Yeats, Pound and their Brazilian Translations

From the second half of the last century on, we have seen a certain number of translations of English language poetry into Brazilian Portuguese. Some of these are landmarks in the field of poetic translations in Brazil. The aim of this article is to present a preliminary investigation and comparison of the effect that translation choices had in the reception of two authors, namely, William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound. Another point in the investigation is the longevity of these translations in the catalogues of their publishers. Availability, scope, quality and intention play a role in the way Yeats and Pound were translated and how they were read in Brazil.

essence of his admired senior -about to dismiss Yeats's influence and set his own path as one of the founders of Modernist poetry in English.
It was between this moment and that winter in 1913 at the Stone Cottage that Pound set the standards of Imagism. He was, as far as Modernism history is concerned, at the centre of the first great English movement in the direction of Modernism, and he then accompanied the greatest living poet, for they were working as a team, reading each other's works, and mutually contributing to their own personal transformations as artists.
Having met in 1909, it is impressive to observe how they maintained a mutual admiration and a curiosity about each other throughout their lives, including when they had very harsh criticism on each other's work -and even that was not enough to set them completely apart. "I have been praised by the greatest living poet", is now a famous quote and was written by Pound to William Carlos Williams in their correspondence (Pound 1971, p.7). Also famous is the remark by Yeats in the same year on how "this queer creature, Ezra Pound" was a great authority on the troubadours and knew the right sort of music for poetry (Yeats 1955, 543).
Their collaboration continued for some years after their time at Stone Cottage, but became less and less frequent in the 1920s. Pound writes to W.C. Williams in 1920 that at this time "Rémy and Henry are gone and Yeats faded, and no literary publication whatever extant in England, save what "we" print (…)" (Pound 1971, 158). In his typical harsh and dismissive style, Pound wants to point out to Williams his independence from the English scene, which includes Yeats. In 1920 Yeats was lecturing, working on plays and had just published the important Wild Swans at Coole (1917); he would also write the poem "The Second Coming" in 1920, so one would find it hard to see how Yeats could be "faded".
Another famous episode shows Pound, in 1934, calling the draft of the play The King of the Great Clock Tower "putrid", an incident that "seems to have dispirited rather than angered Yeats." (Ross 2009, 347). The incident happened at an ascending moment in Pound's career. He was now deeply immersed in the writing of The Cantos, and had just published The ABC of Reading by Faber & Faber. Though the Pounds received the Yeatses at Rapallo, he was clearly not any longer in tune with the poetic project of his senior.
Two other notable episodes in the 1930s were the publication of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse and the revised edition of A Vision in 1937. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) is an anthology of poets "chosen by Yeats" from Walter Pater (1839-1894) to George Baker (1913-1991. Yeats devotes six pages to Pound's poetry, but inform us that he is "inadequately represented because too expensive" (Yeats 1936, xlii) Yeats presents Pound, in the introduction, saying that he is in the middle of an "immense poem", in which the pattern, is timeless, flux eternal and therefore without movement. Like other readers I discover at present merely exquisite or grotesque fragments. He hopes to give the impression that all is living, that there are no edges, no convexities, nothing to check the flow; but can such a poem have a mathematical structure? Can impressions that are in part visual, in part metrical, be related like the notes of a symphony; has the author being carried beyond reason by a theoretical conception? (Yeats 1936, xxiv) Yeats's cautions with the possibility of a poetic project such as The Cantos to succeed could be taken as anti-modern, but actually what we see in this anthology is the talent of a great poet in assembling just the perfect taste of Pound productions. Starting with Pound's daring translation from the Greek in "The Return" quoted in the "Introduction", Yeats then assembles together "The River's Merchant's Wife: a Letter", a translation from the Chinese included in Cathay, an excerpt from "Homage to Sextus Propertius" and "Canto XVII". The "inadequate" representation is actually an ideogram of Pound's poetics: Greeks and Romans and Chinese -West and East and the eternal flux of The Cantos. The understanding of "The Modern" in his anthology may not be the expected radical Modernism of the avant-garde but it shows his understanding of what it meant to be writing in English (and being Modern) at the period: it does not mean only to be avant-garde, it includes more parts of the spectrum.
