Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

noon at sunset on the Praia Moçambique. At the end
of my stay in Brazil, while visiting Rio de Janeiro, I
spoke with the thoroughly impressive poet-translator
Paulo Henriques Brito, who shocked me with his
generosity when he gave me the original 1966
recording of “Os Afro-Sambas” by Baden Powell
and Vinícius de Moraes (an LP with a deeply syncretic
spirit—not entirely unlike “O Poeta do
Desterro”—that I had been seeking all year in
Brazil) as a present. Five years later, it was through
Paulo that Sylvio Back found me in Madrid, where I
was living at the time, and proposed the collaboration.
It was with a certain trepidation that I began
negotiating the points of the contract with the
Brazilian director. I drew on the expertise of
acquaintances who knew the film industry in the
United States and Colombia as well as the broadcast
medium in the U. S. advertising business to establish
a flat fee for the job to be paid upon satisfactory
completion of the translation. I learned, too, about
the tremendous number of variables in terms of
financing films in Brazil. For example, the costs of
creating the subtitles in English, Spanish and French
would be covered by a regional governmental office
(in conjunction with a state-owned company that
produced electricity) interested in promoting
tourism on the island whose beautiful landscapes
were an integral part of the film.
I also learned that it is important to insist on a
contract so that certain points can be negotiated,
including: retaining the copyright of the translation
in the translator’s name; establishing how the translation
will be used as subtitles and marketed as film,
video, and DVD; delineating whether or not the
translation will appear in book form as a published
screenplay; stipulating that the translator’s name
must appear in the credits of the film and on the
title page of any book publication; providing a gratis
VHS copy of the subtitled film as well as complimentary
copies of the published work; and facilitating
access to proofs of the text as subtitles and also
as page proofs for the book.
I discovered that the point of making sure to
have the right to review the actual text that will
appear as the subtitles is extremely important.
Apparently, although I submitted an electronic version
of the translation, someone needed to retype the
manuscript for use in the subtitling machine.
Consequently, in the text generated by this process,
there were many errors that I had a chance to correct
that did not exist in the version I submitted initially
to the director. It made me remember seeing certain
foreign films and cringing at all the typographical
errors in the subtitles, an unsettling experience that
certainly does not inspire viewer confidence. The
truth is that I enjoyed working with the printed text
generated by the subtitling machine because I had a
clear idea as to the exact words that would be in
each frame of the film. In the left hand margin, the
subtitle number appeared in conjunction with the
elapsed time of the film (with the precision of times
that one associates with Olympic runners!). In addition
to my being able to correct spelling mistakes,
there was also some leeway for me to adjust the line
breaks of the poems and how the subtitle as verse
would actually appear on the screen.
Naturally, any process of negotiation depends
on the goodwill of all parties. Fortunately, the director
was absolutely professional and helpful throughout
the entire process, and I was very satisfied with
the agreements we reached. After signing the contract,
however, panicked by the scope of the project
that I had accepted, I went to see “Shakespeare in
Love” (in English, with Spanish subtitles in
Madrid), with a very specific purpose and was
greatly relieved to see how the rather dense, poetic
text of the screenplay of this film fit on the screen
and how little was lost in translation. After this, it
was simply a question of learning some technical
vocabulary (such as Off Screen and Voice Off) and
of putting in the long hours needed to conserve in
my English version as many of the formal qualities
of Cruz e Sousa’s poetry as possible.
The temporal tightrope I walked as a translator
consisted of creating in English an identity poetics
that balanced an aesthetic sensibility clearly from
the 19th century with a political sensibility regarding
racism in Brazil that seemed strikingly contemporary.
Two things confirmed this impression as I
worked. One was a fortuitous visit to the Musée
D’Orsay in Paris, where I saw a luminous, enigmat-
32 Translation Review