In Memoriam
Fernando Alegría
1918 (Santiago, Chile) – 2005 (Walnut Creek, California, U.S.A.)
As Americanist scholarship increasingly incorporates work on literatures of the Americas, publishers are re-editing or translating for the first time important Latin American authors long-neglected by U.S. readers and scholars. Joint consideration of the Americas, North and South, has elucidated connections and divergences between the two continents' literatures. Less common has been scholarly attention to the criticism of English-language literatures by scholars based in Latin America and writing in other languages, principally Spanish. Yet surveys of scholarship on Walt Whitman produced outside the United States have long identified Latin American critics as among the more astute readers of the Good Gray Poet.1
This digital edition of Álvaro Armando Vasseur's 1912 selection and translation of Leaves of Grass seeks to make widely available not a book of criticism about Whitman but a nonetheless extremely influential text for Latin American readers—the first substantial collection of Whitman poems in Spanish. Scholars have identified Vasseur's translation as instrumental in accelerating Latin American poetry's shedding of its "modernista" tendencies (modernismo was less like Anglo-American modernism than something approximating French symbolism) in favor of franker, less precious, and often more explicitly socially and politically engaged verse.2
Access to this seminal Spanish-language volume of selections from Leaves of Grass will aid in understanding Whitman's reception and influence in the Spanish-speaking world. "Every society brings to literature its own form of expression, and the history of the nations can be told with greater truth by the stages of literature than by chronicles and decades," wrote the Cuban poet, journalist, and revolutionary José Martí in his 1887 homage to Whitman. Martí's was the first known piece published in Spanish on the North American poet, written after Martí had heard Whitman deliver his lecture on Abraham Lincoln in New York.3 Martí thus argued to his Latin American readers that insight into nineteenth-century U.S. culture was to be gleaned from reading Whitman. We hope that this digital edition of Vasseur's translation may similarly provide insight not only into Whitman's treatment in Latin American and Spanish letters, but also into an important moment in Latin American and Spanish literary history.
Whitman remained all but untranslated into Spanish until Vasseur's 1912 edition, even though his work had long been known to Spanish-language critics who encountered it in the U.S. (as was the case for Martí) or in translation into other European languages (as was the case for the Guatemalan writer Enrique Goméz Carillo, who read Whitman in French and wrote about him in 1895). In attempting to convey Whitman's import for U.S. literature and culture, Martí had rhetorically queried his readers, "[b]ut what can give you an idea of his vast and fiercely burning love?"4 A translation might clearly have accomplished this. Yet, despite his own vocation as poet, critic, and translator of, among others, Emerson, Longfellow, and Poe, Martí did not translate any Whitman. (When he died it was discovered that he had planned a book on Whitman and other American poets.)5 Following Martí's piece, Rubén Darío, the famous Nicaraguan modernista who would later write an anti-imperialist ode "To Roosevelt," dedicated a glowing sonnet to Whitman in his 1888 book Azul. Yet similarly, Darío did not attempt a translation. A Mexican, Balbino Dávalos, translated only a few of Whitman's poems on the occasion of the second American International Congress held in Mexico City in 1901.6
Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno translated a few poems in 1906.7 In 1909, three years before Vasseur's edition, a Peninsular translation of twenty-four of Whitman's poems was published—but in Catalan, by Cebrià Montoliu, who was himself following upon J. Pérez Jorba's 1900 Catalan study of Whitman. (It is striking that Pérez Jorba's study had proposed that the American poet displayed the "philosophical sensibility of Nietzsche," an aspect Vasseur too would highlight in the preface and footnotes to his translation.)8
In 1910 a Spanish journalist under the pseudonym "Angel Guerra" published a short article in the journal La Ilustración Española y Americana on "Walt Whitman's Lyric." Guerra would go on to write an enthusiastic preface to the 1939 edition of Vasseur's translation. In the 1910 article, occasioned by the publication of both the Italian translation of Leaves of Grass and a study by famous French Whitman commentator León Bazalgette, Guerra lamented the lack of curiosity in Spain about the American author. Only with Vasseur's subsequent 1912 translation did Whitman become available and important to generations of Latin American poets, from the residual modernistas to the region's major twentieth-century figures, including Peruvian vanguardist César Vallejo, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and the Argentine Jorge Luís Borges.9 Following Vasseur's edition, selected poems by Whitman continued to be translated anew by writers such as the Cuban poet José de Armas y Cárdenas and Chilean author and critic Arturo Torres-Rioseco. Complete translations of Leaves of Grass into Spanish followed in the post-war era, beginning with Concha Zardoya's 1946 full translation with additional selections of Whitman's prose, entitled Obras Escogidas.10
Vasseur was born in 1878 to French immigrants in Montevideo, Uruguay. He grew up in the small town of Santa Lucía, Canelones, about thirty miles outside of the capital, and left at the age of twenty for Buenos Aires, Argentina. There he mingled with prominent modernista writers Rubén Darío and Leopoldo Lugones, and greatly admired the Argentine poet "Almafuerte" (Pedro Bonifacio Palacios), with whom, however, Vasseur would later have a violent falling out. During this period Vasseur is said to have translated some Oscar Wilde and, writing under the portentous pseudonym "Americo Llanos" (the name defies exact translation but suggests "American Plains"), to have composed poetry that oddly mixed modernista aestheticism with what was called "social" verse—a poetry concerned with what U.S. writers of the same period might have called "the social question." While in Buenos Aires, Vasseur grew increasingly interested in Nietzsche, Marx, and scientific materialism, the latter of which provided him with the tools to combat what he later called, witheringly, the "sentimental socialism" he had previously known (Infancia y juventud, 59).
In 1901 Vasseur returned to Montevideo, dropped his pseudonym, and threw himself into a host of projects. He took up journalism for newspapers such as the Montevideo-based El Tiempo, oversaw the Constitutional Manifesto of the Uruguayan Socialist Party, and gave lectures in favor of divorce. He also soon published several books of poetry, including Cantos Augurales (1904), Cantos del Nuevo Mundo, and A Flor de Alma (both 1907). As Uruguayan critic Hugo Achugar points out, Cantos del Nuevo Mundo exhibits a paradoxical kind of regionalist universalism typical of the period, and exalts a pan-Americanist utopia of Progress. In this, then, Cantos del Nuevo Mundo was already perhaps a bit Whitmanesque; indeed, the book included lines of Whitman verse taken from an Italian translation as prefaces to Vasseur's own poems (Poesía y sociedad, 153).
In 1901 Vasseur was also involved in a rather sordid exchange of calumny with his contemporary and author Roberto de las Carreras, a notorious exponent of free love. On June 1, 1901, in the newspaper El Tiempo, Vasseur called de las Carreras' sensibility "exaggerated like that of an androgynous decadent" and accused him of sharing, with Enrique Gómez Carillo (ironically, the early commentator on Whitman noted above) a "cosmic vanity and feminine ill-will." De las Carreras responded in kind, flinging some thirty slurs at Vasseur, calling him everything from a "rube" to the "miserable product of a stale marriage, in whose stupefied features is etched the slight yawn with which he was conceived."11 Such literary gossip allows us to glimpse Vasseur's anxious relationship to gender and sexuality. If in some ways it was unremarkable for the time, in the self-consciously liberal environment in which de las Carreras and Vasseur moved, it was notably reactionary. It may also offer insight into Vasseur's later decisions to "straighten" some of Whitman's sexual language in Leaves of Grass.
