Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

In 1964, the year the Brazilian military staged a coup that unseated the democratic government, Brazilian poet Geir Campos (1924-1999) published “Fôlhas de Relva,” the first significant compilation of poems from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” to be translated into Brazilian Portuguese. In 1983, just two years prior to the collapse of the regime’s twenty-one-year occupation, Campos (re)translated his own compilation in what could be appropriately called a “literary remodeling;” he radically fragmented verses, rearranged syntax, cut old punctuation, added some that was new, rearranged the poems’ positions on the page, altered typefaces, and played on Whitman’s—and the original translation’s—title by tacking on a “leafy pun.” “Fôlhas de Relva” (Leaves of Grass) became “Folhas das Folhas de Relva” (Leaves of Leaves of Grass). It is in “Esta Tradução” (“This Translation”), the critical introduction for the 1983 volume, that Campos justified his “remodeling” under Czech theorist and translator Josef Cermák’s rubrics: “esta é uma superinterpretação de poemas e fragmentos selecionados de Leaves of Grass… a subinterpretação aproxima a tradução do autor, a superinterpretação aproxima-a do leitor” (“This is an ‘overtranslation’ of selected poems and fragments of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”… whereas the ‘undertranslation’ moves the translation toward the writer, the ‘overtranslation’ moves it toward the reader”). In this paper, I set out to investigate the relationship between Campos’s “overtranslation” and globalization. I first explore the micro differences in Whitman’s poetics between Campos’s 1964 and 1983 editions to argue that the translator’s radical modifications were not only his linguistic savvy; they were rather Campos’s indirect response to global forces taking place during early 1980s Brazil—the ethos and the rhetoric of political rebellion from the American hippie subculture. In this sense, Campos’s (re)translation, “Folhas das Folhas de Relva,” might as well be read as an ode to globalization: it was therein that Campos attempted to redefine Brazil and the United States’s cultural and political relations in the 1980s.