Another sign of a "different modernity" is Yeats's A Vision. Readers of the 1937 edition of the book are presented with an addendum, in the form of introduction, not seen in the 1925 original, called "A Packet for Ezra Pound". They might wonder what Ezra Pound is doing in an already mysterious volume, a peculiar blend of occultism, pre-Socratic philosophy, and mediunically received poetic images, forming a complex system that would work as a skeleton key for the art of all ages. In this piece Yeats discloses the nature of his appreciation of Pound's art at that point: "Ezra Pound, whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more than with anyone else" (Yeats 2015, 3). And yet his tone towards Pound is affectionate, the older poet looking at the man who was feeding the cats in Rapallo, the Italian village where Pound was living.
Yeats and Pound are deeply connected also to the point of affecting each other's critic reception at times. Studies that keep the perspective of the creation of "Modernism in English" tend to see Pound as pivotal to the changes in the poetry of Yeats. Another tendency, in somewhat more recent criticism, aims to review previous claims and minimize the weight of Pound's "modernizing powers" over Yeats. One example, written in 1988 -the same decade of Yeats's first main translations in Brazil -is James Longenbach's Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism. Its author contends that at closer look, Pound was receiving a lot from Yeats, more than he was usually credited for. Pound was certainly proud of the attention given to him by Yeats, who is clearly reinventing his poetic self, though he does not make a direct connection between their personal artistic exchange and "the new Yeats". In 1915, for a book that remained unpublished, Pound wrote: There is little use discussing the early Yeats, everyone has heard all that can be said on the subject. The new Yeats is still under discussion. Adorers of the Celtic Twilight are disturbed by his gain of hardness. Some of the later work is not so good as the Wind Among the Reeds, some of it better, or at least possessed of new qualities. Synge had appeared. There is a new strength in the later Yeats on which he & Synge may have agreed between them. Poems like "The Magi" & "The Scholars," and "No Second Troy" have in them a variety that the earlier work had not. (Longenbach 1988, 19) For Longenbach, if this opinion had come to light at the time it was written, it might have changed the notion of the younger poet invested in the project of "modernizing" Yeats. Richard Ellmann, in his influential biography The Man and the Masks (1979), presents a Pound that is "convinced that Yeats was the best poet writing in English but that his manner was out of date" and "a very mixed personality" in his relationship with the nineteenth century. Full of energy, and ready to "eliminate abstractions", Pound takes liberties with his revision of Yeats's poems, and suggests improvements for the text of the play "At the Hawk's Well", but in the end "the tone, too, is definitely that of Yeats and no one else" (Ellmann 1979, 214-215). So, in this sense, Pound's hand is seen, as in the case of his revision of Eliot's "The Waste Land", as an artistic collaboration rather than an influence.

Pound and Yeats in Brazil
It is not our purpose here to take sides either with the idea that Pound has "influenced" Yeats to the point of carrying him along to the twentieth century or to prove how it was actually Pound who has taken much from Yeats. All those anecdotes feed interpretative myths that place (or not) Yeats in an idea of "Modernity" along with Pound and Eliot. Our aim is to see if these ideas (and how) have arrived in Brazil and affected the reception of these poets here, especially in relation to the work of translators, their selections and their introductions written for anthologies of poems. How was this relationship read in Brazil and how -the focus of this article's investigations -have they influenced the way they have been translated?
One point should be made about Brazilian translations of both poets: none of them are examples of what is called "literal translations". The poems mentioned below, either in monolingual or bilingual editions, have received, with different levels of success, a poetic translation. This is characteristic of much of the poetry translation practice in Brazil, and might even help to explain the scarcity of poetry translations available.
