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JOANA MATOS FRIAS/PAULA RAMALHO ALMEIDA–TRANSLATING ALLEN GINSBERG
will unveil one of the major challenges the translator of Ginsberg’s poetry has to face: he must
often interpret and subsequently reconstruct a text which is already a translation, either
intertextual or intersemiotic.
The intersubjective grounds which determine the deep structure of Ginsberg’s
poetics come to the surface of the poem converted into a complex polyphony. Therefore,
since Ginsberg’s verse at this level also relies on a structural duality, its reading and
translation presupposes not only a poetical competence, but also, using Umberto Eco’s
terms, both encyclopedic and intertextual competences. The truth is, both the reader and
the translator will often feel as if they were facing Debussy’s Fille aux Cheveux de Lin, which
was inspired by a homonymous poem by Leconte de Lisle, which in turn was an adaptation
of a poem by Robert Burns, the tone of which was taken from a Scottish popular aria. This
almost endless chain reveals the fourth-dimensional world and word generated by the
hypertext, a notion which takes its theoretical sense from Gérard Genette’s broader concept
of transtextuality, but also a percept which inevitably leads us nowadays to think about that
infinite net of texts connected by countless links. Thus, within this informatic context, we
could say Allen Ginsberg’s work presents itself as a true word wide web, meaning the
translator must have the ability to read a non-lineal and non-sequential text, where the words
and phrases are associated with other textual segments, which naturally induce a
multidirectional reading through the establishment of several relations between verbal and
non-verbal artifacts (Carlos 1999: 219-226).
The intersemiotic relation, just as the craft of translation, is basically a dialectical
and unresolved movement between fidelity and metamorphosis (Carlos 1999: 179-193).
That is why, first of all, we must be very cautious while analyzing and translating those
poems which take specific pictures, arias, or films for their motif. We must bare in mind
that a relation between several arts does not fit inside the limits of an Aristotelian logic
based on identity. Otherwise, we would easily be tempted to take as source-text the work
of art which inspired the poem, instead of the poem per se. This temptation is even more
dangerous and perverse if we recall the fundamental differences that separate the
non-verbal from the verbal. Language, unlike all the other semiotic systems, articulates both
a semiotic and a semantic mode – it has a bidimensional significance, while painting and
music, for instance, are reduced to the semantic mode. This is why Émile Benveniste
carefully points out that there is no possible synonymy or redundancy among two different
systems, just as there is no trans-systemic sign (1981: 53). The complexity of poetry goes
deeper: it adds a rhetorical and a poetical mode to the semiotic and semantic modes of
everyday language (Carlos 1999: 205-206). By taking as its object any painting or piece of
music, it must relate to monolithic systems, and the translator must be very careful not to
return to those unidimensional systems, ignoring the transformation they were already
subjected to. Thus the difficult exegetic problem lies in finding and translating the
transformational relations between the two systems considered. In his famous essay on the
linguistic aspects of translation, Roman Jakobson accurately spoke of the intersemiotic
translation as a transmutation, that is, an interpretation based on a change of body, thus
stressing the awareness of the unsurpassable divergence between the verbal and non-verbal
signifiers (1963: 79). The nature of this divergence means that the poet, even while trying to
precisely describe a certain work of art, can only achieve a creative transposition, for he
must deal with an essential difference in formal media. Allen Ginsberg was quite aware of
these important differences, as we may confirm by the title of one of his intersemiotic
poems, “Transcription of Organ Music” (Ginsberg 1988: 140-141). The text refers to
Bach’s composition “Organ Prelude and Fugue in A Minor”, and the semic irradiation of
the word chosen for the title, transcription, immediately discloses a gesture toward
metamorphosis. By no means can the translator hope to listen to Bach’s composition in
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