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JOANA MATOS FRIAS/PAULA RAMALHO ALMEIDA–TRANSLATING ALLEN GINSBERG
kind of colloquial expression poured out in longwinded verse. Anyway, even those poets of
the 70’s remain far from Ginsberg and Kerouac’s spontaneous prose and verse, and
especially very far from their discourse filled with American slang. If we try to find
anything close to Ginsberg’s poetry in Portuguese literature, we will have to go back to the
“Pessoa Shmessoa” he wrote about or, some decades later, to Jorge de Sena. This means
that the Portuguese reader is forced into a great change in horizon, an enlargement of his
intertextual competence. For the translator, the nonexistence of Portuguese poetic artifacts
similar to Ginsberg’s entails a further obstacle, for finding no correlation between two
different poetic discourses, he has to create them almost ex nihilo.
It is not by chance that both in English and in Portuguese tongue stands for
language. Language, and therefore translation, is a question of flesh. “To let the body fall,
that is the essential energy of translation”, says Derrida (1967: 312). The difficulty of the
translative process is enhanced by the very fact that there are three subjectivities working
together with a universe of an infinite number of subjectivites, striving to reach an infinite
number of Others. But by the same token it is also made clearer in the nakedness of
intersubjectivity, and so there can never be an original text: both texts meet in a definite
middle, an interworld, filled with a special kind of intertext. It is a dialectical process, so if
by translating we suppress our cultural and individual differences, we also intensify them. Is
the author a you or a he? Neither. He is an I. We may not behave as the Other in
Ginsberg’s poem “America” whose silence is portrayed in the performative verse “I’m
addressing you”.
REFERENCES
ALMEIDA, Paula Ramalho. A Intersubjectividade na Poesia de Allen Ginsberg. Dissertation.
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, 1999.
BARNSTONE, Willis. The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993.
BELL, Roger T. Translation and Translating: Theory and Practice. New York: Longman, 1991.
BENVENISTE, Émile. “Sémiologie de la Langue”. In BENVENISTE, Émile. Problèmes de
Linguistique Générale II. 1974. Paris: Gallimard, 1981, pp. 43-66.
BERMAN, Antoine. “A Tradução e a Letra ou a Pousada do Longínquo”. In JORGE,
Guilhermina (ed.) Tradutor Dilacerado: Reflexões de Autores Contemporâneos sobre a
Tradução. Trans.: Catarina Salgueiro et. al. Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 1997, pp. 15-63.
BIGUENET, John; SCHULTE, Rainer (eds.) The Craft of Translation. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984.
BLANCHOT, Maurice. Le Livre à Venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959.
CARLOS, Luís Adriano. Fenomenologia do Discurso Poético: Ensaio sobre Jorge de Sena. Porto:
Campo das Letras, 1999.
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