A UNE DAME CREOLE

Charles Baudelaire:

Au pays parfumé que le soleil caresse
J’ai vu dans un retrait de tamarins ambrés
Et de palmiers d’où pleut sur les yeux la paresse,
Une dame Créole aux charmes ignorés.

Son teint est pâle et chaud; la brune enchanteresse
A dans le cou des airs noblement maniérés;
Grande et svelte, en marchant comme une chasseresse,
Son sourire est tranquille et ses yeux assurés.

Si vous alliez, Madame, au vrai pays de Gloire,
Sur les bords de la Seine ou de la verte Loire,
Belle, digne d’orner les antiques manoirs,

Vous feriez, à l’abri des mousseuses retraites,
Germer mille sonnets dans le coeur des poètes,
Que vos regards rendraient plus soumis que des noirs.

See Francoise Lionnet on this poem in Diacritics and in “‘The Indies’: Baudelaire’s Colonial World,” PMLA 123:3 (May 2008): 723-736.

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Pizer on Weltlitteratur

First, see my post on Goethe and translation.

Pizer’s general thesis in The Idea of World Literature is that world literature courses should revive the concept of Weltlitteratur as constructed by Goethe, which involves considering the intersection of the global or universal and the local. Pizer uses terms like “subnational” and “transnational” and insists one must look at the subnational (the regional) as well as the transnational (which is not necessarily the same as universal, I note). Bakhtin, who uses the word “locality,” is one of Goethe’s best readers on this question of the subnational-transnational dialectic.

World literature depends on translation, and Goethe’s translation theory is therefore key – because he does appreciate alterity. His most significant pronouncements on translation are in his notes to the West-östlicher Divan, which is his most seminal creative engagement with Weltlitteratur. He wants to bring together a “great meeting of all nations” and he says there are three main ways to translate:

1. To flatten difference, making us aware of the foreign through the filter of the familiar (as in typical World Literature in English Translation courses);
2. “Parodistically,” wherein the translator is imitating the style of the poet he is translating and appropriating the foreign sensibility so as to re-represent it with his own;
3. Where the translator creatively captures the essence of the original (as when the artist attains a style and is able to represent an object by rendering visible its inner essence) and is able to make original and translation identical. [Here Pizer notes, on 9, n. 20, which is on 153, Goethe's influence on Benjamin.]

Pizer explains all of this in chapter 1. Chapter 2, on Goethe and the Romantic school, says more on Goethe’s translation theory. Goethe’s idea of translation was oriented toward alterity: “its highest ideal [is] the movement of the self toward the Other, not a dominion over the Other or a leveling of the Other. This embrace of alterity, grounded in a unique principle of estrangement that forces the self to become foreign to itself, serves the twin causes of intercultural dialogue and respect for the foreign.” (XXVIII) (This blogging software is interpreting my eight as a Smiley icon.) The Divan represents the “completion and confirmation” of the poetic self, and translation develops the poetic self. (30) Translation makes universal mediation possible. (40) In an ideal translation, “one alienates and obscures personal identity in bringing the alterity of the translated language to the forefront” (41) – unlike some Romantics who use the Other as a means to an end of their own.

Note that Goethe apparently developed the term Weltlitteratur in response to Romantic universalism / nationalistic tendencies of German Romantics. This is important. In Goethe the self participates in and interacts with the foreign, and is not simply “influenced” by it. Intersubjective dialogue is the goal. See the Goethe / Schlegel contrast on 44-45.

Later on in Pizer’s book, we see that the desideratum of the world literature classroom is an engagement with Otherness, and that Weltlitteratur even has to do with biculturality (136-37) and mestizaje, as it were.

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Constructions of Brazil

Note Introdução ao Brasil. Um banquete no trópico, by Lourenço Dantas Mota. This book comments on many writings, as does Leslie Bethell’s Ideas and Ideologies in Twentieth Century Latin America.

