Untimely translations: the ideology of unusual rhythms in

modern translations of the classics

Rodrigo Tadeu Gonçalves (UFPR)

Given the theme of this conference, it appeared to me that it was a good opportunity
to reflect critically about something which has occupied my practice as a classicist
and as a translator at least since 2007, when I gathered a group of ten undergraduate
students to study Carlos Alberto Nunes' hexametric translations of Homer and Virgil
and to imitate his enterprise with a short fragment of Book X of Ovid's
Metamorphoses. Most students were not translators nor poets yet, but some of them,
with time, became good in both fields. Nowadays, since the first lessons in Classical
Latin at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba, we teach students how to recite
Latin verses and feel the rhythm. Since 2013, when we received a visit from Philippe
Brunet and Fantine Cavé-Radet, from the French theatrical troupe Démodocos, my
friend and colleague Guilherme Gontijo Flores also felt the urge to do something
more with his translations. He even bought a lyre and started to perform and record
some of his translations. My group of third-year students of Latin, together with
Guilherme and I, just finished the first galliambic translation of Catullus 63 into
Portuguese, and we've been rehearsing a performance with a melody written by one of
the students, dance and musical accompaniment.
This small biographic preface serves to introduce the main point of this
presentation: the urge of performance has definitely changed our relationship with the
classics. Classical literature regained a dimension of orality and performance that put
it into a new perspective for us. And we are not alone in this enterprise. After starting
fortuitously with the interest for Nunes' hexameters, usually unnoticed by the
specialized criticism both in classical studies and in translation studies in Brazil, little
by little we started to find translators and performers who were doing very similar
things with the ancient material. A special session on homeric hexametrical
translations during the festival Dionysies in its 2012 edition in Paris put me into
contact with many translators, actors, musicians and scholars who showed me that this
apparently marginal scene is growing and getting more strength everyday. That
festival is in itself an important witness to this process: for more than ten years, the
company Démodocos performs many ancient Greek and Latin plays, performances of
Homer, Lucretius, Catullus, among others, every year. Using lyres from Ethiopia,
masks, dances and music developed especially for each production, the company, led
by Philippe Brunet, is astonishingly faithful to the ancient and also very modern at the
same time. Without being too precious about archaeological or philological precision
in the performances nor being too modern in their reinterpretations, the result is a
fascinating set of very original receptions of classical texts. Sometimes Greek or Latin
is used together with translations, and the quality and precision in the scansion and
performance of the ancient rhythms is what impresses most. All translations imitate
every aspect of the ancient meters and rhythms, so that sometimes Greek, Latin and
modern French can be heard at the same time as if they were the same.
And that is precisely what interests me most here. Rhythmic performative
translations can give the impression that modern languages can rival their ancient
predecessors in a strikingly natural way. If that works well for the French because of
Brunet's accuracy and precision in every aspect of the performatic dimension, the
same can be said about other attempts in other languages. At that meeting, Philippe
Brunet, Rodney Merrill, Augustín Garcia-Calvo and Danielle Ventre presented their
full, published translations of the Iliad and/or the Odyssey in hexameters. In French,
in English, in Spanish and in Italian. Add Nunes to the list, as well as the Estonian,
Romanian, Russian, German hexametric traditions (among others not mentioned in
the meeting), and we start perceiving the power of that new trend. Not that new, if we
consider that the first attempts in modern languages were made during the
Renaissance, in Italian, in French, and throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in most
European languages. What changed is that most recent rhythmic translations of the
classics seem to share a certain different way of seeing what they do.
Leaving aside the ideological nature of not so recent rhythmic translations for
reasons of scope (for the German tradition, these attempts are already well established
as a way of enlarging German language and literature, if we think of Voss's,
Klopstock's, Goethe's and Hölderlin's attempts inscribed in a clear nationalist
ideology and politics of translation), it would not be too far-fetched to see in the
recent trends a special way of being modern and ancient at the same time, or being
modern by being ancient. The enterprises are usually revolutionary and marginal, and
not, as it might seem, pompous, conservative or essentialist. A very important
document that was issued as a proceedings dossier for that meeting in Paris was