Petty disputes like that of 1901 were the more trivial side of a lively intellectual climate in Uruguay in the late nineteenth century, which was first centered about Montevideo's Ateneo, a liberal cultural and educational center and the seat of the nation's Academic and Romantic authors. With fin-de-siècle socio-political ferment and the turn towards both socialism and modernismo, the scene moved to a series of more informal watering holes such as the Polo Bamba café, the Café Moka, the "Carlos Marx" and "Emilio Zolá" Clubs, and the International Center for Social Studies, this last founded in 1898 by a group of workers and artisans to foster intellectual and political activity through courses and lectures.12
At the turn of the century neo-Romanticism and criollismo (local color) reigned in River Plate literature, giving way to modernismo (again, a sort of aestheticism) and eventually to more "social" poetry. It is not surprising, given the character of both the Ateneo—whose members included ministers, senators, diplomats, and Presidents of the Republic—and the syndicalist International Center for Social Studies, that the poetry issuing from both would be of a more "political" nature. Vasseur, emerging from such a climate, found Whitman's rhetoric of democracy consonant with the overlap between politics, civic culture and art historically more typical of Latin- than of North American letters. It is significant, then, but not incongruent, that the press responsible for the diffusion of European revolutionary thinkers such as Max Stirner, Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Georg Büchner and Friedrich Nietzsche would be the press to publish Vasseur's translation of Whitman: the editorial house Sempere, based in Valencia, Spain.13
In 1907, at age 29, Vasseur was named a consul to San Sebastián, Spain by Uruguayan president José Batlle Ordoñez. Five years later Vasseur published his Spanish translation of selections from Whitman's Leaves of Grass, entitled Poemas. Much later, in a preface written for the book's sixth edition, Vasseur would recall that he had first encountered Whitman when he was still living in Uruguay, through Italian translator Luigi Gamberale's selections from Leaves of Grass.14 It has been assumed that Gamberale's complete translation Foglie di Erba (1900; 1907), rather than the English original, served as Vasseur's source text.15
Whitman's route into Spanish was even more circuitous than this, however. It had been French critics who initially brought Whitman to the attention of Italian writers. One of those writers was Girolamo Ragusa-Moleti, a Sicilian who encountered Whitman's work in 1872. Ragusa-Moleti encouraged his friends to write about the American poet; one friend, Enrico Nencioni, obliged with a piece on Whitman in 1879. Another friend was Luigi Gamberale, whose 1887 and 1890 selected translations from Leaves of Grass were followed by a complete translation in 1900, a reprint in 1907, and a revision in 1923.16
Gamberale based his translation on two different Whitman editions: the poems translated before 1885 used Wilson and McCormick's 1884 Glasgow edition, while poems translated later were based upon the 1890 Small, Maynard edition of Leaves of Grass. Gamberale's complete 1900 edition was based on David McKay's 1892 so-called "deathbed" edition.17 Vasseur's edition, though not a complete translation, thus is based indirectly on Whitman's of 1892.
In an essay entitled "The Accidental Tourist: Walt Whitman in Latin America," Enrico Mario Santí begins the work of documenting the complex history of the Vasseur translation. In tracing its genealogy, Santí picks up on Vasseur's admission, in his preface to the sixth edition of Poemas, that the Uruguayan translator "was never able to take in 'Anglo-Saxon words and tones,'" and that Vasseur's wife and son assimilated the language better. Yet Santí concludes rather too hastily from scant and evasive words that therefore "all translations from the original English were done by [Vasseur's] wife and son."18
In fact, however, the preface to the sixth edition, published almost forty years after the initial translation, is much less conclusive about sources consulted and translation methodology. Vasseur does write that he never grew comfortable with the sounds of English, as Santí notes, and that, despite Vasseur's consultation of exercise books and dictionaries, it was his "wife and son [who] assimilated it better." Yet Vasseur concludes the passage with an enigmatic sentence: "In general, when I needed to translate, I did so well-accompanied." This ambiguous phrase suggests he received assistance from his family or friends, and certainly underscores Vasseur's need for aides, human or bibliographic, in the translation process. It does not, however, indicate that Vasseur was not the principal translator of any English texts consulted, nor that his wife and son were. In fact, elsewhere in the same introduction Vasseur claims that the process involved, in his words, "making myself read the original, verifying the versions, choosing the most rhythmical."19 As we will suggest below, some, if tenuous, textual evidence does seem to confirm that Vasseur had access to an English edition, or at least to someone able to check the English, during the writing of the translation.
Chilean scholar Fernando Alegría's pioneering 1954 study Walt Whitman en Hispanoamérica [Walt Whitman in Hispano-America] offers one of the most comprehensive and cogent readings of the Vasseur translation, and has served as the foundation for all subsequent studies. Its exhaustive textual analysis of the work remains indispensable, though Santí's essay, cited above, offers a more detailed genealogy of the translation, as well as some new insights into it. Bringing the history of the translation up to date, Santí points out, for example, that despite the 1954 date of Alegría's study, the Chilean scholar seems not to have been acquainted with the preface to the sixth edition, in which Vasseur owns up to having used other translations as his source. (Alegría writes that Vasseur's translation is based, presumably directly, upon Whitman's 1892 edition). There too, Vasseur describes his free-handed stylistic approach to both the structure and the content of the poetry: "Purifying, pruning, and at times enriching it with some spark."20
Still, Alegría's painstaking analysis of Poemas provides the necessary figures on the translation: it tallies up the total of 83 poems included from Leaves of Grass, many in abbreviated forms, and lists the titles of the 16 poems whose names Vasseur changed, often drastically (Walt Whitman, 351, see Appendix A below for a full list). Alegría further compares, section by section, Vasseur's version of "Song of Myself" with Whitman's, listing by subsection each omission made by Vasseur (some 750 verses in total) and tracking Vasseur's strange reordering of sections of the poem.21 Alegría critiques what he sees as Vasseur's inconsistencies and occasional sloppiness, as, for example, the decision to translate "Song of the Answerer" as "Canto del Poeta" ["Song of the Poet"].22
Such inconsistencies indeed can do more than irritate: at times they undermine the sense of the book as a whole, as in "Song of the Exposition," for example, when Vasseur leaves "Columbia" unchanged in the Spanish ("Columbia"), whereas in the poem "Spain, 1873-1874" ["España 1873-1874"], appearing earlier in the collection, he inexplicably renders the same word "America." This curious change may owe something to the Americanist voice typical of Vasseur's own poetry. Such a perspective emerges more strongly at times than even the oft-strident Whitman's—as, for example, when Vasseur amplifies Whitman's "new garden of the West," from the poem "Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals," into "the new Eden, the great West of my race" [el nuevo Edén, el gran Oeste de mi raza]. "Raza," or race, does not have in Spanish quite the racialist connotation it does in English, meaning something more like a nationalist sentiment, or a sense of a "people." Here it has the unmistakable ring of celebratory pan-Americanism. And in a comic moment that Alegría dryly glosses, a regionalist chauvinism overtakes Vasseur when he changes Whitman's "wait at Valparaíso, Rio de Janeiro, Panama" to "wait at Valparaíso, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo" (from "Salut Au Monde"), and again, later in the same poem, "I see the Amazon and the Paraguay [rivers]" to "I see the Amazon, the Paraguay, the River Plate" (Walt Whitman, 359).23
Vasseur abbreviated poems according to his own taste, almost invariably eliminating Whitman's signature catalogues (Vasseur's translation of "Salut au Monde" is the only exception, rendered in its entirety).24 The problematic features of what Vasseur termed his "adaptation" include but are not limited to outright errors; the completion of sentences Whitman had deliberately rendered opaque; the omission of Whitmanesque gerunds; and, perhaps most glaringly, a tendency to cover over Whitman's homosexuality with, in the most benign cases, a vague rhetoric of brotherly love.25 In the most radical instances of Vasseur's censoring, the translator changes originally homoerotic or at least ambiguous phrases into expressions of clearly heterosexual desire.
