12 janeiro 2025

ONCE UPON A TIME: In the kitchen of Bob Dylan's Lyrics Portuguese translation

One afternoon, at the end of the summer of 2005, Francisco Vale, editor and owner of Relógio d’Água, called me: “Would you like to translate Bob Dylan’s complete lyrical works into Portuguese? I'm thinking about buying the rights from the Americans…” In addition to the shock, I tried to buy time: “Let me think about it for a few days…”

In the 1960s my parents had a farm on the outskirts of OPorto, with a water border on its southern limit, the Douro River. During the Easter holidays of 1966, a friend and I spent a week there, alone with our cans of tuna, camped ten feet above the ground in a granary, a small hut where the corn was stored, well ventilated and safe from rodents.

In the photo, I'm on the stairs and the guy sitting on the doorframe is Rui, now an ophthalmologist in OPorto. If you look closely, next to his left hand there is a wire that crosses one of the granite pillars on which the granary sits and disappears into the right corner of the photograph. It's an electric wire and a Gründig tape recorder, our permanent sound companion, was connected to it.

That week we listened incessantly to an album that had appeared in Portugal not long ago, although it had already been released in the United States almost a year ago. It was titled Highway 61 Revisited, the singer was called Bob Dylan, the songs were all his compositions and I had never heard anything like it, so strange and so powerful. So hypnotic and full of details to absorb that as soon as the last song ended I would pull the reel back and start it all over again.

If, at the time (I was 13), someone had told me that one day I would be asked to translate Dylan, I would have believed it as much as if I had been told that there was life on Mars, and I would have felt as crushed by the honor and responsibility as if I had been told that I had been chosen to engender a prophet…

“Don’t take too long to decide,” said the editor on the other end of the line, “my right of first refusal on the translation is running out...”

But, going back to that afternoon in the summer of 2005, in addition to the honor and the almost cosmic responsibility there were also the practical aspects: the work to be translated (Lyrics 1962-2001) was immense (600 pages of a dense, almost A4-sized sheet of paper, in American-English); labyrinthine poetry; the interpretations surrounding what he wrote generated thousands of interpretative theories, theses, 500,000 active presences on the Internet.

A week later I ended up saying yes, but I presented a counterproposal: yes, but only in good company. This half had been preparing, in the meantime. I had a friend, who had a degree in English and German and specialized in Anglo-Saxon literature, and I knew she demonstrated a taste for rigor and an ability to work in a step-by-step, word-by-word fashion.

And so it was, for two and a half years our free time and vacations went away. We took Dylan into our heads as an obsession, as a curse: I bought the many records I didn't already have, I ordered books, I spent two years immersed in his music and immersed in reading what he had written, what had been written about him and about his work. And, attached to his music, to his lyrics, came the broth from which all that exploded: the literary, musical, cinematographic influences, the muses; and as a result, there we were reading about English poetry, Scottish and Irish ballads, about blues and blues legends, reviewing Fellini, Hitchcock and Scorsese. Even when looking at things that are apparently less related to the arts, such as political activists, gangsters, baseball players and boxers—Dylan sang about everything, like any self-respecting songster.

Gina lives in Braga, I live in the south, 400 km of road separate us. So all the work was done via mail, and we only met half a dozen times in person to discuss criteria, fine-tune final versions of the poems, review the evidence for the two extensive volumes that all this turned into. In these long meetings in Braga, permanently watched by the domestic eyes of Gina's two dogs and invaded by the company of her black cat, we sucked kilos of menthol candies in marathons that lasted 12 hours a day and during which we discussed, exhaustively, the decision to be made about a word, a verse, a stanza, a song, the definitive title of a song, the text of a footnote; whether yes or no to introduce a comma.

It was hard and all the more so because we had decided, as a general axiom, that our approach to translation would be strictly literal, that is, we would follow absolutely what was written and not allow ourselves to be tempted by what might have been the author's intention, the meaning of words, intuition or sensitivity… Or the tight ropewalker contortions for maintaining the rhyme, the sound, the taste of the rhyme. “Fuck the rhyme!”, one of us said, “if anyone wants to savor what it sounds like, listen to the songs”.

This choice caused us frequent aesthetic suffering and I am disappointed not to find a denser word than 'playful' for the mysterious figure of the Joker in the apocalyptic lyrics of “All Along the Watchtower”; something that would better portray the enigmatic, somewhat diabolical figure depicted on the playing cards. Neither of us escaped this frustration and now Gina is going through all the dictionaries, all the possible websites, all the translators' forums, looking for an alternative to the 'tambourine' of “Mister Tambourine Man” (“Lord of the Tambourine”), which she had imagined. could translate as tambor (drum), ending up with no alternative other than the rustic tambourine for a song played on a melodious dreamy morning. And even Vladimir Nabokov's enlightened sentences on translations did not fully console us: “A tortured author and a deceived reader, this is the inevitable result of artistic paraphrase. The sole purpose and justification of translation is to convey the most accurate information possible, and this can only be achieved by a literal translation, with notes."* Lots of notes and lots of mint candies...

That the edition would be bilingual was always granted between us and the publisher, but initially the hypothesis was raised that the main space in the pages of the book will consist of the Portuguese version of each song, with the original text appearing in a footnote, the verses of each stanza presented horizontally, separated by dashes. Something like this:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine /You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?/People'd call, say, “Beware doll, you're bound to fall”/You thought they were all kiddin you/You used to laugh about/Everybody that was hangin' out/Now you don't talk so loud/Now you don't seem so proud/About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

And that's just the first verse of a song that has eight! Gina and I were horrified by this editorial suggestion, which was sensibly presented as a space-saving method and is widely used. In addition to the aesthetic issue of presentation, we wanted the whole thing to appear before the reader's eyes in total transparency and comparative clarity: on the left page the original text, in English, and on the right page, in mirror image, the translation of the same; aligned so that each line in English on the left corresponded, neck-and-neck, to its caption in Portuguese on the right. It was not too difficult to convince the editor of the goodness of our arguments and there was one last thing that decided the hesitations: followers of Nabokov, as far as translations are concerned, and knowing Dylan's prose, we anticipated that the text would have to have abundant footnotes from the translators. Now imagine what it would be like to mix the train of lines of the English text with the serpentine of the numerous and extensive footnotes. A jungle in which, on each of the book's pages, the lower half would be occupied by a visual chaos that would ruin the attention or understanding of the most selfless of readers.

All of this ended up conditioning the physical dimension of the translation into Portuguese of Bob Dylan's lyrics (Songs 1962-2001) and the work had to be published in two extensive volumes: the first, with 665 pages, was released in bookstores in September 2006. and contains songs written between 1962 and 1973. The second, 754 pages, was released in June 2008 and contains songs written between 1974 and 2001.

The translators' footnotes, which we anticipated would be abundant, ended up numbering 409, and the end-of-volume notes, with considerations on the framing of albums and songs, ended up taking up more than 60 pages of the total translation.


* The quote of Vladimir Nabokov is taken from the book Strong Opinions (Opiniões Fortes, published in Lisbon by Assírio e Alvim, 2005).

Images (from top to bottom): Quinta do Outeirinho, Avintes (north of Portugal), 1966 (photo by Eduardo Serrano). Other photos by © Pedro Serrano: Braga, 2006; Proof of cover and backcover of volume 2: © Relógio d'Água editores, 2008. 


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