Poems and stories have murky histories—the older, the more obscure. In the following essay, we follow a translation team from the College of Mexico as they work to unearth an ancient love poem by way of its later translations, delving into the question of what constitutes of an original.
It is accepted that our ancient texts do not come to us intact; from the poetry of Sappho to the second part of Aristotle’s Poetics, we can only know these works thanks to quotations or references by many other authors. As such, a question plaguing translators of history remains: what if you wanted to translate a poem that can no longer be found in its original language?
This is precisely the problem facing certain translators from the College of Mexico, who had decided to embark on the colossal journey of translating the first love poems of over fifty languages. Francisco Segovia, the leading editor of Primer Amor, the book that reunites these texts, stated that they actually “wanted to translate the first poems ever written, but it seemed like and unfathomable task, so we focused just on the love poems”. From there, Segovia, along with Adrián Muñoz and Juan Carlos Calvillo, gathered over forty translators, academics, and poets to ensure the texts were not only well translated, but also accompanied by a brief critical comment of the translation work and the poem itself. Included are poems written originally in Sanskrit, Latin, Náhuatl, Awadhi, Medieval French, Tamil, and more, include excerpts from the Bhagavad Gita, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and even Homer.
However, one text in particular was set apart from the others, and required a distinct approach. The “Song of the Serpent” is a poem originally written in Tupinambá, a native language from present-day Brazil. The community has been deeply described in André Thevet’s The New Found World, or Antarctike and in Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, but the most prominent figure who has written about the Tupinambá was actually Michel de Montaigne; in his essay “Of Cannibals”, he delves into the otherness of the community in an attempt to understand the nations that “are still governed by natural laws and very little corrupted by our own”. As Carlo Ginzburg has pointed out, Montaigne’s unique perspective led him to see Brazilian natives not as animals or savage people, but as “belonging to a distinct and different civilization, although the word civilization did not exist as yet”. Not only that, but Montaigne refused to regard their poetry as barbarian, and defied the paradigms of natural anthropology that deemed American natives as inferior, stating: “I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.”
This is where “Song of the Serpent” comes into play, as it was quoted by Montaigne to show how the poetry of the Tupinambá resembles that of Anacreon. The love song, as he calls it, was written by him in French as follows:
Coulevre, arreste-toy; arreste-toy, arrest-toy, coulevre, afin que ma soeur tire sur le patron de ta peinture la façon et l’ouvrage d’un riche cordon que je puiss donner à m’ami: ainsi soit en tout temps ta beauté et ta disposition preférée à tous les autres serpents.
And the English translation offered by J. M. Cohen in his translation of Montaigne’s Essays goes:
Adder, stay. Stay, adder, so that my sister may follow the pattern of your markings, to make and embroider a fine girdle for me to give to my beloved. So shall your beauty and markings be preferred for ever above all other serpents.
Adalberto Müller, the translator of this poem for Primer Amor, states that “Song of the Serpent” can actually give us an insight into the labor division in ancient Amerindian communities, as it shows how women were in charge of copying the patterns and forms of nature through embroidery. Furthermore, he insists that Montaigne’s association between Anacreon and the “Song” became some sort of “seal that would shape the destiny of this poem throughout the Western World”. In the case of the Greek lyric, we know about Anacreon’s work thanks to his later imitators—whose surviving poems now constitute the Anacreontea, and it is now commonly regarded that none of those verses belonged to the original Ancreon. This similitude led Müller to ask if “Song of the Serpent” ever existed, or is it was simply an invention by Montaigne:
We have three hypotheses: the most radical states that Montaigne came up with the poem; the second, that the French writer modified the original song to the point that it became unrecognizable; and the third, that the original disappeared, along with ancient Tupinambás and their anthropophagic rituals, back in the XVIII Century.
It is worth mentioning that Primer Amor includes a version of “Song of the Serpent” written in Tupinambá, and the obvious question is: how is it possible? There have certainly been cases in history where a lost poem is simply created from scratch and certified as original: the absence of evidence allows us to take such liberties. However, Müller and Calvillo decided to take another route; they elected instead to perform a reverse translation, an exercise in which they considered all the available versions of the poem (all derived from Montaigne’s version) and re-created what might have been the original love song.