Alegría's comprehensive enumeration of Vasseur's changes lays important groundwork for a more interpretive analysis of Vasseur's departures from the original. On the whole, Vasseur's translation is not unfaithful, but changes in elements as seemingly minor as punctuation, for example, have cumulative effects on the style and sense of the work as a whole. Vasseur often adds a fervid exclamation mark where Whitman has none. Vasseur converts commas into periods—a surprising echo of what more typically marks translation from the more clausal, long-winded Spanish into the curter English—reducing Whitman's penchant for catalogues to a more brusquely prosaic style and removing some of his biblical rhythms. Further, Vasseur unfortunately either misjudges the significance of or dislikes too much to preserve Whitman's lyric "I." Instead, he makes the most of the ability to drop pronouns in Spanish. This loss of the repetition of "I"s does disproportionate damage to the cadence and sense of the poems. And Vasseur's occasional insertion of parentheses within lines sometimes dulls Whitman's frankness, turning bold statements into qualifications, or worse, into seemingly unnecessary elaborations. Taken together, these subtle editing choices can make Whitman less strange than he is in the original. In one instance, for example, Vasseur turns Whitman's unusual locution "not-day"—a neologic negation—into the quotidian, positive term "noche" [night].
In analyzing Vasseur's changes one must bear in mind that his may be either principally or entirely a second order translation from not the English but Gamberale's Italian. Thus before drawing conclusions about the significance of Vasseur's changes it is first necessary to make sure they are indeed Vasseur's own doing, and not the passive reproduction of Gamberale's changes or errors. That said, it is striking that in our comparisons, glaring innovations in Vasseur's translation are almost invariably his own departure from the Italian, the latter of which is unusually, even at times detrimentally, literal.26
Vasseur's handling of the sexual thematics of Whitman's poetry offers a good example. Here the translator vacillates between muted renditions of Whitman's sexual openness and versions that may push Whitman's suggestiveness beyond its original bounds. This is particularly the case when the passages involve issues of race or gender—concepts whose framing ideologies vary considerably across Latin America as well as between Latin America and the United States. In the case of Whitman's famous "fugitive slave" passage from "Song of Myself," Vasseur's rendition makes an important amendment to the original scene:
Whitman (1892):
The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and
weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him. . . .
Vasseur (1912):
El esclavo fugitivo se aproximó á mi choza, deteniéndose
en el umbral,
Por la entreabierta puerta de la cocina, lo vi tambalearse
y sin fuerzas:
Fuí hacia el tronco de árbol en que se había sentado, lo
cogí entre mis brazos, y lo llevé adentro;
[The fugitive slave approached my hut, stopping at the threshold,
Through the half-open door of the kitchen, I saw him tottering and weak:
I went toward the stump where he had sat, I held him in my arms, and I carried him inside. . . .]
The addition of "held him in my arms" opens up this passage to more erotic readings than did Whitman's original. In another passage substantively amended by Vasseur, the body of the black male slave is made to resonate historically with the violent restriction of women's bodies:
La madre de antaño condenada por bruja y quemada sobre
haces de leña seca, á la vista de sus hijos,
El esclavo, perseguido como una presa, que cae en mitad
de su fuga, todo tembloroso y sudando sangre,
[The mother of old condemned as a witch and burned over dry firewood, before her children's eyes,
The slave, persecuted like an imprisoned woman, who falls mid-flight, all atremble and sweating blood.]
Here is Whitman's original from 1892:
The mother of old, condemn'd for a witch, burnt with dry wood,
her children gazing on,
The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blow-
ing, cover'd with sweat. . . .
Vasseur's direct comparison of the slave to a woman is based, presumably, on their common lack of power, but it also creates cross-gendered possibilities that turn the passage in new ways. Whitman had distinct units—separate lines—for the witch and the hounded slave. An association could be made between them because of their juxtaposition; yet that association is not insisted on in the English original. Vasseur turns the suggestion of a link into an unmistakable link, associating racial slavery with all the irrationality of religious persecution (invoking, perhaps, the spectre of the Inquisition). That church-sponsored terror might in turn remind informed Hispanophone readers of the widespread support of slavery by some religious organizations in the United States (bitterly denounced in Frederick Douglass's narrative and in others'). Such a reading is remotely perceptible in Whitman's original, but in Vasseur's it rises to the surface.
Still, this dynamic of reaching across boundaries of gender, race, and sexuality does not uniformly characterize Vasseur's translation. Whitman's identification with the slave in his 1892 passage concludes with the declaration, "All these I feel or am." Vasseur's Spanish, however, renders this identification less close: "All this I feel and suffer as he does." The tension here may be rooted in racist boundaries; Vasseur's version of Whitman, it might be argued, seems to allow for homoeroticism in the case of a black subject, while at the same time, it stops short of permitting empathy across racial lines.
In other moments involving Whitman's gay poetics a certain squeamishness is evident in Vasseur's choices. Alegría notes that Vasseur twists key words that Whitman uses to express particularly homosexual desire, relationality and coupling into less physical, even cerebral terms—his prime example is Vasseur's rendering of "adherence" as "trust."27 Additional examples are plentiful. In "City of Orgies" Vasseur changes "lovers" to "friends" [amigos]. In the translation of "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing," "manly love" becomes the slightly tamer "male affection" [afecto viril]. In "Song of Myself," Vasseur translates "the atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless/ It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it" as, to back translate it as literally as possible, "The atmosphere is not a perfume, it tastes of no essences, it is odorless,/ My mouth breathes it in vital gasps; I love it madly, as I would a woman." The Italian contains no such insertion of loving a woman; this addition is Vasseur's. Strangely enough, elsewhere in the translation Vasseur omits references to women: for example, in his version of "Give Me Your Silent Splendid Sun," the line "give me for marriage a sweet-breath'd woman of whom I should never tire" is eliminated, as is, in Vasseur's version of "From Pent-up Aching Rivers," the phrase "of the woman that loves me and whom I love more than my life."28
The Whitmanian word Camerado presents an interesting challenge to Vasseur's vaguely homophobic sensibilities, and perhaps represents something of a cop-out in his attempts to maneuver around openly gay love. Camerado is a defunct term borrowed from Renaissance Spanish, and is the root of the English comrade, Whitman's basic denotation. But Vasseur's frequent equivalent, the contemporary Spanish word camarada, is unusual insofar as it is functionally neutral, but suggests a feminine subject because of its female-gendered ending, "-a" (camarada is in fact grammatically a collective feminine.) A little-used term, camarada is derived from the Spanish cámara, or chamber, and a camarada was originally a group sharing a chamber, or sharing a bed. Hence it first meant bedfellow, then more generally a companion or friend.
