This essay was written by Sawyer Wood, a BYU Humanities Center intern.
Recently I’ve been re-reading the novel Amor de Perdição (generally translated as “Doomed Love”), written by 19th-century Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco. The book is frequently compared to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, as it also follows the story of two young lovers from feuding families who ultimately meet a tragic end. What’s been most interesting to me about reading the novel isn’t the plot, though, but the fact that I’m reading it in my second language.
I learned Portuguese while serving as a missionary in southern Brazil, and while I love the language enough to have continued reading and writing in it three years after my return, I’m sad to say that my fluency has waned in that time. So, reading the novel has required a lot of vocabulary review. To make matters more complicated, the narrative was written more than 150 years ago, so it uses a lot of words and expressions that would be hard to find on the streets of any Portuguese-speaking country today. These include liteira (a kind of carriage used by Portuguese nobility), bacamarte (an antiquated firearm) and luneta (a spyglass, though for several days I misunderstood it to be a pair of opera glasses). Due partially to this archaic vocabulary, I’ve had to pause often to look up new words. I’ve jotted down their meanings in the margins, and some of the pages, especially in first few chapters, are so filled with these cramped translations and scribbled commentary that there’s little white space left at all.
I expected that this type of reading—more slow-paced and consistently punctured with interruptions—would feel exhausting or even frustrating, but it’s actually been just the opposite. I’ve found that with the extra time it takes me to look up words and re-read sentences, my mind has been more free to think deeply about the book—to ponder its themes and how they might be interpreted in different contexts. Let me illustrate with my favorite example so far:
O académico, porém, com os seus entusiasmos, era incomparavelmente muito mais prejudicial e perigoso que o mata-mouros de tragédia. As recordações esporeavam-no a façanhas novas, e naquele tempo a academia dava azo a elas. A mocidade esudiosa, em grande parte, simpatizava com as balbuciantes teorias da liberdade, mais por pressentimento, que por estudo.
The student [Simão, the Romeo-like figure], however, with his enthusiasm, was incomparably more harmful and dangerous than the Mata-Mouros of tragedy. The reminders incited him to new feats, and in that time the academy incited these actions. The studious youth, in large part, sympathized with the babbling theories of liberty, due more to feeling than study. [1]
What I find most interesting about this description of Simão is the way it not only displays his reckless attitude as a student but also foreshadows the way he will behave once he falls in love with Teresa (his Juliet). Though Simão outgrows some of his immature reactions to social causes, he continues to approach complex issues (such as trying elope with Teresa and eventually dueling against her cousin) with simplistic, even delusional, confidence. This recklessness throughout the book makes him comparable to Don Quixote; both are individuals who cannot differentiate between reality and fancy, imagining themselves as the heroes of their own sagas rather than facing the reality of their actions and the harms they cause.
This was an insight I never would have gained had I been reading the text in English. It was the slow process of reading in my second language that helped me discover multi-layered meanings like this one. It’s frankly made me want to read all texts as if they weren’t written in my native language—I can’t help but wonder what layers I might be missing when understanding comes easily.
After reflecting more on this experience, I realized that reading Amor de Perdição isn’t the only time that I’ve been benefited from the experience of struggling to understand another language. Last year, I took an Introduction to Translation class in Portuguese, which proved to be one of my favorite courses, and one project I found to be especially engaging was when we translated poetry for the More than Muses library. When two professors in charge of the project came to our classroom to instruct us on poetry translation, they explained that translating poetry is not like creative writing; it’s more like a puzzle.
The professors elaborated by saying that to translate poetry, one often does a “prose translation” first, capturing the meaning of the poem as closely as possible without worrying about line breaks or syllables. Once the prose translation is complete, the translator works to fit that meaning into lines of poetry that would capture as much as possible of that message, while also maintaining the appropriate meter and rhyme structure of the poem. (Not all translators choose to follow the rhyme or meter, but this is the kind of translation that we did for the course.) Depending on the type of poem, the translator might also choose to maintain elements such as vowel agreement, alliteration, or other rhetorical devices. That’s where the “puzzling” comes in, as finding words that rhyme with or connect to each other in the same way the original poem does is quite difficult, especially when trying to preserve the meaning of the prose translation. Working and reworking the lines for hours can prove to be grueling, but the hope is that the finished product can capture the meaning as well as the feeling of the poem, giving new readers the chance to experience it as speakers of the original poem’s language would.
This translation task was especially interesting for me because I’m a creative writer who has occasionally tried his hand at poetry. When I’ve attempted poetry in the past, the result has usually been something that sounds overly sing-songy or that completely abandons any attempt at rhyme by the second stanza. (Though non-rhyming poetry isn’t without merit, I personally agree with Robert Frost’s assertion that “writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” [2]) The experience of translating poetry, however, introduced me to a new concept: the prose translation, which isn’t concerned with meter or rhyme, but serves as the base of the later poetic translation.
When inspiration struck me to write a poem this summer, I was halfway through the second draft before I realized that I was following the same process I’d learned in my translation class: writing out the general shape I wanted for each stanza in prose first, then going back to rewrite them with the syllable count and rhyme scheme I was aiming for. I’m happy to report that the poem I ended up with is probably the one I’m most proud of, and that I think it’s largely due to my experience in class earlier this year. The slow, arduous process of translating poems from one language to another helped me write better poems of my own, just as the careful, deliberate process of reading Amor de Perdição helped me to engage in deeper and more meaningful reading.
So founded on those findings, my invitation to you, if you know another language, is to engage with it. Read it. Translate it. Listen to it. Create with it. More than just increasing the number of people you can communicate with, I’d suggest that it will help you live other parts of your life better, in ways you likely wouldn’t have expected. And if you don’t yet know a second language, why not learn one? The skills that language learning helps develop aren’t beneficial to your fluency alone. In fact, when it comes to reading, writing, working, or countless other facets of our lives, I’d say they translate quite well.
References
[1] Castelo Branco, Camilo. Amor de Perdição: memorias d’uma familia. Brazil, 7. da Silva Mengo, 1876, p.24. This translation is my own.
[2] Frost, Robert. Address at Milton Academy, Massachusetts. May 17, 1935.
