Anthony Doyle
on translating Carlos Drummond de Andrade
“A Máquina do Mundo” is widely considered the best Brazilian poem ever written, but I have yet to find an English translation that captures both its style and content with equal fidelity. Some take far too many liberties (one even imposes a non-existent rhyme scheme), while others are excessively literal in their approach. None, to my ear at least, really sounds like Drummond. So I wanted to produce a translation that was true to his original in content and style.
The key to the pace and flow of this ninety-six-line poem is the fact that it is only six sentences long in Portuguese. While it wasn’t possible to match that exactly, I was able to keep it to only seven sentences.
The poem was largely written in dodecasyllabic lines, with slight variations (many lines drop to eleven syllables or overshoot to thirteen). The basic pattern was three to four long stresses per line. To capture that stress pattern in English, I oscillated between decasyllable and dodecasyllable lines, to compensate for the reductions of unstressed syllables in Portuguese. As English words tend to be shorter than Portuguese, I sometimes found that lines needed some padding so as not to break the pattern. However, this was always done without departing from Drummond’s basic intentions. For example, the line “passasse a comandar a minha vontade…” (thirteen syllables) would usually translate as “had begun to command my will…” (eight syllables), so I fleshed this out with a horse-riding image that spoke to the verb “command”—‘had seized the reins and stirrups of my will” (10 syllables). This allowed me to keep pattern with the preceding and following lines without altering the sense in any way.
There is no rhyme in the poem, but there is frequent assonance, and I tried to mirror that where possible. Portuguese words are heavy in gender-specific “a” and “o” noun, adjective and participle endings, and a lot of the assonance is based on these (“uma estrada de Minas, pedregosa”). As English word endings are far more varied than in Portuguese, I often had to opt for alliteration and other forms of consonance (“rough old Minas road, rocky, potholed”) instead.
about the author
Carlos Drummond de Andrade was born in the mining town of Itabira, Minas Gerais, in 1902. He studied pharmacy, worked for a time as a journalist, and finally settled into a career in the civil service. He is considered one of Brazil’s most important poets, and left an extensive oeuvre behind him upon his death in Rio de Janeiro, in 1987. Though he was part of the generation of modernists that transformed Brazilian literature and art, he was only ever modernist on his own terms, and he would be bound to no manifesto. Early on, he was mentored by both Oswald de Andrade and Mario de Andrade, but his own firmly held beliefs about poetry and the directions he wanted to take it put constant strains on these relationships. Original, mischievous, and critical, Drummond’s poetry probed Brazil’s sociopolitical reality and the often stark contrast between industrialized, urban modernity and the simplicity of the rural heartlands. There’s also a strong existentialist quality to his work, with his exploration of the themes of mortality, memory, regret and his own awkwardness in the world. As Mauro Villar points out, some critics see “three Drummonds”: the early humorous poet, the mid-career “social poet,” and, finally, the “semiclassical pessimist.” “A Máquina do Mundo” is perhaps best described in terms of the latter. It belongs to the volume Claro Enigma, published in 1951.
about the translator
Anthony Doyle grew up in Ireland, but has lived in Brazil since 2000, where he works as a translator of fiction, nonfiction, screenplays and poetry, with over forty published titles. He is also the author of the children’s book O Lago Secou (Companhia das Letras, 2013) and the recently published speculative-fiction novel Hibernaculum (Out Of This World Press). He is a founding member of the poetry collective Old Scratch Press, based in California. In addition to his own poetry, he is currently translating an introductory selection of Drummond’s best poems.
photo by Andrea Barajas
