By the time I had finished creating the English subtitles for Sylvio Back's film "Cruz e Sousa: O Poeta do Desterro" (1999), I had the uncanny feeling that João da Cruz e Sousa had translated me into a mysterious and powerful language I had never been before. My sense of relief at having finished my work before what I thought would be an impossible deadline (I was given three months to complete the project) was eclipsed by the joy at having undone in English, and in conjunction with a team of translators laboring in Spanish and French, Cruz e Sousa's one hundred years of solitude in the Portuguese language. How could such a marvelous poet have been unknown and in exile from the rest of the literary world for so long? This isolation is doubly ironic in that Cruz e Sousa lived much of his short life (he died of tuberculosis at the age of 36) on an island in southern Brazil that used to be called Desterro (which means exile) and is now known as Santa Catarina, whose main city is Florianópolis. Although it has been said that translation is "an impossible transubstantiation" or "a resurrection, but without the body," I was certain when I saw the final version of the film with the English subtitles that Sylvio Back, through the actor Kadu Carneiro's body, voice and gestures, had somehow managed to embody the spirit of Cruz e Sousa in the perfect medium for the twenty-first century--and this is especially fitting in that the poet died in 1898, the same year that marked the beginning of Brazilian cinema. Perhaps my work on Back's film, (a construct of a life perforce historical and fictive shot through with narrative visual re-creations), is really a translation of a translation. But herein resides the director's genius and radical good sense: Cruz e Sousa the poet speaks in his own words, by means of his poems and personal letters. Sylvio Back describes the structure of the film as a biographical interlinking of what he calls "34 visual stanzas".

One of these stanzas, Sequence II, in which Kadu Carneiro watches himself in a mirror as he rehearses his lines from Cruz e Sousa's poem "O Assinalado" ("Marked for Greatness") contains, for me, a profound metaphor for translation itself that may, in fact, have helped me overcome many challenges, both inter- and intralingual, as I worked on the English version of the screenplay. Certainly there is a conscious awareness in this sequence of the film as a process, reminiscent of, say, the Spanish director Carlos Saura and so many others. But the streak of sacrificial blood that suddenly appears on the actor's face facilitates another kind of process, equally kinetic, but with a religious significance in that it enables Carneiro to incorporate in his body (as if he were a horse to be mounted by a particular god from the Yoruban pantheon) the poet he portrays in the film. The babalorixá (candomblé priest) foresees Cruz e Sousa's designated future of hardship by means of the jogo de búzios (the casting of cowry shells) and the sixteen eyes of Ifá, the Yoruban god associated with divination. The marginality of madness in the Euro-Brazilian context of "Marked for Greatness" is thus tranformed into the integrative ceremonial order of Afro-Brazilian religion.

Cruz e Sousa

You're the madman of immortal madness,
The madman for whom madness reigns supreme.
In your black shackles of this World, you scream,
Enchained in the most outrageous Sadness.

You're the Poet, marked for Greatness by fate.
There's empty space for you to populate
With plural beauty you make eternal.

In Nature's fullness that will never die,
All the bold forces of life justify
The crazed seizures that make you immortal.

Candomblé Priest

João, my son, Ifá, the god of divination, tells me that no suffering in this life is for naught. No tear is lost. Human life, João, is barely a preparation for the true life. There is no tear that God does not perceive, João. Who has never cried a secret tear? God awaits each one for eternity. And so, João, you will reap the richness and greatness of your poems made from pain and sorrow. Let the African gods, João give you the strength to face the hardships you meet on the road of your life. Let the benevolent forces bless you, my son. And let Olorum bring you peace and tranquility on your journeys. Axé.

[Cruz e Sousa
Tu és o louco da imortal loucura,/O louco da loucura mais suprema./A Terra é sempre a tua negra algema,/Prende-te nela a extrema Desventura./Tu és o Poeta, o grande Assinalado/Que povoas o mundo despovoado,/De belezas eternas, pouco a pouco./Na Natureza prodigiosa e rica/Toda a audácia dos nervos justifica/Os teus espasmos imortais de louco!

Babalorixá
João, meu filho, o babalaô falou através de Ifá (adivinho), que nenhum sofrimento nesta vida é vão. Nenhuma lágrima se perde. A vida humana, João, é apenas uma preparação para a verdadeira vida. Não há uma lágrima que Deus não veja, João. Quem não chora a sua lágrima secreta? Deus as guarda por toda a eternidade. Assim, João, tirarás da dor e do sofrimento a riqueza e a grandeza de teus poemas. Que os orixás, João, te dêem forças pelas provações e pela tua caminhada nesta vida. Que todas as forças benéficas te abençoem, meu filho. E que Olorum te dê paz e tranqüilidade nos teus caminhos. Axé.]

