Communicating Voices: Herberto Helder's Experiments in Cross-Cultural Poetry
Faculty of Letters
University of Lisbon
Alameda da Universidade
1600–214 Lisbon
Portugal
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Abstract |
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Every text is an intertext; as Roland Barthes famously put it: "a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures" ("The Death of the Author", 1968). While this notion has been abundantly commented upon and engaged in all sorts of theoretical and interpretative contexts, its implications are still, we believe, to be pursued to their full extent. We have in mind in particular the possibility, opened up by the pluralised "cultures", of defining a text, or at least certain texts, as "cross-cultural intertexts". Seen in this light, intertextuality may configure a mode of translation in which the author of the target text, first and foremost a reader, rather than striving for equivalence, aims at appropriating the foreign text for his/her own personal ends.
In Western literary history, the most celebrated illustration of cross-cultural intertextuality in this sense may very well be Ezra Pound's translations from the Chinese. However, less known but no less interesting is the case of Herberto Helder, arguably the greatest living Portuguese poet. In a series of books that came out between 1968 and 1997, Herberto Helder published a host of writings indirectly "drawn from many cultures", mostly non-Western, from both canonical and folk traditions, which he initially called "versions" and later re-described as "poems changed into Portuguese". The main purpose of this paper is to examine what is at stake in this wholesale process of acculturation, which enables the poet to bring together personal poetics and cultural remoteness, self and other, in a world-wide web of voices communicating across vast temporal and spatial distances. We want to show, in short, how the writer, by self-consciously manipulating foreign texts randomly culled from distant cultures, takes a double critical stance: towards the mythical image of the poet as creator of originals, on the one hand, and, on the other, towards the lack of otherness in his own culture.
Key Words: cross-cultural poetry • intertextuality • translation • Helder, Herberto • Portuguese