Monologue of a shadow

Translation by Wylks Weindhardt and Peter O' Neill

AUGUSTO DOS ANJOS was born in the modern named town of Sapé, in the state of Paraíba, near the north east coast of BraZil. He only published one book in his lifetime, two years before his death, with the help of his brother. The collection is called Eu , or I in English. Hailed as the father of modernism, in a short interview granted in 1912, when asked about influences, Dos Anjos cites two names; those of Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe. He could have added Baudelaire, for the poetry of Augusto Dos Anjos underwent the same Copernican effect as the Parisian master, in terms of both content and form. Rigorously academic in his approach to rhyme and meter, Augusto Dos Anjos, like Baudelaire before him, is a master of the sonnet. This would perhaps partly explain the absence of translations of his work into English, for like Baudelaire, they are notoriously difficult to render in English.

WylkysTranslation Note: What we have tried to give here is the best possible literal translation of the poem sacrificing any attempt at following the very strict rhyming scheme of the Portuguese original for actual content and meaning. Dos Anjos uses rhyme a lot in his work, he is very much like Baudelaire in this respect and so proving incredibly difficult to translate into English. Wylkys and I preferred to retain the force of his work which we felt would be diluted, to a certain extent, if we attempted to retain the rhyme. Besides, rhyme suits so much better Latin languages like Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian, the undulating vowel sounds which all of these languages share are distinctly absent in English and so rendering rhyme less of a pleasure to experience, or such, at least, is how we feel.

As for subject matter, death is ever present in Dos Anjos work- Poe’s influence being all apparent. But Dos Anjos’ lexicon, and treatment of his many morbid themes is uniquely his own, as indeed will become instantly apparent in a reading of Monologue of a Shadow. Augusto Dos Anjos was to die of pneumonia, although some argue it was TB, when he was only thirty leaving his wife and two children behind him.

For the same reason the original line order has been jettisoned, this is a very dramatic soliloquy. In an attempt at rendering a similar force in the original, I have changed the sequence of lines to suit English syntax sometimes more happily than others. I alone am responsible for this re-ordering much, at times, to the desperation of my colleague. I have reproduced below the original Portuguese and our English translation so that you can see clearly the changes which have been made.

18

The soul of rotary movements

Pulse widelyinside myignoti monad,While the

symbiosis ofall things

balances me.

the modernphilosopher

20

Reducing the orographic rou

row, Can soften the hard

Only Art, chiselling away at human so g h ness of the world Without disintegrating

it, watering

happy prairie.

rock,Liquefying the deep telluric fire, it down, To the condition of the