Both Yeats and Pound have been translated by several different translators. Some of them have been published in anthologies or are spread in magazines and blogs. We are going to focus here mostly in translations published as books. Translations of both poets started to appear in book form in the 1960s. The first one is Cantares (Pound, 1960), a selection from The Cantos by Décio Pignatari , Haroldo de Campos (1929de Campos ( -2003, and Augusto de Campos (1931). These poets were the founders and most important theorists of the avant-garde Brazilian movement known as Concrete Poetry, They tried to change a long Brazilian tradition of sentimental poetry that was formally loose, with Romantic tendencies, into a sharp-edged, language-oriented structural poetry, and elected Pound as their main forerunner.
Three years after Cantares, in 1963, the poet Paulo Mendes Campos (1922Campos ( -1991   , poet, translator and literary critic, translates a chronological sequence of poems by Yeats, with an introduction and notes to the poems in 1987. Another selection, this time by translator and literary critic Paulo Vizioli (1934), is published in 1998, in the same molds: chronological sequence, an introduction and notes to the poems.
Not much is seen in book form by either poet during the next decade, though we have a proliferation of translated poems scattered in blogs and poetry magazines. In book form, Pound's Lustra, translated by the poet Dirceu Villa (1975), was published in a luxurious clothbound hardcover edition, with introduction and notes, in 2011, now out of print.
"Beauty is difficult", said Aubrey Beardsley to Yeats, quoted by Pound (twice) in the Pisan Cantos. It is difficult to translate great poetry, and both Yeats and Pound wrote poetry for the ear, with intense musicality and complexity, a trait that can be hard on translators. Yeats has the added difficulty of a verse that is at the same time metric and rhymed, a poetic craft not cultivated by many. As mentioned above, it is not as common as in other countries to see, in Brazil, editions of literal bilingual translations.
The efforts of translating Pound's poetry in Brazil can be said to have been a bit older and more consistent: larger in scope and also more present in the book market. Two books by Pound (The Cantos and ABC of Reading) are still being reprinted, whereas the two main selections mentioned above of Yeats's poetry have been out of print for more than a decade. The main reason for the continuous presence of Pound's editions can be said to be the devoted attention from the Concrete poets and followers, who place Pound as a central figure in their paideuma (a word borrowed from the anthropologist Leo Frobenius by Pound and used by the brothers Campos slightly differently than Pound intended it). As mentioned above, he is seen by the group as a precursor of contemporary poetry, especially for his ideogrammic method, adapted to the purposes of their own art. Haroldo de Campos writes: "the ideogrammic method, as the organizing principle of the cantos, is so important to contemporary poetry as the serial principle is for the structure of contemporary music. The ideogram eliminates the curtains of smoke of syllogism: it gives us direct access to the object." Later, in the same text: "the ideogram has a future of its own, it does not end at the "higher" building of the cantos. it is a language adequate for the contemporary mind. it permits communication in its fastest grade 1 " (Campos, in Pound 1985, 144).
Augusto and Haroldo de Campos translated, with great success, a myriad of poets. Augusto de Campos, for instance, has translated both Pound and Yeats. His renditions are among the best ones, but the number of poems translated is very limited, and intentionally so: less poems to get the best results.
Being labelled "Modern" can be bad for translation -if the poet's free verse is understood as actually free, and not a complex rhythmic construction by the translator, when the tendency is to overlook the prosodic complexity of some poems. The Cantos has been translated in its entirety, in a work of considerable dedication. This translation, by J. L. Grünewald, has got new editions and prefaces, and remains on print. It is not a craftsmanship work as the translations found in de Campos's Cantares: its greatest merit is the effort put to have it completed, but not much can be seen that tries to imitate Pound's rhythms and musicality. The very first Canto is translated privileging an idea of concision to the point of adding to the number of verses and making them smaller than the original. Grünewald did not attempt to maintain any of the pauses signalized by commas nor to recreate a notion of rhythm sequence in the target language. Reading Pound as an "ideogrammic" writer, he has interpreted a necessity for making the verses shorter in Portuguese: And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly seas, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. E pois com a nau no mar, Assestamos a quilha contra as vagas E frente ao mar divino içamos vela No mastro sobre aquela nave escura, Levamos as ovelhas a bordo e Nossos corpos também no pranto aflito, E ventos vindos pela popa nos Impeliam adiante, velas cheias, Por artifício de Circe, A deusa benecomata.