The prerequisite, of course, for a film understood as a kind of xirê, a celebration by means of visitation and possession, is the padê, the invocation of Exú, the messenger, who informs the gods that it is Cruz e Sousa himself, not Kadu Carneiro, sitting in a trance on celluloid ground with sacred leaves in a terreiro (candomblé temple) that pulses with the rhythms of the atabaques (sacred drums) and collective singing. I came to understand Exú, in this sense, as the orixá (god) of translators, a messenger between the Portuguese and English languages.

Exú represents the dynamic continuum between total incomprehension and complete revelation (which resembles, perhaps, the two poles of translation embodied in the aftermath of Babel at one end of the spectrum and the Pentecostal tongues of flame at the other). Without Exú, how can the translator struggle with the linguistic forces of permanence and change? How can communication exist? How can language retain its boundary-transforming powers? As I worked on the translation, I saw Exú at the crossroads of meaning, opening and closing the way. Exú, I began to realize, facilitates the common ground of disparate languages and the connections between humanity's diverse speech communities. In short, what I found in Exú was a kind of translational axé, a vital force, a transgressive harmony linked to the swarm of rhymes and rhythms that I needed to discover in English in order to reveal the music of Cruz e Sousa's poetry in Portuguese. Ultimately, my role as a translator was to create the visual belief system of subtitles so that an international audience might move beyond a simple willing suspension of disbelief and be utterly convinced by the poetry in Sylvio Back's film.

In a way, I had begun translating Cruz e Sousa in 1993-94 by living in Desterro (Florianópolis) on a sabbatical leave from SLU, where I had the chance to meet Zahidé de Muzart, one of Cruz e Sousa's most fervent contemporary supporters, and to teach a course on translation with Walter Carlos Costa at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. No doubt I already had started to assimilate the landscape of the poet, the one that appears in the film: I remember, for example, reading Cruz e Sousa's last sonnets one beautiful afternoon at sunset on the Praia Moçambique. At the end of my stay in Brazil, while visiting Rio de Janeiro, I spoke with the thoroughly impressive poet-translator Paulo Henriques Brito, who shocked me with his generosity when he gave me the original 1966 recording of "Os Afro-Sambas" by Baden Powell and Vinícius de Moraes (an LP with a deeply syncretic spirit--not entirely unlike "O Poeta do Desterro"-- that I had been seeking all year in Brazil) as a present. Five years later, it was through Paulo that Sylvio Back found me in Madrid, where I was living at the time, and proposed the collaboration.

It was with a certain trepidation that I began negotiating the points of the contract with the Brazilian director. I drew on the expertise of acquaintances who knew the film industry in the United States and Colombia as well as the broadcast medium in the U. S. advertising business to establish a flat fee for the job to be paid upon satisfactory completion of the translation. I learned, too, about the tremendous number of variables in terms of financing films in Brazil. For example, the costs of creating the subtitles in English, Spanish and French would be covered by a regional governmental office (in conjunction with a state-owned company that produced electricity) interested in promoting tourism on the island whose beautiful landscapes were an integral part of the film.
I also learned that it is important to insist on a contract so that certain points can be negotiated, including: retaining the copyright of the translation in the translator's name, establishing how the translation will be used as subtitles and marketed as film, video and DVD, delineating whether or not the translation will appear in book form as a published screenplay, stipulating that the translator's name must appear in the credits of the film and on the title page of any book publication, providing a gratis VHS copy of the subtitled film as well as complimentary copies of the published work, and facilitating access to proofs of the text as subtitles and also as page proofs for the book.

I discovered that the point of making sure to have the right to review the actual text that will appear as the subtitles is extremely important. Apparently, although I submitted an electronic version of the translation, someone needed to retype the manuscript for use in the subtitling machine. Consequently, in the text generated by this process, there were many errors that I had a chance to correct that did not exist in the version I submitted initially to the director. It made me remember seeing certain foreign films and cringing at all the typographical errors in the subtitles, an unsettling experience that certainly does not inspire viewer confidence. The truth is that I enjoyed working with the printed text generated by the subtitling machine because I had a clear idea as to the exact words that would be in each frame of the film. In the left hand margin, the subtitle number appeared in conjunction with the elapsed time of the film (with the precision of times that one associates with Olympic runners!). In addition to my being able to correct spelling mistakes, there was also some leeway for me to adjust the line breaks of the poems and how the subtitle as verse would actually appear on the screen.

