últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

JOANA MATOS FRIAS/PAULA RAMALHO ALMEIDA–TRANSLATING ALLEN GINSBERG
order to achieve a better translation of Ginsberg’s poem, which is, first and foremost, a
verbal object. The poet himself emphasizes the contrast between verbal and musical
sequences by referring to words, books, and manuscripts: “Can I bring back the words? Will
thought of transcription haze my mental open eye? / […] / My books piled up before me for
my use / waiting in space where I placed them, they haven’t disappeared, time’s left its
remnants and qualities for me to use – my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my
loves” (1988: 140).
This interaction between a unidimensional and bidimensional semiotic system
implies a decoding and recoding process, on the part of the poet, and knowledge of the
musical source, on the part of the translator. It isn’t that the text’s integrity depends on
Bach’s prelude, for it clearly exists without it, it is just that the translator must make a real
effort in understanding the origin of the poem. It would be impossible to recreate the
poet’s living momentary atmosphere, as did Pierre Menard with Cervantes and his Quixote,
in Jorge Luis Borges short fiction. In fact, it would be virtually impossible to listen to the
same exact version of the piece, for there are many. Moreover, we would probably ruin the
translative process altogether if we suddenly decided to partake in the ingestion of
hallucinatory chemicals, as Ginsberg himself admitted having done. What it actually comes
down to is ethics: when we speak of fidelity and of freedom, as Walter Benjamin so rightly
juxtaposes (Schulte 1992: 78-79), we are referring to our relationship with an Other. In
taking this relationship seriously, we must not forgo anything that might help us better
relate to the Other’s discourse, taking into account each of the most prominent
extralinguistic elements.
A poem such as “Cézanne’s Ports” (Ginsberg 1988: 53) – clearly inspired by Paul
Cézanne’s beautiful painting Le Golfe de Marseille, Vu de l’Estaque –, far from being an
ekphrastic detailed description of the visual object, stands as a verbal configuration of what
the painting suggests, rather than of what it designates (Almeida 1999: 114):
In the foreground we see time and life
swept in a race
toward the left hand side of the picture
where shore meets shore.
But that meeting place
isn’t represented;
it doesn’t occur on the canvas.
For the other side of the bay
is Heaven and Eternity,
with a bleak white haze over its mountains.
And the immense water of L’Estaque is a go-between
for minute rowboats.
In this text, the intersemiotic transposition entirely depends on what the picture evokes,
not on what it shows. The two artisans, Cézanne and Ginsberg, lean against each other in the
poem, and the end result is a product of their two visions. As Ginsberg himself would say, we
stand before an “interpersonal communication of imagery” (Ginsberg 1974: 28).
It is this same interpersonal communication of imagery that equally modulates the
unforgettable “The Blue Angel”(Ginsberg 1988: 54), where the poet, fascinated by one of
the most powerful scenes of Josef von Sternberg’s homonymous film, creatively transposes
the musical, visual and kinetic sensations aroused by Marlene Dietrich’s unique
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