'Love Hath Reason, Reason None': A New Brazilian Portuguese Translation of William Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle"

Abstract

The purpose of this article is twofold: to present a new translation of William Shakespeare's poem “The Phoenix and the Turtle” alongside a discussion of formal and semantic solutions as well as to help filling the gap that exists in terms of translations of Shakespeare's lyrical poetry into Brazilian Portuguese, much smaller in number than those of the dramatic canon, except for the series of 154 sonnets (The Sonnets, 1609). It is a short poem, published in 1601 in a collection edited by Robert Chester under the title Love’s Martyr, which also includes authors such as Ben Jonson and George Chapman. In formal terms, it features 67 lines distributed in 13 quatrains and five triplets, to the latter making up the final part, the threnos. Written in trochaic tetrameter, it follows the rhyme scheme abba in the quatrains and aaa in the triplets. In an allegorical tone, it describes the ideal love between the phoenix and the turtle, which unites them into a single being, while preserving their own individualities. The poem begins with the gathering of some birds, such as crow, eagle and swan, to celebrate the memory of the phoenix and the turtle after their death. From the eleventh stanza on, Reason, personified, takes over the narrative, and sings a funereal lament for the love of the two birds: with their death, beauty, truth and grace disappear from the world. The translation presented here followed the method for the translation of poetry devised by Paulo Henriques Britto (2006, 2015), comprised of three steps: to identify the poetically significant characteristics of the poem; to assign a priority to each feature, depending on the greater or lesser contribution it makes to the overall aesthetic effect of the poem; and to recreate the characteristics considered to be the most significant among those for which correspondences can be sought in the target language. Replicating this method, the poem was recreated in eight-syllable lines, following the stanzaic structure and the rhyme scheme of Shakespeare’s poem.