Naturally, any process of negotiation depends on the goodwill of all parties. Fortunately, the director was absolutely professional and helpful throughout the entire process, and I was very satisfied with the agreements we reached. After signing the contract, however, panicked by the scope of the project that I had accepted, I went to see "Shakespeare in Love," (in English, with Spanish subtitles in Madrid) with a very specific purpose and was greatly relieved to see how the rather dense, poetic text of the screenplay of this film fit on the screen and how little was lost in translation. After this, it was simply a question of learning some technical vocabulary (such as Off Screen and Voice Off) and of putting in the long hours needed to conserve in my English version as many of the formal qualities of Cruz e Sousa's poetry as possible.

The temporal tightrope I walked as a translator consisted of creating in English an identity poetics that balanced an aesthetic sensibility clearly from the nineteeth century with a political sensibility regarding racism in Brazil that seemed strikingly contemporary. Two things confirmed this impression as I worked. One was a fortuitous visit to the Musée D'Orsay in Paris, where I saw a luminous, enigmatic, symbol- and reverie-filled exhibit of paintings by artists such as Redon, Burne-Jones, Lévy-Dharmer, and Khnopff that resonated so deeply with certain poems by Cruz e Sousa such as "Antífona" ("Antiphon"), "Grande Amor" ("Great Love") and "Ilusões Mortas" ("Dead Illusions"). But there are also other, fiercer poems by Cruz e Sousa (who was the son of slaves and the victim of racism in Brazil) such as "O Emparedado" ("Trapped"), "Litania dos Pobres" ("Litany of the Poor") and "Escravocratas" ("Slave Lords") that found their echo in the prose and poetry that I was reading and translating by new black Brazilian writers such as Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, Cuti, Ronald Augusto, Ricardo Aleixo, Lepê Correia, and others.

Sylvio Back's controversial film "Cruz e Sousa: O Poeta do Desterro," along with the recent quadrilingual edition of the film's screenplay published by 7 Letras in Rio de Janeiro, will resurrect and even globalize a poet whose complex, multi-dimensional racial and sexual identity in the nineteenth century may not be entirely in keeping with the way some viewers, readers and political activists might mold him to fit their contemporary needs.

The film reminds us, however, that underlying the Euro-Brazilian voice of Cruz e Sousa's Symbolism, so important to the literary history of his country and to the entire Portuguese language, is another voice, that of his fiancée Pedra Antióquia, calling the poet back to his trans-Atlantic African heritage, singing to him in Yoruba of love and the risks of existence as emblematized by her necklace not of cowry shells but of human skulls.

Cruz e Sousa

You are from the source, from the secret sea,
From unfamiliar surf, where the line seems
To catch the vessel in a net of dreams
And leaves it rocking on water, empty.

From the sea comes your sparkling sympathy,
Your agitated sleep and your features:
The look of menacing feral creatures
In eyes like waves that are dark and stormy.

From an unfathomed violet ideal
You surge from the viscous water and wheel
Like a moon in heavy fog bursting free.

Your flesh contains a flowering of vines,
Virgin saltwater-songs, the day's first signs,
And the sharp smells of a sargasso sea.

Pedra Antióquia

If you want to be my lover
First consult your head

If you want to get married
First consult your head

If you want money
First consult your head

If you want to build a house
First consult your head

If you want to be happy
First consult your head

O, head! Make good things come to me!

[Cruz e Sousa
És da origem do mar, vens do secreto,/Do estranho mar espumaroso e fio/Que põe rede de sonhos ao navio,/E o deixa balouçar, na vaga, inquieto./Possuis do mar o deslumbrante afeto,/As dormências nervosas e o sombrio/E torvo aspecto aterrador, bravio/Das ondas no atro e proceloso aspecto./Num fundo ideal de púrpuras e rosas/Surges das águas mucilaginosas/Como a lua entre a névoa dos espaços…/Trazes na carne o eflorescer das vinhas,/Auroras, virgens músicas marinhas,/Acres aromas de algas e sargaços…

Pedra Antióquia
Se você quiser ser meu amado/Pergunte primeiro à sua cabeça/Se você quer casamento/Pergunte primeiro à sua cabeça/Se você quiser ter dinheiro/Pergunte primeiro à sua cabeça/Se você quer construir uma casa/Pergunte primeiro à sua cabeça/Se você quiser ser feliz/Pergunte primeiro à sua cabeça/Oh! cabeça! Cabeça faça coisas boas chegarem a mim!]

Pedra speaks to João about their potential life together in keeping with the liturgical language of Afro-Brazilian religions. One must consult the Ori, because it is in the head that a particular god exercises control over traits, desires and words that are both human and divine. These are the convergences that I sought to understand and preserve through translation when João da Cruz e Sousa became the owner of my head.

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