galáxias, a book-length poem by the Brazilian avant-gardist Haroldo de Campos, is composed of fifty intertextual constellations that traverse multilingualism, incorporating slippages of word play in melody-harmony, explicitly in tune with the Poundian concept of “make it new” and Campos’s own “transcreation.” In August of 2024, Ugly Duckling Presse published his groundbreaking text. With the work of five translators, responsible in varying degrees for different portions of the text, the volume brings Campos’s “planetary music for mortal ears” to an English-speaking audience. Here, Asymptote is excited to present a roundtable featuring three of the co-translators: Odile Cisneros, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Charles A. Perrone (Christopher Middleton and Norman Maurice Potter have passed). Below, we speak about their individual encounters with Campos, their translation of the constellations as a collaborative and iterative process, and what they discovered in their translations.
Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to each of you?
Odile Cisneros (OC): For me, literary translation stems from curiosity and the desire to share a literary work with others. At least, that’s how it started for me. In the early 90s, I lived in Prague, where I learned Czech, a language that hardly anyone outside the Czech Republic speaks. When I left to go to graduate school in New York, a friend gifted me a beautiful facsimile edition of a modernist poetry book: Na vlnách TSF, by the Nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert. I fell in love with Seifert’s whimsical, surprising poems and wanted to share them with my friends, but alas, they didn’t speak Czech, so I figured I’d try my hand at translating some. A Czech friend helped out.
For me, then, translation emerged from friendship—friendship with a text, friendship with a language, friendship with others. My forays into other languages and texts, primarily Portuguese and Brazilian poetry, had similar origins, which we can talk about more.
As to what the act of literary translation is, there have been countless discussions. I always think of translation as a kind of puzzle that needs to be figured out by first taking the text apart in the source language and then putting it back together in the target language. There are many ways to do this, but some are better than others. The process is both challenging and rewarding.
Suzanne Jill Levine (SJL): As Odile suggests, there are many ways to answer this question, just as there are many ways to translate, as Jorge Luis Borges showed us in his provocative essays on the translators of Homer and of the One Thousand and One Nights, which are bursting with provocative originality. Early on, as a student who was discovering literary worlds while learning new languages—first French, then Spanish—I suppose I saw translation as a way to explore and expand my understanding of words, writing, and style, which was especially exciting when trying to translate what seemed impossible, like the everyday speech of people from a different cultural and linguistic universe.
Another way to think of literary translation is as both a critical interpretation and a work of art that recreates the original in a new form. The traditional raison d’etre or ethical responsibility of translation, going back to antiquity, is that translation passes knowledge and wisdom down to future generations. Translations are never the thing itself, and the wise writer who “closelaborates” focuses not on what gets lost but on what is gained in the act of translation, in which translation is even a kind of resurrection, extending the life of the original work.
Charles A. Perrone (CAP): The act of translation is conventionally held to be a sort of service, to make a work in another language available to readers in your language. The Bible is the classic example.
Literary translation is another level involving aesthetic pleasure. I sometimes translate poems just to explore all the ins and outs of the original. Haroldo de Campos and his brother Augusto spoke of “criticism via translation,” meaning that one had to identify all the features in the original poem to be able to render them in another tongue. That is somewhat applicable to prose as well. When I look back on my first efforts (a team translation of the story “El Apando” by José Revueltas), I marvel at how little we were concerned with the conceptualization of translation per se. I still rely more on intuition and confidence than theory, but I appreciate how far critical approaches have advanced.
TT: I love how translation, for each of you, is a means to engage with the other, whether that’s a person or the text. Turning to galáxias—Odile, in the Translator’s Note, you write of how you became drawn to Haroldo de Campos’s intertextual work, which is less preoccupied with weaving together a narrative than with travel. Could you all speak to how you first came across Haroldo’s work?
OC: I became aware of Haroldo’s work through my interest in the concrete poetry movement and Brazilian poetry in general. In 1997, I was pursuing a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese, and the following summer, on my first research trip to Brazil, I met a number of contemporary poets, including Régis Bonvicino and Horácio Costa, both of whom knew Haroldo. Although my initial scholarly interest was the Brazilian modernists of the 1920s, I eventually became acquainted with contemporary Brazilian poets too. At NYU, I took a course on Brazilian poetry, which included the work of the Campos brothers, and was fortunate enough to sit in on the wonderful graduate seminars that Richard Sieburth taught on literary luminaries such as Mallarmé and Pound. I would credit Richard, a phenomenal scholar and brilliant poet-translator, with motivating me and my fellow student, Antonio Sérgio Bessa, to produce the first English-language edition of Haroldo’s writings: Novas, published in 2007 by Northwestern University Press. I remember Richard taking me and Sérgio aside after class and saying something like, “We [meaning him and other comparatists such as Marjorie Perloff] are really interested in Haroldo’s work, but we don’t speak Portuguese. You guys should put together an English edition of his writings!” And that’s how it all started. . .