In the version of the same stanza made by the other three Concrete poets (the brothers Campos and Pignatari) we read: And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly seas, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. E descemos então para o navio, e Quilha contra as ondas, rumo ao mar divino, içamos Mastro e vela sobre a nave negra, Ovelhas a bordo e também nossos corpos Pesados de pranto e os ventos da popa Nos lançaram ao largo, as velas infladas, Por arte de Circe, a de bela coifa.
Maintaining the same number of verses and keeping the pauses where appropriate, the approximation is much closer, and it also follows Pound in the alliterative style, yet the rhythm of Pound's verses is not mimicked. They have transported the final "and" of the second verse to the first, a resource of compensation used in poetic translations, that skilfully gives the first verse a more daring connotation, with the pending "and" at the end the very first verse of a long poem. It shows a characteristic of some of the brother Campos translations: in part, they follow very traditionally the steps of their originals, but in other moments their interpretative reading shows in the final product. In any case, the result is a very fine piece of translation, but not as innovative as other experiments made by, for instance, Haroldo de Campos in his transcriações [transcreations] of Japanese and Hebrew texts. Inspired by Poundian translations such as the Chinese poems in Cathay, the idea of a transcriação is to reinvent, in the target language, the operative aesthetic characteristic of the original text. But the Concrete poets' version of Pound himself is no such thing, even if they are, together with Dirceu Villa's more recent rendition of Lustra (Villa 2011), the best attempts so far at Pound in Portuguese. Another translation that adds to our investigation is Augusto de Campos's version of "And Thus in Nineveh" [E assim em Nínive]. In this case, the understanding of Pound as a Modernist has made his translator to experiment with a version of the poem where there is no reference to the marks of older language usages chosen by Pound. The final result is a poem that though a brilliant translation that sounds like a poem originally written in Portuguese, does not reduce or omit anything said by Pound, it does not reproduce that particular option for an old-fashioned style: "Aye! I am a poet and upon my tomb Shall maidens scatter rose leaves And men myrtles, ere the night Slays day with her dark sword.
" "Lo! this thing is not mine Nor thine to hinder, For the custom is full old, And here in Nineveh have I beheld Many a singer pass and take his place In those dim halls where no man troubleth His sleep or song.
And many a one hath sung his songs More craftily, more subtle-souled than I; And many a one now doth surpass My wave-worn beauty with his wind of flowers, Yet am I poet, and upon my tomb Shall all men scatter rose leaves Ere the night slay light With her blue sword.
"It is not, Raana, that my song rings highest Or more sweet in tone than any, but that I Am here a Poet, that doth drink of life As lesser men drink wine." E mais de um cantou suas canções Com mais arte e mais alma do que eu; E mais de um agora sobrepassa Com seu laurel de flores Minha beleza combalida pelas ondas, Mas eu sou um poeta e sobre a minha tumba Todos os homens hão de espalhar pétalas de rosas Antes que a noite mate a luz Com sua espada azul.
"Não é, Raana, que eu soe mais alto Ou mais doce que os outros. É que eu Sou um Poeta, e bebo vida Como os homens menores bebem vinho." (Pound 1985, 52) One piece of critical commentary generated by this poem is symptomatic of the reception received by Pound in Brazil and how it influences the way other poets are read. Antonio Cícero, in his blog "Acontecimentos", writes a commentary of this translation in a post called "Ezra Pound transcriado por Augusto de Campos" [Ezra Pound trans-created by Augusto de Campos] 2 . For Cicero. For Cicero, "the poem is more beautiful in Portuguese" because the then absent linguistic marks of another age, intended by Pound, are labelled Edwardian, Swinburnian, and Victorian in a pejorative way: the adjectives for Pound's poem are synonymous of outdated poetry, whereas the modernised language of the translation is "perfect". The example is only one among others, following a tendency to equate modernistic traits to "good" poetry.