published in volume 20 of French journal Anabases.
What seems to be at stake is the possibility of rivaling with the originals,
respecting them as works of art, but in a different way. Imitation has always been a
driving force in most periods of renaissances: from Rome incorporating Greek
literature to the European Renaissance per se, it has always been a matter of
confronting the present with that oppressive power of the past. Different reactions can
be taken into account. And so it becomes necessary for me to restrict my argument to
the Brazilian context. In that peripheral context it is easier to understand what
rhythmic translations can do.
The repertoire of Brazilian translations of the classics is very restricted, and
we are far from having good, reliable translations of most ancient literature, even
when we restrict ourselves with the 'canon' of Homeric-Classical Greece to the 'Silver
Age' of Roman literature. Some authors haven't even been translated yet, or
translations are so old they have yet to be re-edited or even edited from manuscripts
from the 18th and 19th century. Specifically in the Roman part of that spectrum,
things are even worse. Outdated and outfashioned translations still exist, but most
were composed to be aids to high school students when Latin was still taught in
schools. So we have a lot of Ceasar's Bellum Civile, Cicero's and Sallust's Catilina,
abundant prose translations of the Aeneid etc. Only the works who were considered
the greatest monuments of the classical past deserved more than one poetic
translation, such as the Aeneid. Still, there's a lot to be done. And time has made a big
difference in the scenery today.
With the removal of Latin from the curriculum of the elementary and high
schools in Brazil in the 1960's, a gap was formed between the old scholars, usually
priests or somehow related to religion, who were not interested in research as we do
today, and what was left of classics at universities. Some very important scholars
filled this gap and continued doing important research and publishing important
translations during that period, until, after the 1990's, a new generation of younger
classicists occupied the positions of many retiring classicists and started something
new. At least regarding what concerns me here, there has been an important change of
scenery. Good literary translations started coming out of university circles to fill the
huge lacunae in our repertoire of translations. This started to outreach to the general
public, since most major publishing houses started to publish very good translations
and editions by our university professors. We may think of João Angelo Oliva Neto's
Catullus, Raimundo Carvalho's Bucolics, Christian Werner's Odyssey, Maria Celeste
Dezotti's Aesop, Guilherme Gontijo Flores' Propertius, Adriane Duarte's and Ana
Maria Cesar Pompeu's Aristophanes, Isabella Cardoso's Plautus, Marcio Gouveia
Junior's Valerius Flaccus and Medeas, Brunno Vieira's Lucan, Paulo Vasconcellos'
edition of Odorico Mendes, Marcio Thamos' Aeneid, the impressive translations of
tragedy by Jaa Torrano, Trajano Vieira, Flávio Ribeiro de Oliveira, and Eduardo
Lohner, among so many others which I may have done injustice for memory failure.
Most of those very important works were born in the academic circles.
Of course it's important to think of great scholars outside classical studies who
also translated profusely and gave us preciosities such as Haroldo de Campos' Iliad,
as well as José Paulo Paes' and Péricles Eugênio da Silva Ramos' anthologies of
ancient poetry
However, the specificity of the kind of translation I wish to present here is the
recreation of ancient Greek and Latin rhythms. For that as well we count today with a
growing army, put together by chance, in different universities, for different reasons,
but doing almost the same: Marcelo Tápia, Leonardo Antunes, Érico Nogueira,
Guilherme Gontijo Flores and myself. A special issue of Scientia Traductionis
organized by Guilherme Gontijo Flores in 2011 presented some results, and a
collection of some of the translations and ideas of this group was published as a
special dossier of Revista Letras, volume 89, edited by Brunno Vieira and me.
So, in addition to the two journal volumes already mentioned and some
scattered papers and translations published here and there, most of the massive work
produced by this group is still not widely accessible, but can be consulted as Master's
theses and PhD dissertations (such is the case with Tápia, Antunes, Nogueira, Flores,
Leandro Cardoso, among others). Some of the most lengthy translations are being
prepared to appear in book form, such as Flores' Odes, my Adelphoe, Leandro
Cardoso's Amphitryon, my Lucretius, and some have already been published as
scholarly books, such as Antunes and Nogueira's translations.
And so we have the scene. I pass now to a brief description of some of those
translations in order to be able to analyze the question of timeliness.
In order to concentrate on just a few examples already published, let us have a
look at one of Flores' horatian Odes, the first lines of my Lucretius and a translation of
Catullus 8 made by both of us in collaboration. They appeared in the journal Rónai,
volume 2, number 1 (2014):