In "An Oak in Louisiana," a poem focusing on male love, Vasseur opts for camarada. He does translate the phrase "without a friend" as without an amigo (male/neutral). But Vasseur translates "lover" as "camarada," a dodging of the issue. It is possible that Vasseur is here influenced by the Italian rendition, which chose camarata for camerado. The Italian camarata, however, is a more common word for companion, interchangeable with the unambiguously male/neutral compagno, and indeed carries militaristic, masculine connotations despite its apparent gender. In another passage from "Song of Myself," Gamberale translates Whitman's "bed-fellow" as "compagno di letto" in the lines "the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread,/ Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with their plenty." Vasseur makes the loving bedfellow the more muted "caressing, affectionate camarada," rather than, say, compañero de cama. The Italian bedfellow kisses and hugs, and fills the house with white towels. The Spanish companion is merely affectionate and caressing, and leaves white towels that brighten (alegran), rather than more sensually "swell[ing]," the house with their plenty. It is, of course, possible that Vasseur simply finds camarada the best translation for bedfellow. The gender agreement for "caress" does indicate that the bedfellow is male.29
At times Vasseur's changes evince a general fidelity to the integrity of Leaves of Grass, but remain puzzling. Why, for example, does he render "Endless unfolding of words of ages!/ And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse," the last word faithfully maintained in French in the Italian translation, as "Infinite unfolding of words in time!/ Mine is a modern word: the word multitude!"? Multitude is in keeping with Whitman's famous lines about contradiction, but the very use of multitude later in the original suggests Whitman meant something particular in choosing "En-Masse" in the earlier line. The choice is the more puzzling because in his version of "Song of Myself" Vasseur uses the term "en masa," an equivalent of en masse, to describe the killing of captured soldiers in the poem's thirty-fourth section (1892 ed.).
As evidenced in Vasseur's insertion of additional exclamation points, something of his Romantic stylistic tendency persists and breaks through at moments. As Alegría puts it wonderfully, "Whitman as much as Vasseur expresses . . . a sentimentalist indignation typical of nineteenth century Romantic, liberal philanthropism. But Vasseur laments two times where Whitman does once" (358). These flourishes can be almost comical, as when Vasseur adds to Whitman's line "my faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths" the superfluous addition "like the tail of a comet."
An additional trilingual comparison of the Whitman, Gamberale, and Vasseur versions offers intriguing evidence that Vasseur was working with an English edition as well. We reproduce the three versions below to illustrate what appears to be a correction on Vasseur's part back to the English meaning of a word erroneously translated into the Italian:
Whitman (1892):
I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured
and never will be measured.
Gamberale (1907):
Io so di avere il meglio del tempo e dello spazio, e che esso non fu misurato mai, nè sar misurato mai.
[I know I have the best of time and space, and that this was never measured, nor ever will be measured]
Vasseur (1912):
Sé que soy superior al tiempo y al espacio, sé que nunca he sido medido, que no lo seré jamás.
[I know I am above time and space, I know I have never been measured, that I never will be.]
Here, although Vasseur inexplicably changes "have the best of" to "above," he reinstitutes the "I" as that which is not subject to measure, which Gamberale had turned from the subjective to the objective immeasurable "best of time and space."
In her study of Gamberale's translation, Grazia Sotis points out that some of the idiosyncratic or more streetwise English words give the Italian translator trouble (52). The famously barbaric yawp, for example, becomes a mere shriek or scream in the stanza that ends "I, too am untranslatable," which Gamberale faithfully renders "intraducibile." But in the Spanish, as if Vasseur were making a subtle yet bold commentary on these challenges of translation, the same section concludes with an "I" not untranslatable but "inexplicable" [inexplicable]. Perhaps Vasseur was, in the very act of translation, refuting Whitman's claim, and honoring Whitman's "dearest dream" for "an internationality of poems and poets binding the lands of the earth"?30 Though not all of Vasseur's changes may be "explicable," the wider availability of this important translation may help encourage further study of the "internationality" of Whitman's works.
Matt Cohen Rachel Price Duke UniversityNote that we have rendered both the nouns canto and canción as "song"; Vasseur may well intend a distinction here, as canción is closer to the English sense of "song," while canto can refer to a chant or hymn as well as the classical "canto."
| En el mar, sobre las naves [At sea, on ships] | In Cabin'd Ships at Sea |
| A una locomotora [To a locomotive] | To a Locomotive in Winter |
| Chispas emergidas de la rueda [Sparks from the wheel] | Sparkles from the Wheel |
| Desbordante de vida, ahora [Overflowing with life, now] | Full of Life Now |
| Canto de la vía pública [Song of the open road] | Song of the Open Road |
| Ciudad de orgías [City of orgies] | City of Orgies |
| El Himno que Canto [The Hymn I Sing] | Still Though the One I Sing |
| Una marcha en las filas [A march in the ranks] | A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown |
| Apartando con las manos la hierba de las praderas [Parting by hand the prairie grass] | The Prairie-Grass Dividing |
| Ciudad de los navíos [City of ships] | City of Ships |
| En las praderas [On the prairies] | Night on the Prairies |
| A ti, vieja causa [To you, old cause] | To Thee Old Cause |
| Imperturbable [Imperturbable] | Me Imperturbe |
| Una extraña velada transcurrida en un campo de batalla [A strange evening passed on a battlefield] | Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night |
| Un roble en la Luisiana [An oak in Louisiana] | I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing |
| Pensamiento [Thought] | Thought |
| Silenciosa y paciente, una araña [Silent and patient, a spider] | A Noiseless Patient Spider |
| Cuadro [Painting] | A Glimpse |
| Este polvo fue antaño un hombre [This dust was once a man] | This Dust Was Once the Man |
| A los Estados [To the States] | To the States |
| España (1873-1874) [Spain (1873-1874)] | Spain, 1873-74 |
| A un historiador [To a historian] | To a Historian |
| La Morgue [The Morgue] | The City Dead-House |
| Como meditaba en silencio [As I meditated in silence] | As I Ponder'd in Silence |
| ¡Oh capitán! ¡Mi capitán! [Oh captain! My captain!] | O Captain! My Captain! |
| Allá á lo lejos... [Far off...] | Old Ireland |
| Dadme vuestro espléndido sol [Give me your splendid sun] | Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun |
| Hijos de Adam [Sons (or Children) of Adam] | Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals |
| Canto de la bandera, al amanecer [Song of the flag, at dawn] | Song of the Banner at Daybreak |
| ¡Pioners! ¡Oh pioners! [Pioneers! Oh pioneers!] | Pioneers! O Pioneers! |
| Imágenes [Images] | Eidólons |
| Pensamientos [Thoughts] | Thoughts |
| Hacia el Edén [Towards Eden] | From Pent-Up Aching Rivers |
| Excelsior [Excelsior] | Excelsior |
