle term between a faithful translation and, at the same time, one that remains readable for the uninitiated reader. However, trying to be faithful to the original, I deemed it relevant not to make the resulting text too easy, which would imply a high degree of interpretation and a subjective reading biased by my personal points of view. Therefore, I opted to preserve in Portuguese the literalness and the density of the metaphors so that the result would be the less interpretative and the more poetic possible (in a Poundian way: poetry is language concentrated). I preferred to preserve a certain strangeness [for the reader], for Pindar’s songs were difficult to understand even for its original audiences. (…) As for the metre, I decided not to try to reproduce in Portuguese the rhythms found in Pindar’s poetry. Greek language is quite different from our own (…). Furthermore, Pindar used metrical structures in his poems that are quite different from the ones of our Iberian tradition. (…) This is why I chose free verses, trying to keep with the structure of the original verses as far as possible. (…) Pindar creates many new words, composite words, normally adjectives, combining different roots. There are many hapax legomenoi in the Pindaric corpus. (…) Therefore, trying to keep with the spirit of the original (…) I created composite adjectives by means of haplology (…). For example: “brilantrovejante” (“bright-thundering”) (…) in Paean 12.9.
(47–50)
Rocha’s translation is an interesting case of a scholar that has also published original poetry and is certainly able to combine the skills of both a competent philologist and the sensibility of a poet. His translation is unequivocally inspired by the Haroldian and Poundian praxis, but, at least considering what we have just discussed about de Campos’ translation, he goes much further. As promised in the Introduction, he does not shy away from the compound adjectives and, following the advice of Andrada e Silva, with whose work he is acquainted, he comes up with several solutions to tackle Pindar’s bold creations, such as “violitrâncias” (ἰοπλόκαμος), “lideracoros” (ἀγησίχορος), “semprefluente” (αἰέναος), “escurolho” (κελαινώψ), “fundidrapejantes” (βαθυκόλπος), “centicápite” (ἑκατογκάρανος), just to cite some from Pythian I. He also keeps his promise of trying to reproduce Pindar’s complicated syntax, but here he is much more conservative, probably because of his compromise in weighing in faithfulness and readability. His translation, which is too recent to be critically assessed, is an attempt to break away with the domestication of Greek lyric, and for that it deserves to be commended.
***
Compared to Europe, the United States and even the rest of Latin America, Brazilian classical tradition is just in its beginnings. Given the historical peculiarities of Brazilian history, the teaching of Greek has always been limited to a few places and people from the start, experiencing a brief expansion under the Second Empire, in the nineteenth century under D. Pedro II, and again in the late decades of the twentieth century, thanks to a robust program of expansion and investment in public federal universities (where 95% of the country’s top research is done) known as REUNI (Restructuration and Expansion Plan for Federal Universities) and to the consequently greater availability of governmental funding for researchers and students, especially those from outside economical centers such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. These measures led to an exponential increase of students that were able to pursue a degree in classics all over the country in the last twenty years and that later went on to become academics, translators, or even publishers.35 Most of them are now teaching, translating, and publishing works of Greek literature, among which lyric poetry.
There is still a lot of work to be done, but if this virtuous cycle continues, it is expected that many more Greek lyric poets will be translated or retranslated in the near future, helping to shape a canon of translated Greek lyric poetry in Brazilian Portuguese. The era of indirect translations from English, French, German, or other European languages may have finally come to an end.
FURTHER READING
As I have said in previous sections, Brazil has chosen to focus on other literary genders such as historic prose, epic, and drama, instead of lyric. Besides the works cited above, there are a few other resources that the interested reader can look for, most of them in online open access journals, and in websites dedicated to poetry and translation.
The interested reader may profit from reading Tuffani’s (2019) preliminary version of a catalogue of Greek authors published in Brazil between 1837 and 2016. Interesting is also the Neto’s (2016) introduction to a special issue of the journal Cadernos de Literatura em Tradução. Duarte’s (2016) summary review of history of the translation of the Classics in Brazil, which, even if not comprehensive, is a stepping-stone to further studies. The most updated account in relation to Greek lyric is that of Brunhara (2019). For Sappho in particular, see Brose (2020).