1. Horace, Odes 3.12

Miseráveis as mulheres que não gozam dos amores,

nem diluem sua dor em vinho doce, mas receiam
tios de línguas fustigantes.

O menino de Citera as tuas cestas, tuas telas,

teus trabalhos de Minerva, tudo leva, ó Neobule;
e o liparense Hebro brilhante,

que seus ombros besuntados lava em ondas tiberinas,

que supera em seu corcel Belerofonte e não se rende
aos pés mais lentos, nem aos punhos,

sabedor em enlaçar as greis de cervos fugidios

sobre os campos e veloz em confrontar o javali que
se escondeu na brenha densa.
(trad. Guilherme Gontijo Flores)

Miserārum est neque amōrī dare lūdum neque nēque dulcī

mala uīnō lauere aut exanimārī metuentīs
patruae uerbera linguae.

Tibi quālum Cytherēae puer āles, tibi tēlās

operōsaeque Mineruae studīum aufert, Neobūlē,
Liparaeī nitor Hēbrī,

simul ūnctōs Tiberīnīs umerōs lāuit in undīs

eques ipsō melior Bellerophōnte, neque pūgnō
neque sēgnī pede uīctūs,

catus īdem per apertum fugientīs agitātō

grege ceruōs iaculāri et celer artō latitantēm
 fruticēto excipere āprūm.

The structure of the ionics a minore (u u — —) was imitated by a sequence of two

weak syllables followed by two more prominent ones. Technically, that sequence of
two stressed syllables in Portuguese would be very difficult to perceive or realize in
normal speech, but onde the dimension of performance is added, the results can be
heard. In his PhD dissertation, which is being prepared to be published by Editora
Autêntica, Flores develops that question and proposes a rhythmic equivalent for all
horatian meters in new performances.

2. Catullus, VIII

Catulo, triste, larga dessa loucura,

e o que perdeste aceita como perdido.
Brilharam sóis pra ti nas luzes de outrora
Então corrias onde a moça queria,
que tu amaste mais que amaram as outras.
E tantas brincadeiras ambos brincavam
que bem querias e ela não desqueria.
Brilharam sóis pra ti nas luzes — é certo.
mas ela já não quer — molenga, não queiras.
Não busques se te foge, deixa as tristezas.
Mas fica firme e forte, vai, endurece.
Garota, adeus, Catulo agora endurece.
Não vai atrás e não quer mais forçar barra.
Tu vais sofrer, porque ninguém te procura.
Bandida, mas que vida agora te resta?
Quem vai te visitar? A quem serás bela?
Quem amarás? De quem serás a querida?
Quem beijarás? De quem morder os beicinhos?
Mas tu, Catulo, lapidar endurece!
(trad. Rodrigo Tadeu Gonçalves e Guilherme Gontijo Flores)
 Miser Catulle, dēsinās ineptīre,
et quod uidēs perīsse perditum dūcās.
fulsēre quondam candidī tibī solēs,
cum uentitābās quō puella dūcēbat
amāta nōbīs quantum amābitur nūlla.
ībi illa multa cum iocōsa fīēbant,
quae tū uolēbās nec puellā puella nōlēbat,
fulsēre uēre candidī tibī sōlēs.
nunc iam illā nōn uult: tū quoque impotēns nōlī,
nec quae fugit sectāre, nec miser uīue,
sed obstinātā mente perfer, obdūrā.
ualē puellā, iam Catullus obdūrat,
nec tē requīret nec rogābit inuītam.
at tū dolēbis, cum rogāberis nūlla.
scelesta, uae tē, quae tibī manet uītā?
quīs nunc te adībit? Cuī uidēberis bella?
quem nunc amābis? Cūius ēsse dīcēris?
quem bāsiābis? cuī labella mordēbis?
at tū, Catulle, dēstinātus obdūrā.