| Á Uno que fué crucificado [To One who was crucified] | To Him That Was Crucified |
| Del canto de mí mismo [From the song of myself] | Song of Myself |
| Canto del hacha [Song of the axe] | Song of the Broad-Axe |
| Mira tú que reinas victoriosa [Look, you who reigns victorious] | Lo, Victress On the Peaks |
| A un burgués [To a burgher/bourgeois] | To a Certain Civilian |
| Año que tiemblas y vacilas ante mí [Year that trembles and reels before me] | Year That Trembled and Reel'd beneath Me |
| Canto del poeta [Song of the poet] | Song of the Answerer |
| Inscripción para una tumba [Inscription for a tomb] | Outlines for a Tomb |
| Canto de la Exposición [Song of the Exposition] | Song of the Exposition |
| El enigma [The riddle] | A Riddle Song |
| Á un extranjero [To a foreigner] | To a Stranger |
| La duda terrible de las apariencias [The terrible doubt of appearances] | Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances |
| Del canto al Presidente Lincoln [From the song to President Lincoln] | When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd |
| La canción de la Muerte [The song of Death] | When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd |
| Á cierta cantante [To a certain singer] | To a Certain Cantatrice |
| De lo más hondo de las gargantas del Dakota [From the deepest passes of Dakota] | From Far Dakota's Cañons |
| Del mediodía á la noche estrellada [From noon to starry night] | Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling |
| Iniciadores [Beginners] | Beginners |
| ¡Jonnondio! [Yonnondio!] | Yonnondio |
| Los Estados Unidos á los críticos del Viejo Mundo [The United States to Old World critics] | The United States to Old World Critics |
| Hacia alguna parte [Toward somewhere] | "Going Somewhere" |
| Media noche [In the middle of the night] | A Clear Midnight |
| Espíritu que has plasmado esta naturaleza [Spirit that has shaped this nature] | Spirit That Form'd This Scene |
| La abuela del Poeta [The Poet's grandmother] | Faces |
| La Etiopía saludando á la bandera [Ethiopia saluting the flag] | Ethiopia Saluting the Colors |
| Luna hermosa [Beautiful Moon] | Look Down Fair Moon |
| Reconciliación [Reconciliation] | Reconciliation |
| Cuando estaba a tu lado [When I was beside you] | As I Lay with My Head in Your Lap Camerado |
| ¡Oh estrella de Francia! [Oh star of France!] | O Star of France |
| Paises sin nombre [Nameless lands] | Unnamed Lands |
| Un espectáculo en el campo [A sight in the camp] | A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim |
| La cantante en la prisión [The singer in the prison] | The Singer in the Prison |
| Orillas del Ontario azul [Shores of blue Ontario] | By Blue Ontario's Shore |
| A un revolucionario europeo vencido [To a defeated European revolutionary] | To a Foil'd European Revolutionaire |
| Canto del Sequoia [Song of the Sequoia] | Song of the Redwood-Tree |
| Europa [Europe] | Europe |
| Una hora de alegría y de locura [One hour of joy and madness] | One Hour to Madness and Joy |
| Canto el cuerpo eléctrico [I sing the body electric] | I Sing the Body Electric |
| Poetas venideros [Poets to come] | Poets to Come |
| Cuando leí el libro [When I read the book] | When I Read the Book |
| Un canto de alegrías [A song of joys] | A Song of Joys |
| Saludo mundial [Salute to the world] | Salut au Monde! |
| Atravesé antaño una ciudad populosa... [I once passed through a populous city...] | Once I Pass'd through a Populous City |
| Camino de las Indias Orientales [Road to the East Indies] | Passage to India |
| La plegaria de Colón [Prayer of Columbus] | Prayer of Columbus |
| Os he oído, suaves y solemnes armonías del órgano [I have heard you, soft and solemn harmonies of the organ] | I Heard You, Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ |
| Juventud, mediodía, vejez y noche [Youth, midday, old age and night] | Youth, Day, Old Age and Night |
| Solitario pájaro de las nieves [Solitary snowbird] | Of That Blithe Throat of Thine |
| Grave y titubeando [Grave and hesitating] | Pensive and Faltering |
| Mirando labrar [Watching the plowing] | As I Watch'd the Ploughman Ploughing |
| De los Cantos de Adiós [From Songs of Farewell] | So Long! |
Translating into English Vasseur's Spanish version of "Song of Myself," itself based on the Italian translation of Leaves of Grass and perhaps other translations, felt like straining to hear a muffled and distant voice. Much of Whitman's meaning and even words remained surprisingly intact, however, throughout the course of the poem's linguistic transmutations. One is reminded of the mid-nineteenth century Brazilian phrasebook, English As She Is Spoke, which so charmed Mark Twain. The phrasebook, intended to provide Brazilians with common English phrases, was written by two men, José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolina, neither of whom knew English. Comedy ensued; it has been said that many of the improbable mis-translations came not from consultation of a Portuguese- English dictionary but from a French-English dictionary.
This translation is designed more to stimulate critical comparison than to be aesthetically innovative or elegant. It attempts to strike a balance between offering as literal as possible a translation (rather than trying to refract the style or flavor of Vasseur's version), and rendering words plausibly cognate with Whitman's original in that form. That is, after undertaking a first stab at back-translation, I corrected any synonyms I may have chosen that were slightly, but not meaningfully, different than Whitman's 1892 original. This should permit readers consulting this English version of Vasseur to discern the more significant changes proper to Vasseur's version.
That said, however, as much as meaning would permit, and even when a difference was as small as an article, I attempted to conserve it in the translation. Whenever possible, I have also transferred Vasseur's punctuation and layout to my translation. The layout, using paragraph instead of hanging indentation, follows Vasseur's practice in Poemas. Paragraph indentation is not uncommon for Spanish language poetry, but by Vasseur's time poets were manipulating such layout conventions as a way of making meaning. It was not possible, however, to preserve line segmentation. In cases in which Vasseur's choice of gender seemed clearly significant in relation to the original, a footnote indicates the designation. Finally, as Salessi and Quiroga note (127), Vasseur often renders Whitman's "you" in the plural form, vosotros, which, while not always mitigating the intimacy of Whitman's famous "I and you" moments, does introduce different potential meanings.
Rachel PriceThough attempting to capture some of Vasseur's acrobatic metaphorics, this translation emphasizes the sense of the "Prólogo" over its style. Titles of books and names of authors mentioned have been rendered in their best-known English versions; titles of specific editions cited are left in the original Spanish.
Matt CohenThe poems whose Spanish adaptation I offer to my readers were written between the years 1854–1888. The first edition of the Leaves of Grass, in modest octavo, was no longer than one hundred pages. Whitman himself, being an old typographer, composed his own work (1).
The poet, who was born in Long Island—an island situated across from New York—the 31st of May, 1819, was then thirty-five years old.
Stimulated by Emerson's essays, he had many times dreamed of a lyrical form—capable of descending to the most trivial, quotidian details and of soaring to all the spiritual heights—falling back on neither traditional prose nor traditional poetry.
