[Full Text] back four decades in time and try to remember what free verse meant to me over the years that I worked with enthusiasm. Basically, a visual fact: a line measured by eye, cut eye and an ear never fully satisfied with the results obtained, arranging and rearranging words that went up or down from one line to another by following the movements of a chess without rules. The theory of free verse cut is elastic enough to admit many interpretations as there are poets in the world. For this reason, the unrest caused by the free verse who cultivates honesty, I mean: in whom seeks to achieve through it one way, can not be easily denied, especially when it aims at intensifying the music of verse and verifies that you are devoid of the precision instruments that allow arouse it.
began for me a while after learning that Pessoa has been defined with great irony in stating the poetics of his heteronym Ricardo Reis: the period of discipline of rhythm. "The discipline of rhythm," says Reis-you learn to just be part of the soul: the verse that produces emotion is born subject to the discipline. Naturally ordered emotion: an emotion is an emotion naturally ordered translated into an orderly pace, as the emotion given the pace and order in it the order that the pace there. "In these lines without waste (whose humor lies the dismantling of the classical mechanics, which tends to confuse the natural with what is actually quite unnatural) I want to emphasize his use of the word translation Reis to tie the concepts of emotion and rhythm that marks the passage bond Pessoa's avant-garde to classical. Developing his theory, one could speak of two instances rhythm: the first lies in the way of personal emotion to an equally personal rate (ie, disordered), the second, when translated properly, that is when our emotion is subjected to a rhythmic system impersonal (ie, ordered).
Every poet pours his emotions in a rhythmic order, the difference between the classical avant-garde lies in the way we carry out this operation: the first freedom, discipline second. Too freely say the classicist, to replicate the pioneering excessive discipline. Freedom means: making use of free verse, lingua franca of the time. Discipline means, making use of technical equipment provided by the tradition of language, the disciplined rhythm that further discipline by submitting to the impersonality of the fixed forms, but by dint of rapport with a model established by custom for centuries has ended up becoming "part of the soul."
So far the proposition has no problems. The problems begin when it is found that usually the versolibrismo the avant-garde is a bit less than complete ignorance of the technical workings of the tradition that precedes it in time, an assertion that can not possibly be reversible, at least not for Pessoa. This is particularly evident in the field of translation, when dealing with texts that are subject to a fixed form. The translation involves a wholehearted tribute to the voice of another, a truly unlimited membership, and deserve only the voice that you love. It makes little sense, therefore, ignore the qualities of that voice when trying to imitate, ie translate modern free verse poets who have challenged the failure of the vehicle, such as Frost and Auden, among many others. Doing so helps to disguise the true profile of modernity: a phenomenon as complex and contradictory as the many voices and many poetry-all valid-that populate the universe Pessoa.
However, the really strange is not in this, but in the conjecture that the flexibility of free verse is more pleasing to most readers of modern poetry in translation, even when the poet translated not use this vehicle at any time. Such an example: accept the strict rhythm when you hear Auden recited in an English that is not achieved fully understand, but in the case of Auden translated strongly preferred trump musicality. It seems that our language has sided poetic prose; supports the song only when the voice has the character of an instrument devoid of meaning. Here too it is appropriate to quote another of heteronyms Pessoa: "Poetry," says Bernardo Soares in the 'Book desasosiego'-help the children to come closer to the future prose, because poetry is, of course, childish, mnemonic, and initial help. "
translate the comments in my code: poetry was born in a time when we had a circular conception of time, was conceived in itself, therefore, as a clear and stunned area: a fruit of language, hence in an age like ours, whose conception of time is another fixed forms not satisfying. Once, while traveling, the bus that took me going through a planting of fruit trees, I noticed One of my companions, a boy not too young, but not exclusively urban affiliation doubt, ask what were these yellow balls hanging from the plants, was struck with the disconcerting news that the mandarins were born from trees, something similar happens to the avant-garde, inhabits a world that ignores the relationship between the captive and the conception of poetry is in its origin, development is still in effect for the ears of some modern poets: Frost, Auden and Pessoa, among other equally remarkable.
One last digression: why could assert the primacy Pessoa future of prose and simultaneously cultivate poetic forms of extreme rhythmic density, as are the odes of Ricardo Reis? The cohesion of these odes is nothing infantile at times, it seems that the poet tried to revive the oracular dimension of language, as if it will advance directly to the core archaic poetry: a syntax thinned the maximum demands of form and rhythm , without this we can speak of Baroque. Brevity is the magnetizing the classical north of Reis: short, but vibrant pace expressivity that adheres strongly. Transcribe a brief ode to the end of 1928 dated: Negue-me sorte tudo a less see-la, / That eu, 'sem stoic toughness, / Na sentence levied do Destino / Quero enjoy as letters. ("Luck, less to see, / Niégueme all: no stoic toughness, / The recorded statement of Destiny / enjoy it letter by letter, translated Octavio Paz.) Certainly, we in the antipodes of prose, free verse also , the rhythm of these verses hieratic carefully measured makes that clear. But what these lines tell us, while his last will oppose the symbol of the unknown and somehow, obtain a transparency it as hard as quartz? Basically, they say the joy of expression. Reis is willing to accept anything to be able to express: that is the limit of his stoicism. Equivalent expression to redemption in this short verse: A good definition of poetry. The elements of verse mnemonics (syllable number and stress emphatically) recorded in the mind the words, okay, but no trace of childishness in it. On the contrary, it seems that loss is a maturity that speaks laconically from the imaginary old hatched by Pessoa in the odes of Reis. Hence, Alvaro de Campos, the heteronymous avant-garde, could say of his colleague: "I do not criticize Reis over another poet. Really appreciate it, and indeed, over many, many others. His inspiration is tight and dense, his thought compactly sober, his emotion real but too directed towards that point called Ricardo Reis. But it is a great poet-here-I admit, if there are great poets out of the silence of their own hearts. "
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