In comparison, Yeats was not co-opted by any group of important Brazilian poets as a "precursor," and that might explain why his books have disappeared in the already depleted poetry book market in Brazil. Considering that none of his poetry books has been translated in its integrity, his two main translators (Ramos and Vizioli) have tried to create anthologies with a notion of chronological sequence, and both have tried to distribute their selections evenly throughout Yeats's career. Augusto de Campos, on the other hand, who has translated only a handful of poems as mentioned, have selected mostly later poems (all after 1910). Nelson Ascher (poet and translator) has published seven translations of poems by Yeats in his anthology Poesia Alheia (Ascher 1998) All of the translated poems, in this case were written between 1910 and 1929. The consensus being that the best of Yeats was produced after he was a middle aged man and had made his transition from his early poetry to the modern style of the twentieth century.
If reading a poet as an exponent of Modernism can mean understanding his vers libre as freer than it actually is, or being mistaken for loose prose that resembles verse in the page, the notion of Yeats as a transitional poet (from Victorian to Modern) can have the opposite effect: a translation that sounds more antiquated than the original. The direct first verse in "Sailing for Byzantium" (1927) -"That is no country for old men" was set to a very convoluted inversion by Péricles Eugênio da Silva Ramos, completely unmaking its simple, direct statement style. The meter of choice for this poem was the dodecasyllable (twelve syllables, instead of the original ten) and the rhyme scheme was altered (with a predominance of nasal rhymes in ão e ões): That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, -Those dying generations -at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.
Terra aquela não é que sirva para ancião Os moços a abraçar-se, as aves a cantar Nas árvores -que perecíveis gerações! -Mares cheios de atuns, cachoeiras de salmões, Peixe, ave ou carne ao longo louvam do verão O que é procriado, nasce e vem a se findar, Com aquela música sensual qualquer esquece As obras do intelecto que não envelhece. (Yeats 1987, 102-103) The longish verse line, the uncommon vocabulary and the excessive inversions sound too affected in Portuguese, adding to the feeling of an antiquated poem, instead of the lively images that are vibrant, direct and musical in the original. "The Poetic Work", a section of the introduction to his anthology, brings Ramos quoting the critic Rice Henn stating that Yeats would have remained a minor poet had he stopped writing before being 40 years old, or his best work was written between the ages 50 and 75. Ramos avoids any mention of Yeats's connection to Pound or to any other poet or movement, but says that it has been much noticed that after "a certain point" Yeats has changed his poetry, as he attested it in "A Coat" (1910). He also quotes Richard Ellmann as a contrasting view to Henn's, but nothing is said about the nature of the "changes" being connected to a feeling of Yeats as "more modern" (Yeats 1987, 27). Whatever Yeats has produced and how his poetry changes would be encapsulated in his own discoveries and is not a construction in which other artists contribute to his evolution as a poet. What is left for the reader to ponder is if this Romantic presentation of Yeats also explains the way he is presented in the translations.
Much contrary to this view is Augusto de Campos's: for him, there is a "post-Pound Yeats" who is a direct product of his affiliation to Pound (Campos 2006, 175). In 1910 Yeats starts a rupture that takes shape in Responsibilities (1914), but reaches its peak in 1928 with The Tower. His rendition of "Sailing to Byzantium" [Navegando para Bizâncio] reflects his understanding that the 1927 poem belongs to a poet who is "a modern classic" with Rilke, Blok and Valéry, preceding the "proper Modernists" as Schwitters, Khlebnikov, Mayakovski, Pound, Eliot and Apollinaire (Campos 2006, 176).