It was a desire analogous to that which Baudelaire describes in the preface to his Prose Poems. The difference lies in the distinct temperaments with which one and the other teased out his execution.
Classically rhythmatic clauses and sober adjectivization in the Frenchman; grandiloquent phrases, redundant and barbarous in the American.
The said form did not seem to have other precedents than certain liturgical ejaculations, some isolated pages of Chateaubriand, Kempis's exhortations, the axioms of the great French thinkers—Pascal and La Rochefoucauld—swift and musical like poems, and overall, the verses of the Bible, and of the fragments of Orphic and Vedic hymns (1) as they circulate in the translations of modern languages.
The "Great Idea" that Whitman was forging for himself, about how he had to be the singer of democracy, could not be projected along the lines of New World schools, after they deformed themselves on slender, trendy poetical frameworks.
He had to begin by breaking the mold of Medieval metre. He had to revolutionize the ancién régime of rhetoric, with the aim of giving to the American intellect freedom of creation and expression as others had already given it political and civil freedom.
To achieve this it was necessary to renounce the European poetic tradition; make a tabla rasa of its themes and its tinkling verbal musics; return to the most ancient, to fling himself into the unknown. . .
Walt Whitman, guided by his extraordinary poetical instinct, reached the same fountains as had the great gospels, true lullabies of the races.
"The Bard of Democracy," as he considered himself, was not just another poet. He had to be the evangelist of the continent-in-formation, creator of new values, hero, prophet and companion of men. Guide of guides, consoler of the afflicted, terror of despots, a marvel to children, beloved of the young, friend of wives, counselor of fathers, glorifier of life and of death.
For him, to live was not to conserve oneself, as Schopenhauer understood it, nor to defend oneself in order not to perish, as Darwin postulates. To live is to develop—not at the expense of others and oneself—as Nietzsche would say a quarter of a century later, but out of oneself. And since the individual life takes root in an egocentric substrate as absorbent as the personality is imperious—resulting in altruism—it illuminates its most sordid depths.
Walt Whitman carried within himself the thirst for life and love that Wagner incarnated in Siegfried. His character made blossom in the midst of his youth the grain of wisdom that Faust harvested in old age: to love life over the images of it that withered between the pages of books.
To prefer the smile of the watchman's daughter to the treasures hidden in bank vaults.
To project from himself the fantastic dawns of suns for the rejoicing of humanity present and future.
After having studied the greatest teachers of the ages, to wish that they could come to his time to study him. To manifest himself in everything like a God.
To hit upon a literary form adequate to the tone and the multiple senses of his "new good" was an undertaking before which all of Hercules's paled.
Forty years passed, dense, electric, before Whitman would definitively cast the torrential and often contradictory intuitions of his temperament.
Forty years of fighting with verb and rhythm, of variants and incessant re-smeltings.
Ten editions of Leaves of Grass saw the light in Whitman's lifetime. With each new edition the book grew, transformed, became more and more monumental. But always it was the same book.
The leveling idea, the love for common men, the ennobling of all varieties of the profanum vulgus, the passion for Nature and human liberty, the religious cult of manual labor, bursting out in hymns to all occupations, the apotheosis of fecund sensualism and of physical beauty, flash out in his poems like the sword of the Archangel at the entrance to Milton's Paradise Lost.
The symphonic music that energizes his verses is comparable to Wagner's most potent chords.
Certain passages in some of his songs outdo in spirit and transcendence the most heroic of all times. Only Nietzsche in the poem of "The Seven Seals" achieves the elevation and lyrical flight of the Yankee.
In spite of his silence in this respect, more than once I have believed I recognized seedlings of Leaves of Grass ripening on Zarathustra's mountainside.
The poems of Walt Whitman were known in Germany before 1868. The poet Freiligrath had already published a study of the democratic singer in the Allgemeinen Zeitung.
Nietzsche found himself in those days in Leipzig. He had not yet been named Professor of Philosophy at Basel (1869). His first work, The Birth of Tragedy, appeared in 1872; the Gay Science in 1882; The Dawn in 1886; and the first part of Zarathustra he wrote in 1883. The four known parts of the said epic appeared from 1883 to 1886.
According to Nietzsche's plan, inserted in the edition of his Obras póstumas (vol. XII), Zarathustra was meant to consist of six parts. The final chapter of the sixth part cuts, in the most thorough way, the old knot of its contradictions.
In it, Zarathustra announces to the men congregated around him that class conflict has come to an end, as has the moral rule of the dominators. He affirms that at this level of evolution, the human species shares one lot and one ideal. After reiterating his hope for the appearance of the Superman, he proclaims his new faith: that life would return to its commencement (1). Then he asks them: Would you like all this, one more time? All answer: Yes! And Zarathustra dies of joy. In this strange ending seems perceptible the influence of the democratic muse of Whitman more than that of the great Fichte, Hölderlin, and Emerson, the favorite authors of his youth.
The Yankee cosmos was, in its life and nature, that which the German poet had dreamed to be: force and sweetness, beauty and disinterest.
Walt Whitman practiced as a volunteer nurse during the War of Secession. In Washington's hospitals he contracted the disease that, undermining his titanic constitution, degenerated over thirty years into paralysis.
Nietzsche was also a nurse during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). To the emotions of this epoch and to the subsequent abuse of chloral hydrate is attributed the dementia that reduced him to idiocy in his final years.
Both are, in my judgment, the chief lyricists of the past century. The German, with the limitations imposed by his philosophical criticism and the complexities of his great classical culture. The Yankee with the brilliance of his religious transcendentalism and the ingenuities of his august autodidacticism.
That one, concentrated and explosive, like the flammable ordnance of the Prussian arsenals; this one, overflowing and for moments monotonous, like the cataracts of his country.
Beside him, Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Swinburne, Carducci, Junqueiro, Rapisardi, look like regional poets. Poets, in the most conventional and European sense of the word.
The influence of W. Whitman is already universal. Translated into Italian, German, French, Spanish, his images and adjectival couplings retain their primitive texture. Modern verslirismo is one of the many effects of his work.
Maetnerlinck and Verhaeren in Belgium; Rapisardi; D'Annunzio, the "Futurists" in Italy; Laforgue, Viele Griffin and the "social poets" in France; Miers, Rossetti, Carpenter in England; Unamuno, and perhaps Alomar, in Spain; Darío and Lugones in America, are indebted to him for varied and profound suggestions.
I could have followed silently such illustrious examples without risking passing for a tradittore. . .
It has seemed to me more original to take this final risk. . .
"What matters the individual if it is the spirit who guides?"
Sings the poet.
Blessed be the tempest of his art, if it manages to clear the Hispanoamerican literary atmosphere, so overburdened with clucking and crowing!
A. VASSEUR San Sebastian, February 1912.In addition to those thanked in the footnotes, the editors would like to thank Ralph Bauer, George Handley, Hugo Achugar, and the directors of the Walt Whitman Archive for reviewing this introduction and making suggestions that much improved it.