For Pindar, other translations that I did not mention in the previous sections that are worth checking are those of Teodoro R. Assunção (1999), who translated Olympian 4 alongside a small commentary in which he discusses the challenges of translating poetry from a language that is completely different from Portuguese. Heavily influenced by Benjamim’s The Task of the Translator he denounces translations that are only poetic in that they are arbitrarily divided into verses, while advocating for a translation that, abandoning the meter, would focus on reconstructing the poetic syntax of the original.
Carlos. L. B. Antunes’ (2013) study of the meter and rhythm of Pindar’s Pythian odes also proposes a translation of these in which he aims for a rhythmical reproduction in Portuguese. Sérgio L. Romero (2016) proposes a translation of Olympian 1 that takes into account the performative dimension of the epinicians, calling for a translation that tries to be mindful of the larger context in which this ode was inserted, that is, the musical and corporeal dimension that are important to its understanding.
There are also many resources in the form of dissertations that deal with Greek lyric, its receptions and translation. It is common for these monographs to be accompanied by original translations made by the author that in most cases are never published. However, Brazilian law requires all of them to be made available online, and, even though this may not cover older ones, which depend on being digitalized by already understaffed university libraries, they represent a wealth of resources for those who can read Portuguese.
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PORTUGUESE TRANSLATIONS OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE REFERRED TO IN THIS CHAPTER
Anthologies
1941. Trans. A. F. Coimbra and V. de Falco. Os Elegíacos Gregos: de Calino a Crates. Com Texto Crítico, Tradução em Versos Portugueses e Notas (Vol. 1). São Paulo: Sociedade Brasileira Impressora De Brusco & Cia.
1964. Trans. P. E. da S. Ramos. Poesia Grega e Latina. São Paulo: Cultrix.
1976. Trans. D. Malhadas and M. H. de M. Neves. Antogologia de Poetas Gregos de Homero a Píndaro—com a colaboração de Maria Celeste Consolin e Maria Nazareth Guimarães Cardoso. São Paulo: Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letas de Araraquara da Universidade Estadual Paulista.
1984. Trans. J. C. de Souza. “Parece-me ser igual aos deuses/Fragmentos/Carmina Popularia/Hino dos Kuretas,” Remate de Males, 4, 21.
2001. Trans. J. P. Paes. Poemas da Antologia Grega ou Palatina. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
2010. Ed. P. Martins. Antologia de Poetas Gregos e Latinos (Monódica e Coral, Jâmbica, Polímetra e Elegíaca). 3rd edn. São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo.
2013. Trans. G. Ragusa. Lira Grega – Antologia de Poesia Arcaica. São Paulo: Hedra.
2017. Trans. T. Vieira. Lírica Grega, Hoje. São Paulo: Perspectiva.
Anacreon
1940. Trans. F. da Silva Malhão. Odes anacreônticas. São Paulo: Cultura.
1948. Trans. A. Cousin. Odes. Rio de Janeiro: Pongetti.
1952. Trans. J. Almansur Haddad. Odes Anacreônticas. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio.
1966. Trans. A. Cousin. Odes. Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro.
1983. Trans. A. Cousin. Odes. Rio de Janeiro: Achiamé.
Callimachus
2019. Trans. G. G. Flores. Epigramas de Calímaco—Bilíngue (Grego-Português). Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora.
Lycophron
2017. Trans. T. Vieira. Alexandra. São Paulo: Editora 34.
Palladas
1992. Trans. J. P. Paes. Paladas de Alexandria. Epigramas. Seleção, tradução, introdução e notas de José Paulo Paes. São Paulo: Nova Alexandria.
Pindar
1825. Trans. A. Elysio [=J. B. de Andrada e Silva]. Poesias Avulsas. Bordeaux.
1861. Trans. J. B. de Andrada e Silva. Poesias de Americo Elysio. Rio de Janeiro: Eduardo & Henrique Laemmert.
1957. Trans. M. Faustino. Píndaro: Primeira Olímpica, Newspaper supplement. Jornal do Brasil, p. 1. Retrieved from http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/030015_07/80603.
1969. Trans. H. de Campos. “Píndaro: Primeira Ode Pítica,” in de Campos 1969: 116–119.
1999. Trans. T. R. Assunção. “Olímpica de Píndaro: tradução e comentário,” Scripta Clássica, 1: 200.
2016. Trans. G. B. Onelley and S. Peçanha. As Odes Olímpicas de Píndaro. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras.