During that project, I was extremely privileged to work closely with Haroldo (in person and by correspondence), compiling and editing existing translations of his essays and poems, and translating other untranslated work. Sadly, Haroldo passed away in 2003, so he didn’t see the volume in print, but he knew it was in the works. So, to go back to the original prompt, translation literally involved several trips to Brazil. I remember I would often travel there with an empty suitcase, and I would bring it home full of books.
SJL: It was really through my work on/with the Cubans Severo Sarduy, Cabrera Infante and the Spanish “Joycean” writer Julián Ríos, that I became interested in Haroldo de Campos’s experimental prose poetry. Also, I was beginning to develop the field of translation studies and in the process of beginning the book that became The Subversive Scribe, which centers around my experiences of translating. By that time, I had translated fifteen or twenty books of fiction and prose poetry, and was especially interested in the collaborative nature of translation.
Haroldo was not only a poet but also a theoretician of translation from a creative modernist perspective. I felt an affinity there, explicitly in tune with the intertextual and directly Poundian concept of “transcreation”—which is, in brief, the wildest reaches of modernism giving birth to the creative impulses of Sarduy, Cabrera Infante, and of course, Jorge Luis Borges. Through Haroldo’s and my dear mutual friend Emir Rodríguez Monegal (who was a distinguished Uruguayan essayist and literary critic of Latin American literature, and one of the few Latin Americanists to give Brazil its due), I got to meet Haroldo in 1977 when he was invited to Yale University, along with fellow Brazilian Concrete poets such as Decio Pignatari, to present their work.
My main language as a translator is Spanish, and Haroldo admired my work with Sarduy (the novel Cobra, for example); even if my Portuguese was sketchy, he wanted me to try galáxias, and passed along to me a literal translation (by Jon Tolman) of the first “galáxia” to work with—the one beginning with “here I begin.” I was drawn by the vertiginous wordplay and rhythms of the prose. In that piece, popular and “high” culture intertwine: for example, “beguine” (a sensual dance) then the phrase “begin the beguine” came to mind as a relevant intertextual reference in Haroldo’s polyglot compendium of echoing fragments: the popular legendary Cole Porter was a uniquely creative (and satirical) composer of popular lyrics.
The first “galáxia,” my only foray into Portuguese or Brazilian prose poetry, was translated by me and published in 1981 in a small literary magazine edited by Julio Ortega called Plaza of Encounters. It has since then been improved by my dear friend Odile Cisneros, with whom I have enjoyed collaborating. As a footnote, my first experiment translating from Portuguese, in 1975, was a supposed “children’s” story written by another now legendary figure from Brazil, Clarice Lispector.
CAP: In the second semester of my doctoral program at UT Austin, the visiting Tinker Professor was Haroldo de Campos. I was in the lecture class he gave, as well as the advanced seminar. The galáxias were not on the syllabi but got mentioned. At the end of the term there was a small conference on translation, and Christopher Middleton was there. Again, Haroldo’s own work got due mention. If memory serves, it was in São Paulo a couple of years later that he asked me to translate one of the galáxias that had appeared in the literary supplement of a major newspaper. I stayed in touch with him until the end.
TT: So that readers of Asymptote can get a sense of Haroldo de Campos’ work, could you each share a favorite line or phrase and why you believe it’s emblematic (or not) of Haroldo’s vision?
SJL: A key to the genius of Haroldo is the music of language and his desire to go beyond Joyce—to be the first explorer to take Portuguese to the limit, to contain all language, thus to envision his own very Brazilian ”music of the spheres,” where sound is the sense and where meaning is circular, as we are only one infinitesimal point (of view) in an infinite space beyond space that has no end. As mentioned earlier, “begin the beguine” is from the classic repertory of jazz, with an alliterative repetition referring to a popular Caribbean dance. It demonstrates how the Caribbean and Brazil share the cultural creativity of African American music, and it seemed a perfect note to bring forward the circularity of Haroldo’s traveling book of travel. The very first “galáxia” was, as earlier mentioned, the only translation of mine in this book, and as such I see it as a frame of the book to come, or how the book as a (w)hole works “to begin to release and realize life begins at the end,” as in the line: “here I begin I spin here the beguine where the end is begun where to write about writing’s not writing a book is its sense.”