1. Basing his judgment on John Delancey Ferguson's 1916 assessment of Whitman scholarship in Ferguson's American Literature in Spain, Gay Wilson Allen concluded that, "to judge from the representative examples which Ferguson has provided, Spanish criticism of Walt Whitman has been as intelligent and perceptive as that of any other foreign country,—more intelligent, in fact, than that of most of the infatuated disciples in France, Germany or even the United Status" (Allen quoted in Aizen de Moshinsky, Walt Whitman, 60). [back]
2. Fernando Alegría succinctly justifies further study of Vasseur's work, "because of all the Spanish translations of Whitman's book it is the one which has had the greatest influence on the poets and public of Spain and Hispanoamerica" (Walt Whitman, 349, our translation). Vasseur's rough contemporary, the Uruguayan poet and critic Alberto Zum Felde, similarly argued that Vasseur's translation "was the one I knew in those years, as it was the one that circulated in Uruguay, and surely elsewhere in Latin America. Knowledge of this translation influenced [my own work]" (Visca-Arturo, Conversando, 35-6, our translation). The importance of the translation, Alegría argues, was such that it served as something of a "literary manifesto" insofar as it did not translate Leaves of Grass in its entirety but instead selected a limited number in an attempt to "convulse and revolutionize the world of Spanish letters and to stamp in the minds of poets the idea that a more profound conception of poetry was necessary if they hoped to gain any measure of universality" (Walt Whitman, 350, our translation). [back]
3. Martí, Allen, and Echevarría, JoséMartí, 185. [back]
4. Ibid., 189. [back]
5. See Martí, Obras Completas, 18: 286. [back]
6. See John Englekirk, "Notes," 134. [back]
7. See Allen, Handbook, 320. [back]
8. See Ferguson, American Literature in Spain, 175. For a chronological list of Whitman's translators and critics in Spain and Latin America see Alegría, Walt Whitman, 34. [back]
9. For more on Whitman's role in Latin American literary aesthetics see Santí, "The Accidental Tourist"; and Salessi and Quiroga, "Errata sobre la erótica." [back]
10. For an exhaustive catalog and analysis of Whitman's presence and translators in Latin America see Fernando Alegría's Walt Whitman en hispanoamérica. For a more circumscribed but nuanced reading of Whitman's influence on some of the twentieth century's more notable Latin American authors, including Borges and Neruda, see Enrico Mario Santí's "The Accidental Tourist: Walt Whitman in Latin America" (156-176). [back]
11. Quoted in Monegal, "Sexo y poesía." [back]
12. For further consideration of this moment see Achugar, Poesía y sociedad; and Sergio Visca-Arturo's interview with Alberto Zum Felde, Conversando Con Zum Felde. This helpful source we owe to Santí's excellent bibliographical research on Vasseur's translation, discussed in "The Accidental Tourist." [back]
13. See Zum Felde, El proceso intelectual, 213. [back]
14. Vasseur, "Prólogo para la sexta edición." [back]
15. Indeed, Vasseur hints at one of the origins of his translation, as well as his professional anxiety about turning Whitman's translator instead of writing poetry inspired by him, at the conclusion of the preface to the first edition. There he writes, "Yo podía haber seguido silenciosamente tan ílustres ejemplos sin exponerme á pasar por tradittore. . . Me ha parecido más original correr este último albur. . ." ["I could have followed silently such illustrious examples, without risking passing for a traitor . . . It has seemed to me more original to take this last risk . . ."] (Poemas 1912, xii). Vasseur chooses to render the word "traitor" in Italian when we expect the word "traductor," evoking the ironic saying, "traduttore, traditore," or "translator, traitor." At the same time he plays on the multiple meanings of the verb "exponserse," which can mean both to risk and to expose oneself—the playful use of the Italian suggesting simultaneously that his source is not directly Whitman and that he is aware of the pitfalls of translation. [back]
16. See Allen, Walt Whitman Abroad, 187. [back]
17. Thanks to Grazia Sotis for clarifying these details. [back]
18. Santí, "The Accidental Tourist," 366 fn 12. Perhaps Santí was unduly convinced by an anecdotal (and unfortunately unverifiable) recollection, by Vasseur's contemporary Zum Felde, that Vasseur had not known any English, but instead had depended upon a certain Dr. Vitale for auxiliary literal English translations. In the preface to the sixth edition Vasseur does mention his friend Dr. Vitale's role in familiarizing Vasseur with English-language literature, including Whitman, but says nothing about Vitale as a consultant in translation. Further, he mentions visiting Vitale in Montevideo—but Vasseur undertook the Whitman translation in Spain. [back]
19. Vasseur, "Prólogo para la sexta edición." In the same introduction Vasseur dwells on having grown up in a French-speaking household, recalling that French was his mother tongue until he was at least fifteen years old. And he follows the above-cited comment about being well-accompanied in his translation process with the sentences: "Harto diversas y simultáneas solían ser mis preocupaciones. Singularmente, en aquella primera etapa hispano-anglo-francesa" [My concerns tended to be quite varied and simultaneous. Singularly so, in that first Hispano-Anglo-French moment]. This signals the possibility that one of the "versions" or translations of Leaves of Grass consulted was the French. [back]
20. Vasseur, "Prólogo para la sexta edición" (our translation). [back]
21. Alegría describes the parts Vasseur edited out of "Song of Myself" (using a numbering system explained in the appendix): "6, pantheistic symbol of grass; 9, an illustration of his philosophy of death; 12, a detailed description of human types, important because it helps in understanding the poet's incarnation in familiars, part of his pantheistic doctrine; 15, enumeration of jobs; 16, 17, 19, where the poet expresses his understanding of all kinds of men, victors and vanquished alike, good and evil, throughout the eras; 27, 28, 29, 30, where he glorifies the feelings of and affirms the greatness of the human body; 37, where the poet identifies with the prisoner, the rebel, the thief, the choleric, the beggar; 38, in which he suggests his transfiguration; and 50, where he indicates the meaning of his Happiness. In addition to these sections, omitted altogether, many verses were excluded from the translated sections" (Walt Whitman, 367-8, our translation). [back]
22. Ibid., 352. [back]
23. At times, it should be noted, Vasseur manages to out-Whitman his master, or to put a verse into words that may seem truer to Whitman's own spirit. Take, for instance, Vasseur's decision to translate "imbue" as "impregnate" in a line from "Song of Myself." One meaning of imbue can be to impregnate, but the latter word lends a rawer, transgressive, if less lyrical, tone to Vasseur's rendering, which in English would be: "I accept Reality, I do not argue with it,/ I begin and end impregnating myself with materialism" (the original is "I accept Reality and dare not question it,/ Materialism first and last imbuing"). On translation and the possibility of supersession see Ilan Stavans, "Beyond Translation: Jorge Luis Borges Revamps William Faulkner," in Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies, ed. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn (Durham: Duke UP, 2004): 495-504.