Paulo Prado’s Retrato do Brasil. Ensaio Sobre a Tristeza Brasileira is one – a text Bethell connects with other famous documents from 1928. It has an epigraph from Capistrano de Abreu, from a letter to J. L. d’Azevedo, saying the JABURU is the bird that symbolizes Brazil. It is a tall bird with thick legs and well feathered wings. It spends its days with one leg crossed over the other, very sad, of an “austere and vil sadness.” Following are chapters on lust, covetousness, sadness, and romanticism – and a then postscript.

The postscript says the book is not regionalist, although it was written in a provincial city. The author isolated himself in the Goethean manner so as to flee the influence of the “Bovarisme” of S. Paulo and create  his work of art in peace. Only in the provinces can one imagine the long, book-lined study Renan dreamed of. Also, in this particular province iBrazilian sadness is very salient (for as Anchieta already realized, S. Paulo is particularly melancholy). This enabled Prado to guard against the assumption that all of Brazil is so sad.

Prado says he wrote this “retrato” like an impressionist painting. This enables him to get to essences. He has considered history not as a romantic resurrection … but as a group of impressions … which allows us to get to what I would call a sediment of Brazilian experiences.

Martius in “Como se deve escrever a historia do Brasil” doubted the importance of repeating facts. Rather, he recommended the writing of a “pragmatic” history of Brazil (says Prado). He and apparently Martius (whom I have not read) emphasize the fusion of the three races so as to produce a new ethnic type. [Note then: once again this is hardly new with Freyre]. Martius, satys Prado, was the first to give importance to the African. And as we know, slaves first came to Brazil with Cabral. There were 20,000 of them by 1600, and there was a great deal of racial mixture by that time.

Page 192 of the 4th edition (RJ: Briguiet, 1931) refers to a “hyperesthesia sexual” that caused more mixture to take place than had done in the United States. Lust brought the races together, from the beginning, slowly. There was intimacy among the races (and there was none in the United States). And North Americans do not like mulattos … whereas in Brazil an octoroon “passes.” And we have seen that mixtures of Portuguese and Indians give strong stock, especially in the first generations (195). It is hard to tell so far how good the mulatto mixture is, but one thing is clear: “Aryanization” takes place. In another five or six generations we will see whether the mixture creates a strong race.

At the end of 197, Prado starts talking about the ways in which slavery weakened Afro-Brazilians and Brazil, again paraphasing Martius. Prado says there were psychological problems: lust and covetousness led to the romantic malady in the Brazilian character. And Brazil is still in a marasmo colonial … it needs to modernize its attitude and stop sitting in the margins.

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Jack Spicer

“Poems should echo and re-echo against each other,” Spicer wrote. “They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can.” The poetry and prose of After Lorca echo not only among themselves but with that of the Spanish poet whom they alternately address and ventriloquize. Spicer’s serial method allowed him to weave a dense mesh of myth, metaphor, literary allusion and searing emotional candor through his text while letting each line stand brutally blunt–almost physically perspicuous–to the point where it could be mistaken for something artless. As a result, his books have a structural concision that protects them from the self-indulgent longueurs as well as the ostentatious erudition that sometimes mar the Modernist epics.

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Goethe on Translation

The last and “highest” phase in Goethe’s translation model occurs when the translator wishes to make original and translation perfectly identical, so that the one can e validly interchanged with the other. This mode generally finds resistance on the part of the reading public, for the translator who so strongly identifies with the original essentially gives up the originality (“Originalität”) of his own country. Ultimately, however, this mode of translation is of greatest value to the public and its mother tongue, for the unique rhythms and meters in the foreign idiom that the translator attempts to approximate, at first so strange and unappealing to mass taste, ultimately expands the variety, the suppleness of the mother tongue (3:555-56). This phase is similar to “style” in the domain of art; in both cases, the original object/language is represented in its unique, immanent essence.

–John Pizer, The Idea of World Literature (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006) 9.

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