Catullus' skhazon, or limping iambics, is widely known for the 'limping' feel
introduced by the inversion of the iambic pattern in the last foot with the introduction
of a spondee. In our translation, that same rhythm is imitated, which, again, is
enhanced by performance. The translation may be seen as a proposal of an 11-syllable
pattern, but, in reality, what is at stake is the possibility of the rhythm. The amount of
syllables just happens to be the same because we are dealing with an isochronic meter
with syllabic pattern even in Latin. This changes when we come to the dactylic
hexameter.

3. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, I, 1-9

Mãe dos enéades, ó volúpia dos homens e deuses,

alma Vênus, que sob os astros nos céus deslizantes
tu, que os navígeros mares, frugíferas terras celebras,
 toda a espécie dos animais por ti no princípio
foi concebida e avistou os luzeiros do sol oriente:
ventos fogem de ti, ó deusa, e as nuvens celestes
fogem do teu advento e a ti a terra dedálea
flores suaves oferta, e riem-te as ondas dos mares
e também plácido em lume difuso o céu vasto alumia.
(trad. Rodrigo Tadeu Gonçalves)

Aeneadum genetrīx, hominum dīuomque uoluptās,

alma Vēnūs caelī subter lābentia sīgna
quae mare nāuigerum, quae terrās frūgiferentīs
concelēbrās, per tē quoniam genūs genus omne animantum
concipitur uīsitque exortum lūmina sōlis:
tē, dea, tē fugiunt uentī, tē nūbila caelī
aduentumque tuum, tibi suāuīs daedala tellūs
summittit flōrēs, tibi rīdent aequora pontī
plācātumque nitet diffūsō lūmine caelum. (De Rerum Natura, I, 1-9)

This model of Portuguese dactylic hexameter was fashioned after the growing
perception that the all-dactylic stress pattern of Carlos Alberto Nunes, probably an
imitation of Carducci's Odi Barbare and/or Giovanni Pascoli's hexametric translations
and own poems, was too monotonous when used in longer poems. After the
evaluation of Brunet's and Merrill's versions of flexible hexameters and, in Brazil,
Antunes', Nogueira's and Tápia's practice, I was more and more convinced that some
dactyls could be replaced by binary feet, which could have the second syllable
lengthened in performance, and that would be more agreeable to the ears of the
audience. Not only that, but in choosing to translate Lucretius (after a request by
Autêntica's editor Oseias Ferraz), I realized that Lucretius' poem deserved a poetic
diction different from the prose renderings accessible to general readers or Antonio
José da Lima Leitão's 1851 decassylabic translation. And this is where timeliness
comes in.
Two anecdotes are important to understand the project. Leitão's translation
starts with "Mimosa Vênus, mãi da Eneide Roma". Mimosa is hard to translate in all
its cheesiness for the contemporary reader. For a contemporary Brazilian speaker of
Portuguese, that is usually a proper name for a cow, or a species of tangerine, or, used
as an adjective, a very old-fashioned synonym for "cute, meek, gentle, tender, placid,
docile, sweet, honey". As you wish. One could not but sketch a smirk or laugh out
loud when starting to read Leitão. Of course his translation is dated, and the word was
not ridiculous at the time, with its arcadian, pastoral overtones. Alma Venus starts line
two of Lucretius' poem, but Leitão chose to start the poem with that phrase. Alright,
then. Guillaume Boussard, the translator of Lucretius in French hexameters (still
unpublished) has a similar story to tell. For him rhythmic translation, "traduire à
l'oreille" prevents us from doing things like the first line of Henri Clouard's translation
of Lucretius': "Ô Mère d'Énée..." ("Oh Mother of Aeneas / Oh shit, Aeneas"). His
reading of this infamous début is worth reproducing: "The reader believes that he is
hearing an interjection and a coarseness before the proper noun and asks himself,
bewildered, whether he has stumbled upon some apocryphal Aeneid which start with
Dido's complaints as a prologue" (Boussard, 2014: 236). If one finds Boussard's
almost comical interpretation a little too exaggerated, at least a shallow
psychoanalytical interpretation could provide us with a model of disgust for what the
translator is actually doing: "Shit, that Aeneas again... how the hell am I supposed to
go on with the translation of the remaining 7500 lines..."
If these two anecdotes show us that time can do us a favor and demand for
new translations, it is because the taste and the fashion also change with time.
Accumulating poetic receptions through translations enhances, enlarges our own
perspective of antiquity. New translations do not have to be radically new in form or
content (is a hip-hop Lucretius possible?), but they also do not have to rely on the
same principles and presuppositions of older generations and movements. But here's
where things get interesting. My hexametric translation of Lucretius can be attacked
for being too conservative: not only I have tried to repeat/recreate the rhythms, but a
closer look at the text will show some resource to (ultra)litteralism whenever possible.
Some ideas on these first nine lines:

(line 1): volúpia for voluptas, homens e deuses in the same order;
(line 2): alma, a very uncommon Portuguese cognate for the Latin adjective alma,
"nourishing"; reconstruction of the hyperbaton caeli subter labentia signa with "sob
os astros nos céus deslizantes";
(line 3): navígeros and frugíferas for navigerum et frugiferentes, two uncommon
calques in Portuguese; celebras "commemorates" for the Latin concelebras of line 4;
(line 5): luzeiros, a rather ucommon Portuguese word, for lumina, oriente ("rising",
"orient") for exortum;
(lines 6 and 7): repetition of ti, teu, ti, for te, te, te, tuum, tibi; adevento for adventum;
dedálea for daedala;
(line 9): lume difuso for diffuso lumine; plácido for placatum.

These are just a few observations on style that try to show not how I try to be
faithful to the Latin poem by the traditional standards, but that I chose deliberately to
repeat poetic patterns, sounds, roots, in order to conflate both texts into a new unity
which captures poeticity in a new style, a new poetic work, something which can be
read without, beyond and despite the original.
The result is a kind of an untimely poem which calls the attention of the reader
to different and unusual aspects of Portuguese prosody, vocabulary, word order, and,
at last, performativity. Of course other kinds of translation can also do that, in many
different ways, and I cannot be sure of my endeavor's success in fulfilling this
promise. But the question of time is important. Some linguistic uses in the translation
call the attention of the reader to the language's historicity, to floating and bygone
uses that can be recovered just for being latent possibilities in the language. In a
sense, it is a performative translation because it calls the attention to the signifiers, to
the sounds of the voice, to the performable nature of its rhythm and its sonic texture.
It is not a faithful translation because it does not necessarily believe in the
untouchable essential nature of the original, in its supremacy as a perennial
monument that cannot be altered. In the very act of translating this way, my intention
is to enlarge the possibilities of my own language, not only through the innovative
metrical patterns, but also by giving it and its users another Lucretius, which pays
tribute to the first one but tries to surpass it by making it always the mirror against
which the translation can be heard. Paradoxically, the translation does not aim to
efface the model, but to make it echo in itself, as if both should function at the same
time, being the same and different. That, in a certain sense, is the aim of all
translations when they don't want to disappear and pretend that they are the original
text. However, this kind of rhythmic ultralitteral translation manipulates time in a very
peculiar way. On the one hand, it feels old because of the sound patterns, the calques,
the use of similar roots, but, on the other hand, what makes it avoid being
condescending or conservative is the choice of rhythm in itself, since that can be an
act of rebellion against tradition in a different sense: although classical texts are
considered the basis of tradition and the canon, the way of translating them has
suffered different kinds of pressure from different times. Since the Renaissance, most
western European languages and poetic cultures decided that the best way to translate
the epic is through the slight variations of the same poetic form, the
decasyllable/hendecasyllabe in the Romance world and the iambic pentameter in the
Anglo-Germanic world. They are all, actually, quite similar. Choosing a foreign
meter/rhythmic pattern after centuries of traditional epic blank pentameters is a
conscious act of rupturing with tradition. Untimeliness is a key concept to understand
the proposals here presented, because by choosing a different form, at the same time
looking back to the Latin rhythms and trying to break free from later traditional poetic
constraints can give a sense of not belonging to the past nor to the present, both by
trying to create the poems anew, in a modern performative fashion, and by trying to
mirror phonic and prosodic features of the ancient, the result is neither old nor new,
never belonging to a specific time.