Several critics have argued on behalf of the innovation of Vasseur's interpretation of Whitman. Enrico Mario Santí, for instance, offers a revision of Fernando Alegría's critique of Vasseur's translation. Santí places scare quotes around Alegría's criticisms and goes on to ratify—even endorse—what he reads as Vasseur's knowing and pointed re-writing of Whitman. Alegría's judgment of Vasseur's readings as "truncated" and "incorrect," and his grumbling about Vasseur's "excessive liberties," were, in Santí's estimation, misguided. Indeed, he counters, "Far from Alegría's view that Vasseur's 'translations' were defective or aberrant because they did not render faithfully Whitman's English original, I find them to be the most apposite. These 'unfaithful' versions of Whitman, foundation-texts of his Latin American cult, confirm the alienated, second-order quality of such discourse" (164). Another article, by Jorge Salessi and José Quiroga, similarly defends Vasseur's poetic license, proclaiming that the Uruguayan poet manages to make Whitman more erotic than he reads in the English. Citing a fragment of Vasseur's translation of "To a Locomotive in Winter," they write that in translation "Whitman's locomotive is turned into an erotic manifesto that is already not without a certain Marinettian flair. In the original, the body is more mechanical" (125). [back]
24. See Ferguson, American Literature in Spain, 189. [back]
25. See Alegría, Walt Whitman, 352-355. [back]
26. Again, despite the fact that he was apparently unaware that Vasseur was working from at least the Italian translation, Alegría's major assessments still obtain. For example, it is true that several of the titles Vasseur changes were also slightly changed in the Italian. But the changes are not consonant, suggesting that at most Vasseur was inspired by Gamberale's adaptations to make his own, or that indeed the changes may be merely coincident or derived from another source such as the French translation. Thus, for example, while "To a Certain Civilian" is rendered by Gamberale as "Ad un pacifico cittadino" [To a peaceful civilian], it is translated equally curiously but distinctly as "A un burgués" [To a burgher/bourgeois] by Vasseur.
For a discussion of Gamberale's translation and the debatable merits of its literal nature see Grazia Sotis, Walt Whitman in Italia: la traduzione Gamberale e la traduzione Giachino di Leaves of Grass (Naples: Società Editrice Napoletana), 1987. [back]
27. 361. Alegría notes also, importantly, that Whitman's rendering of key terms from phrenology, such as "adhesiveness" or "amativeness," is lost in Vasseur's version; this may be the case for other terms Whitman has borrowed or adapted from specialist discourses. [back]
28. Perhaps more strangely, as if to balance out Whitman's male-focused gaze, Vasseur fantasized the poem "The Poet's Grandmother" ["La Abuela del Poeta"] into existence, constructing it from a section of Whitman's poem "Faces" (Poemas 1912, 147). [back]
29. Just a year after Vasseur's translation was published in Barcelona, Cebrià Montoliu, the author of the 1909 Catalan selections from Leaves of Grass, wrote his in-depth study of Whitman, Walt Whitman: L'home i sa tasca (1913). One can only speculate about whether or not he read Vasseur's translations in the meantime. In any case, as Alegría points out, Montoliu was clear, if ambivalent, about Whitman's sexuality, writing that Whitman "demonstrated all his life a great indifference to the fair sex" and that, "strange as it may seem," the "perfect male . . . seemed not to feel . . . the magical attraction of females" (quoted in Alegría, Walt Whitman, 37, our translation). [back]
30. Whitman quoted in Allen, Handbook, 252. [back]
31. Many of Whitman's poems are titled "Thought"; "Pensamiento" corresponds with the poem on page 300 of Whitman, Leaves of Grass 1892. [back]
32. "Pensamientos" corresponds with the poem on page 364 of Whitman, Leaves of Grass 1892. [back]
33. Vasseur both made selections from "Song of Myself" and reordered the lines within those sections. See for example the analysis in Alegría 367-8. [back]
34. Vasseur translates sections 6, 7, 10, and 11 of this poem as it appears in Leaves of Grass 1892. [back]
35. These lines are excerpted from section 14 of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," as it appears in Leaves of Grass 1892, 260-61. [back]
36. This poem is subtitled "¡Tú, Astro Cenital!" [You, Star of the Zenith!] in Vasseur's text; "Thou Orb Aloft Full-Dazzling" is the first poem in the section "From Noon to Starry Night" in Leaves of Grass 1892, 352. [back]
37. This poem is excerpted from section 5 of "Faces," Leaves of Grass 1892, 355-56. [back]
38. This poem is excerpted from section 9 of "Passage to India," Leaves of Grass 1892, 322-23. [back]
39. This poem is excerpted from "So Long!" in the section "Songs of Parting," in Leaves of Grass 1892, 382. [back]
40. In Spanish the plural is conserved despite the comma following "tongue." [back]
41. [Sic] The Spanish here is, I believe, erroneously plural. [back]
42. Literally, make happy (alegran). [back]
43. Here Vasseur makes the invisible character described unambiguously the lady. [back]
44. Literally, salaams. [back]
45. The phrase is ambiguous in the Spanish: defenderlo could be "defend it"; "defend that" (the august nature); or possibly even "defend itself" (as it is in the original), in a strange kind of reflexivity in which the soul would be a direct object to itself. [back]
46. Pedestral is likely a typographical error for pedestal. [back]
47. Tierra can mean either earth or land, but, given the context, readers of Spanish would probably presume the more metaphorical "land" than the more literal "earth." [back]
48. Literally, snowing upon. [back]
49. Vasseur makes this person female, Pródiga. [back]
50. "Indigenous name of the island on which New York is located." (Vasseur's footnote) [back]
51. Vasseur includes in this list lizar, a word not listed in the DRAE, though possibly a kind of gun or gun skills. [back]
52. Crew is plural in Spanish. [back]
53. No period or other punctuation mark appears in the Spanish. [back]
54. A typo beyond deciphering; perhaps hieren, or "they injure." [back]
55. Rendered feminine in the Spanish, coqueta. [back]
56. Rendered masculine in the Spanish, amigo. [back]
57. Literally, incorporate into (incorporo). [back]
58. The Spanish is fletante, meaning chartered or freighted. This may be a typographical error for flotante, or "floating." [back]
59. "'He who desires eternal return—Kierkegaard says—that is a man.' And Nietzche's Zarathustra adds: If that has been life, let us live it once again." (Vasseur's footnote) [back]
60. In Spanish these two lines contain an additional second meaning that the body is "nothing more than [e.g., is equivalent to] the soul," and vice versa. [back]
61. Vasseur's original reads bruna, likely a typographical error for bruma, meaning mist or fog. [back]
62. Leaves of Grass (New York), Brooklyn 1855. [Vasseur's note.] [back]
63. Some of W. Whitman's poems seem written by the same hand that recorded The Bhagavad-Gita. In others he manifests himself as a reincarnation of Kalidasa. [Vasseur's note.] [back]
64. This is the famous idea of the Return that Nietzsche believed himself to have been the first to imagine (1881). Before him, Kierkegaard had written: He who desires to begin again, that is a man. W. Whitman, twenty years before, repeats the same idea, with delicate variations, in distinct poems. [Vasseur's note.] [back]
65. Vasseur's epigraph, excerpted from a footnote to "Good-Bye my Fancy," from the "Second Annex: Good-Bye my Fancy," at the end of the 1891–92 edition, reads:
Behind every Good-bye there hides, in large part, the salutation of a new Beginning. For me, Development, Continuity, Immortality, Transformation constitute the chief themes and meanings of Nature and Humanity.
66. Sel., intr., and notes by Emilio Abreu Gómez [back]