As Ramos, he chooses dodecasyllable verses and the rhyme scheme is also altered. The language of the poem sounds modern and precise, though not as musical as the original: Aquela não é terra para velhos. Gente Jovem, de braços dados, pássaros nas ramas -Gerações de mortais -cantando alegremente, Salmão no salto, atum no mar, brilho de escamas, Peixe, ave ou carne glorificam ao sol quente Tudo o que nasce e morre, sêmen ou semente. Ao som da música sensual, o mundo esquece As obras do intelecto que nunca envelhece. (Campos 2006, 186) It can be argued that the extra syllable is necessary for rendering English poems in Portuguese, but it is not difficult to find translations that maintain the same number of syllables (as Campos himself has done a number of times) and can convey practically all the literal meaning of the original, even if it is not always the case. An example can be seen in the same poem, "Sailing to Byzantium" [Velejando para Bizâncio], by Vizioli, who chooses to translate the pentameter as a decasyllable (though he does use the dodecasyllable in other occasions): Este não é país para ancião. Jovens aos beijos, aves a cantar (Mortal estirpe), saltos de salmão, Cavalas que povoam todo o mar, O peixe, o pêlo e a pluma, no verão Só louvam o que nasce e vai passar. Na música sensual vêem com desdouro As obras do intelecto imorredouro. (Yeats 1991, 103) Vizioli's version maintains the same rhyme scheme of the original and reproduces Yeats's rhythm more closely. His version brings Yeats to the twentieth century with a faster pace but uses a choice of less common, old fashioned words from the Portuguese lexicon that hints at the "unageing" art of Yeats's poetry. He also maintains the alliteration of "Fish, flesh, or fowl" as "O peixe, o pêlo e a pluma" where the other two have used "peixe, ave ou carne". Paulo Vizioli's "Introduction" to his bilingual edition of Yeats's poems, states that the "modernity" of Yeats could not be directly attributed to Pound's influence, (even though he does not dismiss it completely), since it begins in 1904, before the two poets had met: "we should not exaggerate the relevance of Pound in the preparation of Yeats's mature phase, since the anthology In the Seven Woods, published as early as 1904, presents us with all those characteristics clearly delineated (…) Yeats's style was already modern 3 " (Yeats 1991, 14).
What we notice, with this very brief comparison of excerpts of translations and critical presentations of Yeats's work, is that among these three very important Brazilian critics and translators there are three different views in the matter of the Yeats-Pound collaboration: the first ignores it; the second sees it as absolutely central to Yeats career and an episode that reinforces Pound's genius; and the last one understands it as consequential but not pivotal. It is my belief that these views have an influence in their translation choices, but this is only a preliminary investigation. These first considerations present a hint to a connection, but it would be necessary to have a more detailed study to seek for more precise answers.
And yet more questions are presented as we reach our conclusion: one that does not seem to appear in the debate as it was found was "Why is being "modern" a necessary thing for a poet to be?" "Why would the placement of Yeats as "modern" be of such primal importance for his appreciation as a poet, still today?" It would be interesting to follow Paulo Vizioli's appreciation of the Pound-Yeats connection and expand from there.
Pound as well needs a new reception in Brazil, one that would see what he has actually done, in all its complexity: from the authors he championed, and the avant-garde movements he shaped and helped create Modernism in English to the acknowledgement of the beauty of his early verse and a reception that try less hard to fit him into the role of a proto-post-modernist. This new reception has already started in the work of Dirceu Villa (Villa 2011) and Rodrigo Lobo Damasceno 4 , but it is far from being what is predominant in Brazil. Pound should not be read because he is announcing what is to come, but because he is a genius who wrote one of the most important body of poetry of the twentieth century.
Both Pound and Yeats have reached very peculiar voices in their poetry. Yeats as a wise and experienced man who composed the mature poems of "The Tower" after having tried his hand at politics, occultism, theatre and helped revive Celtic cultural expression for his generation and after. Pound, much later, old and having reached the version of The Cantos as we know it, was in doubt of what his prophecies meant, as when he told Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, in 1967, that he had tried to make his own verse cohere, but couldn't.
Their years together and their friendship should lead to our reflection on the meaning of artistic collaboration, instead of feeding agonistic ideas that seem to be more a product of criticism than what was really happening between the two friends and fellow poets. And, of course, they need to receive more attention in Brazil, to have more translations and criticism, in order to be more widely known and read.