It can remind us of Ennius choosing and implementing for the first time the Greek
dactylic hexameter in Latin with his Annales and boasting of it:

scripsere alii rem

vorsibus quos olim Faunei vatesque canebant.
[cum] neque Musarum scopulos…
nec dicti studiosus [quisquam erat] ante hunc.
nos ausi reserare… (Ann. 7, frr. 1–1a)

others wrote about the war

with verses which before fauns and vates used to sing.
when neither the slopes of the Muses...
There was no one conscious of diction before him [the poet].
We dared to open the way...
The scholarly attitude of Ennius against his predecessors who wrote in the Roman
traditional meter of the Saturnian verse, leveling them with Faunei vatesque is a
choice for modernism, as we think we are doing when we go back to the timeless
practice of singing, reciting – as modern rhapsodes – an ancient poetic text in a new
form. Time stands still, time flies, both texts coexist at a spaceless and a timeless
universe. Those paradoxes only show us how complex our relationship with the past
can be. If for Ennius being modern meant opposing the autochthonous poetic tradition
of the Saturnian verses, for us a return (or going there for the first time) to an ancient
rhythm and diction can be a marker of a new radical modernity, that of looking to the
past in order to build a new poetic future.

References:

Boussard, Guillaume. "Pour une traduction musicale des vers de Lucrèce" Revue
Anabases, vol. 20, 2014.

Brunet, Philippe. (ed.) "Homère en Hexamètres". Revue Anabases, vol. 20, 2014.

Flores, Guilherme Gontijo. (ed.) "Tradução de Poesia". Scientia Traductionis. Vol.

10, 2011.

Flores, Guilherme Gontijo. Elegias de Sexto Propércio. Belo Horizonte: Editora

Autêntica, 2014.

Flores, Guilherme Gontijo & Gonçalves, Rodrigo Tadeu. “Polimetria latina em

português”. Revista Letras, vol. 89. Curitiba: 2014a.

Flores, Guilherme Gontijo & Gonçalves, Rodrigo Tadeu. "Três Traduções Rítmicas:
Lucrécio, Catulo e Horácio". Revista Rónai, vol. 2, n. 1, 2014b.

Flores, Guilherme Gontijo & Gonçalves, Rodrigo Tadeu. "Translation as Classical

Reception: 'Transcreative' Rhythmic Translations in Brazil". Framing Classical
Reception Studies, forthcoming.

Gonçalves, Rodrigo Tadeu (coord.), Álvaro Kasuaki Fujihara, Gabriel Dória Rachwal,
Leandro Dorval Cardoso, Livy Maria Real Coelho, Luana de Conto, Marina Chiara
Legroski, “Uma tradução coletiva das Metamorfoses 10.1-297 com versos
hexamétricos de Carlos Alberto Nunes”, Scientia Traductionis, n. 10, 2011.
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Polimetria Plautina em Português”. Scientia Traductionis, n. 10, 2011.

Gonçalves, Rodrigo Tadeu. “L’hexamètre au Brésil: la tradition de Carlos Alberto

Nunes ». Revue Anabases, vol. 20, 2014.

Gonçalves, Rodrigo Tadeu & Cardoso, Leandro. “A poética da comédia nova latina”,
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Gonçalves, Rodrigo Tadeu and Vieira, Brunno Vinicius Gonçalves. Dossiê Tradução
dos Clássicos em Português. Revista Letras, v. 89, 2014.

Gonçalves, Rodrigo Tadeu. "Traduire la comédie romaine en vers rythmiques

portugais". Speech at the conference "Voix, Geste et Rythme dans la poésie antique et
moderne". Rouen, 2015.