2018. Trans. R. Rocha. Píndaro: Epinícios e Fragmentos. Curitiba.
Sappho
1942. Trans. J. Almansur Haddad. Safo Lírica. São Paulo: Edições Cultura.
1984. Trans. J. Torrano. “Três Poemas,” Remate de Males, 4 (Special issue: Território da Tradução).
1987. Trans. A. A. Antunes. Safo: tudo que restou. Além Paraíba: Interior Edições.
1992. Trans. J. B. Fontes Jr. Variações sobre a lírica de Safo: texto grego e variações livres. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade.
2003. Trans. J. B. Fontes Jr. Safo de Lesbos: poemas e fragmentos. São Paulo: Iluminuras.
2011. Trans. G. Ragusa. Safo de Lesbos – Hino a Afrodite e outros poemas. São Paulo: Hedra.
2017. Trans. G. G. Flores. Fragmentos Completos de Safo. São Paulo: Editora 34.
Notes
1 I would like to thank the following people and colleagues who helped me with information in this chapter: Rafael Brunhara, Willamy de Sousa, Paula da Cunha Corrêa, Guilherme Gontijo Flores, João Ângelo Oliva Neto, Sérgio Luis Gusmão Gimenes Romero, and Rainer Guggenberger.
2 Confusingly also known as “Colégio dos Meninos de Jesus,” like the one in São Vicente, São Paulo. The other two Royal Colleges would be founded in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
3 According to Ribeiro (1992: 19–36), following the orders of D. John III to “convert the natives to the catholic faith by catechesis and instruction,” arrived, in 1549, the first Jesuits, headed by Manoel da Nóbrega. Da Nóbrega’s plan, which included the instruction of the indigenous people though the learning of Portuguese and Latin, was soon superseded by that of the Jesuit Ratio, by which the native population should only receive the catechesis, whereas the teaching of Humanities should be reserved for the sons of the Portuguese elite. By “Humanities” the Ratio Studiorum meant minor studies comprising Grammar, Rhetoric, and reading and imitation of Latin classical authors. Higher studies (Theology and Scholastic Philosophy) could only be done in Portugal. The total number of Jesuit Colleges until 1759, when they are expelled from Brazil, is disputed, the most modest estimate, that of Tito L. Ferreira (1996), puts it at 25, plus 12 seminars for the formation of priests, and one boarding school for women.
4 The Royal Censorial Court, created in 1768, put philosophers such as Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Spinosa, Voltaire in a list of prohibited authors. Even with the educational reforms promoted by Pombal, Portugal’s educational system was dominated until the middle of the XVIII century by the precepts of the Ratio Studiorum. As Ribeiro (1992: 32) notices this meant that “the University of Coimbra (…) remained as medieval as it had always been. Modern philosophy (Descartes), physics and mathematical sciences, the “new” methods of teaching Latin were unknown in Portugal.”
5 The ban on printing books was only lifted with the transference of the Portuguese court to Brazil, in 1808, fleeing the Napoleonic invasions, and the elevation of Brazil to the condition of the seat of the Portuguese Empire.
6 See n. 8 below.
7 Although almost all undergraduate courses require two semesters in Latin Language and Literature from their students.
8 According to Romanelli et al., 2012, Dom Pedro II produced translations from many languages (he spoke at least seven fluently, among which Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Hebrew), including a prose translation of Prometheus (later put into verso by João Cardoso de Meneses e Souza, Baron of Paranapiacaba). He also voyaged extensively in the later part of his reign, acquiring important artifacts to Brazilian museums. Schliemann, in his diaries, register his visits to Troy (1876) and Mycenae (1878). According to Correa 2001, during his visit to the French School at Athens he traded Brazilian gems for Greek Vases from Santorini. Empress Teresa Christina also financed excavations in the royal properties in Italy, and as her dowry, he brought to Brazil a collection of 870 Greek, Roman, and Etruscan vases that were given to the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro. When the museum burnt down in 2018, all these artifacts were lost.
9 “Doutor” in Portuguese, besides being an academic title, is also a form of treatment dispensed to people of high rank, such as university professors (who as of recently did not always have to hold a PhD), lawyers, and physicians.
10 The place from which these translations emanated was to remain for a long time the southeast, in the axis along the cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, with the University of São Paulo playing a major role in producing translations and studies of classical authors. After 2009, however, a series of governmental programs (the most important being REUNI) that sought to expand and fund higher education programs all over the county helped to build a polysystemic configuration in which peripheral regions, especially those in the northeast and north regions began to also play a role in producing scholarship on, and translations of, classical authors. For a scenario of Classical Studies in Brazil, Paula da Cunha Correa’s (2001) and (2013) reports are the most up-to-date. Reading through them one can clearly see a development of the area, even though structural problems persist, the lack of specialized libraries being the most acute of them.
