Universal Prose

The Macau Literary Festival welcomes Professor Frederick Williams, a prolific translator of Portuguese poetry whose major works include the translation of poetry by Jorge de Sena

This year’s The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival will have a particular focus on poetry.  One of the invited guests is Professor Frederick G. Williams who has been a prolific translator of Portuguese poetry throughout his long and distinguished career.

Professor Williams received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, under the tutelage of renowned Portuguese author and poet Jorge de Sena.  He then went on to teach Portuguese literature for 27 years at the University of California (UCLA and UCSB), and for 20 years at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. 

In Santa  Barbara he became a colleague of his old mentor Jorge de Sena and was the founding director of the Jorge de Sena Center for Portuguese Studies, established with a generous grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. 

He has published over 60 articles and 26 volumes, with special emphasis on 19^th century Brazilian poet Sousândrade and 20^th century Portuguese poet Jorge de Sena, and has translated, in eight volumes, the major poets from all eight countries and two regions of the Lusophone world – over a thousand poems in total. He has also published three volumes of his own poetry. 

When you first started translating Portuguese poetry to English there was virtually no work done in this field.  Was this a gap you wished to fill?

Early in my career as a Professor of Portuguese Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, my colleague, Portuguese author Jorge de Sena, who was the chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, asked me to prepare a course on Brazilian literature in English translation; the next year, he asked me to prepare one on Portuguese literature in English translation. 

I found that there was quite a bit of Brazilian prose that had been translated, but not very much poetry, and those that had been translated were primarily the Modernist poets of the 20^th century.  Since the course would cover from the 16^th century to the present, I set about translating poetry.

Deciding to embark on a journey of translating Portuguese poetry from each Portuguese speaking country was a big undertaking.  What made you decide to take on this task?

After accepting a named professorship at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, one of the first things I was asked to do was to direct a Study Abroad program for BYU students in Mozambique in 2000, and to teach a course on Mozambican literature.  During the 20 years I taught at BYU, I was asked to prepare and teach two additional courses of Lusophone literature: a class on Cape Verdean literature, and another one on the literature of Portuguese Asia: Goa, Macau, and East Timor.  I was delighted with the challenge. 

Which Portuguese speaking countryís poetry do you find the most challenging to translate? 

There are two major dimensions to a poem: its subject and its form.  The form may include a specific meter and rhyme scheme, while the subject will always be immersed in a specific cultural, historical, and religious context. If the reader is not familiar with the latter, the poem has no meaning for him, or better said, he cannot understand it. 

In terms of subject, I would say that for me the most difficult Portuguese language poems to translate were those from Goa, Macau, and East Timor, especially when the poem’s content was more deeply reflective of those Asian cultures, for I am less familiar with those richly nuanced contexts. But I can say the same about some of the Portuguese poets from the African nations.  When the poem’s subject was deeply reflective of the indigenous culture, I was less sure of the subject’s nuances.

Do you feel your legacy is complete?

Yes, but since new poets appear every year, someone else will have to take on the work of translating these new poets, and therefore the canon will never be complete.  However, if no one writes poetry in Portuguese anymore, then the canon will be complete; a closed cannon as happened in ancient Greece and Rome.

You're coming to Macau as a guest of The Script Road, which is going to celebrate Jorge de Sena's 100^th anniversary.  Does this have a special meaning to you?

Yes, of course.  It is an honor for me, because I consider Sena to be the third most important poet in the Portuguese language after Camões and Fernando Pessoa. It is interesting to note that all three poets lived abroad beyond Portugal, which gave them a universal, human, perspective on life that is very much more nuanced.

Is there a poem you wish you had been the one to write? 

On the one hand, yes of course, because some poems are expressed so well that we relate to them instantly. Take Camões’s Amor é um fogo que arde sem se ver for example. But on the other hand, not really, because life is so rich and wondrous that even an old familiar theme can be expressed in a new way that likewise captures our imagination. 

How do you see poetry today: a rare art, or a dynamic and evolving space?

When thinking his best, mankind has always used a poetic form to express his ideas and moods.  I don’t think that will change, even though forms are constantly evolving.