OC: I love the fragment of galáxias where Haroldo meditates on his relationship to his mother tongue:
cadavrescrito você é o sonho de um sonho escrever em liguamarga para
sobreviver a linguamorta vagamundo carregando a tua malamágica
zaubermappe para fazer a defesa e a ilustração de esta língua mortaexcriptedcorpse you are the dream of a dream writing in bittertongue to
survive your dead buriedtongue vagamonde carrying your magicbaggage
zaubermappe to carry out the defense and illustration of this dead tongue
As a poet “born” into Portuguese, Haroldo is aware (and acutely so) that his language is his fate. Or as Fernando Pessoa, his great early twentieth-century confrère, wrote, “minha pátria é minha língua” (“my country is my language”). Portuguese is twice removed from the centers of power; as a European language, it was born literally on the confines of Europe, and, in its Brazilian variant, it is an island in the midst of a sea of Spanish. . . Haroldo must, like the French Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay, earn for Portuguese the prestige of more dominant language traditions. This “bittertongue,” this “deadburiedtongue,” however, magically comes alive in galáxias, effectively bringing about that “defense and illustration.”
CAP: Two lines in English occur to me. An extended early sixties socio-political sequence was called “servidão de passagem,” a title that suggests Haroldo’s dedication to the art of poetry, his engagement with social justice, and the notion of flux. This phrase, translated into English as “Transient Servitude” by Edwin Morgan, was the title of a series of poems included in Xadrez de estrelas [Chess of Stars], a volume of Haroldo’s collected poems published in 1976.
Also, in his last collection of verse (Crisantempo, published in 1998), Haroldo used the phrase “this planetary music for mortal ears”— borrowed from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry”—as the title of the lead poem. He made the words his own to evoke his concern with sound/melody-harmony, his global outlook, and his awareness of the fragility of existence.
TT: How was the translation of the “fragments” a collaborative process, whether it’s in collaboration with the late Campos for you, Odile and Charles, or working initially with Haroldo and as a consultant to Odile for you, Jill? What was the most exciting thing that you uncovered through this process? I, for one, was immediately struck by the translation’s multilingualism and the use of portmanteau.
SJL: There was a big gap timewise as I wrote the first “galáxia” in English with Haroldo in 1978 and then reworked it with Odile just before the book was published. Perhaps Odile can address our collaboration at the Banff Centre of Arts and Creativity—a stimulating and peaceful environment where we could expand together on this multilingual voyage of allusions and polyglot portmanteau. Collaboration has been a part of my life’s work, in teaching translation workshops as well collaborating on a sequence of creative projects like the Penguin Classics five-volume series of Borges’s poetry and non-fictions. As the general editor, I found that working with a gifted trio (Efraín Kristal, Alfred MacAdam, Steve Kessler) of fellow translators, scholars, and poets, was a very enriching and often joyful experience.
CAP: The translation I did of the “jagged crown” segment sat in a folder for decades until Odile told me about her ambition to tackle the entire text of galáxias. I sent it to her, and she was able to make some improvements based on more up-to-date research. At some point, I suggested consulting Jill, and that worked out nicely.
I am intimately familiar with collaboration, as from 2020 to 2022, I worked with Ivan Justen Santana on the six hundred and thirty poems in All Poetry by Paulo Leminski, one of Haroldo’s favorite younger poets since the early sixties. Four eyes are almost always better than two.
OC: Collaboration in translation comes from the basic fact that nobody can know everything. Translation involves knowing, nearly perfectly, two languages and two literary and cultural contexts, a very tall order for most people! Even translators purportedly working alone often have to consult with others. When Jill and I embarked on this project in 2006, I was aware of Jill’s masterful translation of the first “galáxia”—“and here i begin”—which she had done in collaboration with Haroldo. Jill’s rare gift for the intricacies of wordplay, which she brilliantly deployed to translate seemingly untranslatable writers like Sarduy and Cabrera Infante, was key, and a huge inspiration to me. I brought my own knowledge of Portuguese and my experience in translating some of Haroldo’s essays and shorter poems for the aforementioned volume Novas.
During our translation residency at the Banff Centre, Jill graciously joined me to discuss the work in progress. She read not just with an eye but also with an ear that is unmatched for the rhythms and sonorities of the original. She also often encouraged me to take liberties with the semantics in order to unleash the music. How would Haroldo have written it if he had written in English? This is what Jill always said, and that was perhaps the most insightful translation advice I ever got.