11 The title of the anthology, Lírica Grega, Hoje (Greek Lyric, Today) is a reference to Haroldo de Campos essay on Pindar called Píndaro, Hoje (Pindar, Today), see below. I sum up Haroldo de Campos theory of transcreation (from now on without inverted commas) in what follows.
12 Although one cannot dismiss the possibility, for, as said before, there is no systematic cataloging of translations of the Classics in Brazil so far and the online catalogs of Brazilian libraries are still unreliable.
13 I have dealt with the reception of Sappho and commented on these translations in de Brose 2020.
14 Since I could not get ahold of a copy of Onelley and Peçanha’s translation, I shall not include them in my commentary of Pindar’s translation below. A review of her and Rocha’s translations can be found in Silva 2020.
15 De Andrada e Silva was a statesman, deemed the “Patriarch of Independence,” for it was he who provided the doctrine and the guidance that resulted in the independence of Brazil from Portugal and the unification of the country in a single kingdom. He would later become Brazil’s first Prime Minister during the reign of Pedro I of Brazil. Andrada e Silva was also an accomplished poet, translator, and a naturalist responsible for discovering four new minerals. He was an imitator of Pindar in his odes, collected in the above mentioned book, written while in his exile in Bordeaux.
16 Elysio 1825, later republished as Bonifácio 1861. All references are to the 1825 edition.
17 In the expression of Rudolph Pannwitz 1861–1969 popularized by W. Benjamin 1923 [1991]: 20.
18 Its difficult to assess whether Andrada e Silva was acquainted with Schleiermacher’s work or not, but, given his enormous erudition, it would not be surprising if he were.
19 R. Lattimore (trans.) 1947, The Odes of Pindar. Chicago; A. Puech (trans.) 1931, Pindare, Olympiques. Paris.
20 Cf. for example de Campos (1969: 114), “Indeed, it is not easy to empathize with an official poet who composed commemorative odes under contract with tyrants and the powerful men of his time, celebrating victories won in chariots that they did not drive themselves but of which they were the mere owners.”
21 The one by Roosevelt Rocha, Pindar (2018). Another two are in preparation that I know of, my own, and that of Trajano Vieira.
22 A celebrated poet and translator, Haroldo de Campos, was the most important figure responsible for rekindling the interest of translators in Pindar. He, together with his brother, Augusto de Campos, were the precursors of the Concrete school of poetry in Brazil. De Campos, however, soon parted ways with the movement to pursue his own interests, which involved, on the one hand, translations of the great poets of the past into Portuguese, and, on the other, the publishing of his views on the theoretical aspects of translation, for which he is mostly known outside Brazil. His house has been turned into a museum (Casa das Rosas) and a center for the study of his work and of translation in general.
23 de Campos 1969.
24 Especially Jakobson 1960, 1971, 1980.
25 de Campos 1969: 109–110. He attributes this remark to his fellow concrete poet Decio Pignatari (1927–2012). Here, the Portuguese “língua” is used in a rather loose way to mean that which Saussure would call “langue,” and “linguagem” that which Saussure would call “langage.”
26 Emphasis in the original.
27 It is unclear which edition de Campos used since he gives no bibliographic details. Probably he used Puech’s Pindare, Pythiques, t. II, Les Belles Lettres, 1922.
28 R. Lattimore (trans.), Some Odes of Pindar in New English Versions. Norfolk.
29 It is still debatable among academics how much Greek de Campos really knew. At note 1, p. 112 of his essay, he acknowledges having had the text explained to him word by word by Francisco Achcar, then Professor of Latin Language and Literature at the Federal University of Campinas.
30 It is clear how much importance de Campos still attaches to the graphic elements of the text, in line with his concrete upbringing as a poet.
31 Here and in the following notes, I will try to render verbatim the Portuguese solutions proposed by Haroldo de Campos into English.
32 “Between the peak/(black leaves) and the plain.”
33 “In the blackleafed summits.”
34 “From the gods come all the means to the human virtues.”
35 It is however difficult to foresee the future, especially when recent policies again seek to heavily defund the Humanities and put an end to this late classical bloom.