Naturally, we may ask if the result is ethical. Furthermore, is it any different from just creating a poem and claiming it is the original? But if one were to put aside the fact of result, to consider that the main mission of the book is to actually find the first love poems ever written, I think that reverse translation is, in any case, a way to search out that lost Tupinambá song.
This uncommon method took its starting point with a version in Portuguese written by Brazilian poet Waly Salomão, whose 2000 book Tarifa de embarque included the poem “Cobra coral”, a versified version of “Song of the Sepent”:
Para de ondular, agora, cobra-coral:
a fim de que eu copie as cores com que te adornas,
a fim de que eu faça um colar para dar à minha amada,
a fim de que tua beleza
teu langor
tua elegancia
reinem sobre as cobras não corais.
Oddly enough, the composer and musician Caetano Veloso used this version to write a song, which was included in his album Noites do Norte.
Then, going back to the 20th century, a Spanish version of the song appeared in Norte y Sur, a book published in 1944 by Mexican diplomat and author Alfonso Reyes. The publication is a collection of his experiences as an ambassador in South America, and introduces the very first version of the poem that was not written in Europe. Reyes’ version goes as follows:
Pára, viborita, pára:
quiero imitar tu primor
pintando un cinturón para
obsequiárselo a mi amor:
mira que así vendrás a ser presente
que una serpiente le hace a otra serpiente.
Before him, the most relevant version of the Song of the Serpent comes from Goethe, who bases much of his poem off of Montaigne’s. The main difference is that Goethe offers a versified version—and is obviously written in German:
Schlange, halte stille!
Halte stille, Schlange!
Meine Schwester will von dir ab
Sich ein Muster nehmen;
Sie will eine Schnur mir flechten,
Reich und bunt, wie du bist,
Dass ich sie der Liebsten schenke.
Trägt sie, die so wirst du
Immerfort vor allen Schlangen
Herrlich schön gepriesen.
As with Salomão, Goethe’s version later inspired a song, and in 1910, Max Brod, of Kafka-related fame, composed a lied and included it in the collection Lieder Op. 4. Other German writers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau also had their own versions based off of Montaigne’s, but none of them had the impact that Goethe’s version had.
With all these versions in mind, Müller went on to recreate the poem in Modern Guarani. As Tupinambá is part of the Tupi-Guarani language family, it was relatively easier to achieve a final version, which goes as follows:
Anive retyryry ko’áĝa, mboichumbe
Che reindy oha’ã haguã nde rasa pytã
Ojapóvo mbo’y ame’ê haguâ che rembiayhupe
Ikatu haĝuáicha en porãngue
Ne mbaretekue
Nde kotŷvo
Iporãve mboikeuer ambuegui.
As has happened with all the versions of this poem, Müller details how he wanted to keep some aspects of Montaigne’s—mainly the existence of its two subjects, the poet that sings and the sister that copies the serpent’s form. Furthermore, he gives some detail of his final Tupinambá version, and explains that tyryry is actually an onomatopoeic verb that represents the serpent’s movement.
In conclusion, we can argue that Müller’s translation is more of an indirect one than a reverse one; however, it is also true that indirect translations usually have an original text source, even though it is achived using other languages as references. It is also worth asking if Montaigne’s “Song of the Serpent” has overtaken the mysterious original, considering all the existing iterations of the poems are inspired by him.
Translating the first love poems of major historical languages is not an easy task, and in an investigative sense, Müller’s attempt to recreate lost song has an immense value. If anything, he resembles the sister in the poem: following the pattern of a long-lost song, embroidering, constantly trying to capture and understand its beauty to distinguish it from other poems. Adder, stay.
René Esaú Sánchez (Guerrero, México. 1997). Journalist and translator. He writes about politics and culture weekly for the Mexican magazine Vértigo. He has translated Iris Murdoch into Spanish and Rosario Castellanos into English. He has also collaborated with publications such as Periódico de Poesía,Reflexiones Marginales, and the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation. Currently, he serves
as an editor-at-large in México for Asymptote Journal.
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