Because at that point, Haroldo had sadly passed; we could not consult with him, but I was in touch with Ivan de Campos, his son, an amazing reader and unconditional champion of the project. He suggested that, besides Jill’s masterful version of the first fragment “and here i begin,” we include the existing translations of two fragments: Charles Perrone’s “on the jagged crown” and Christopher Middleton and Norman Potter’s “passtimes and killtimes,” which we did. In other words, excluding these three versions, out of a total of fifty fragments, I authored the remaining forty-seven. Jill, however, read and commented on the first drafts of these versions.
The translation was very long in the making, and in 2012-13, I also benefited from the advice of another gifted poet-translator, Erín Moure, who graciously read drafts and made many helpful suggestions and comments.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to share with the readers of galáxias?
SJL: Even when one translates alone, which is most of the time, there is a collaborator who is always with you; I mean, of course, the original author. My latest book recaptures time, at least in memorable fragments, to explore this relationship from a personal perspective. This “translator’s memoir” will be published by Bloomsbury in June 2025 as the first entry of a series of works called “Translated by”—that is, opening the vision, going further into the figure of translator, whose only identity is often merely a name at the end of the well-known words “translated by.”
We have been talking in this interview about a Brazilian author who celebrates Brazil’s heterogeneity by challenging and enriching the borders of Portuguese, engaging with the union, fragmentation, and fluidities of words that resist borders. My memoir is titled Unfaithful with a provocative intention, not unlike The Subversive Scribe, but Unfaithful takes a path “less taken,” or perhaps never taken before. We know of course (Haroldo’s work is exemplary in this regard) that translation (or transcreation) must be unfaithful in order to be faithful—Borges’s Pierre Menard shows us this with greater clarity than any theoretician on the topic. Unfaithful embraces a paradox and its fluidities across generations, desires, genders, and languages, all of which comes together in my life with translation—as metaphor, as art, and as the enterprise of producing books, even as they are disappearing or transforming into a new technology.
OC: To say that galáxias is a tour de force is an understatement. The work itself took Haroldo thirteen years to compose (1963-1976), and it was only published in book form eight years later, in 1984. Our collective translation began in 2006, and came out in 2024 (in that time, I count the birth of my two children, as well as the long, arduous process of finding a publisher—poetry in translation has got to be the hardest sell on the planet!). I owe a debt of gratitude to all who supported this project, especially Jill, Charles, and the wonderful people at Ugly Duckling Presse (Rebekah Smith, Silvina López Medin, and Marine Cornuet).
To our readers, I’ll issue a warning that galáxias is not an “easy” read, but it is one that is well worth the effort. The intro will help as you venture into Haroldo’s mind-boggling literary universe. Begin with the first fragment, and, from there, feel free to skip around. Except for the first and the last fragments, there is no set order. Read it aloud, one fragment at a time. Enjoy the sounds and the many enigmas (for some, there are clues in the author’s notes at the end, and for others, there’s always Google). We hope you find the journey stimulating and that this book finally brings Haroldo the credit he so richly deserves.
CAP: We hope that all readers will agree with us that this is one of the great poetic works of late twentieth-century Latin American literature—full of sound, sentiment, multiple heritages, and future adventures. A deep dive is recommended!
Odile Cisneros has translated the work of modern and contemporary poets, including Régis Bonvicino, Haroldo de Campos, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Sérgio Medeiros, Vítězslav Nezval, and Jaroslav Seifert. Her translation of Haroldo de Campos’s galáxias was published in 2024 by Ugly Duckling Presse. She teaches at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Distinguished Professor Emerita and Guggenheim Fellow, Suzanne Jill Levine’s books include The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction and Manuel Puig & the Spiderwoman: His Life and Fictions. A noted translator, poet, and scholar, whose prolific literary and academic career began in the early 1970s, she is the 2024 winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for lifetime achievement in translation. Her latest book is Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir, to be published by Bloomsbury (June 2025).
Charles A. Perrone is Professor Emeritus of Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian Literature and Culture at the University of Florida. His most recent book was All Poetry, the complete poems of Paulo Leminski (1945-1989), co-translated with Ivan Justen Santana and co-edited with Alice Ruiz. His previous books include Brazil, Lyric, and the Americas; Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry since Modernism; and Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song: MPB 1965-1985. He has translated dozens of Brazilian poets, most notably the co-founder of concrete poetry, Augusto de Campos.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.
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