Between Poems and Poetry: Considerations on the Translation of Meus poemas não mudarão o mundo

Abstract

Considering that the act of translating is an exercise of choices that imply positive and negative aspects, this article intends to reflect on the experience of translating, into Brazilian Portuguese, Patrizia Cavalli’s Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo (Einaudi, 1974), Meus poemas não mudarão o mundo (Edições Jabuticaba, 2021). The subtleties and ironies of Cavalli’s ambiances – verbalized through the orality of routine interactions – needed to be recreated in the translation to be received in another time-space, seeking to establish a new meaning for their lexical games, while preserving their original aesthetic-poetic effect. In this sense, a passage was designed between the Italian poetry and the Brazilian translation, supported by the identification of shared sensations, but also by processes of differentiation, which revealed very specific cultural baggage from each country. The experience reported here is aligned with a perspective that understands poetic translation as a set of choices that aim to constitute an atmosphere of exchange between the voice of the lyrical self of the poems and the voice of this self-other of the target language, trusting in the hypothesis that this is a possible and practicable exchange, despite the difficulties and subjectivities intrinsic to this process.