Living not at home

When translating, there are always textures in the source language which cannot be directly replicated in the target language. Moving from Portuguese to English, gender is one such texture. Every noun in Portuguese is either feminine or masculine (which is the case in many other languages too) while English only has gendered nouns in special cases. I have been translating João Luís Barreto Guimarães’s collection Aberto todos os dias from Portuguese into English. I noticed a pattern at the start of the poem ‘Aquela garça ali’ (or  ‘That heron there’) . The first six nouns are alternately feminine and masculine. The nouns are:  a garça, o bote, a curva, o rio, a cidade, o fim. (In English this would be: the heron, the boat, the curve, the river, the city, the end).  Since every noun in Portuguese – whether animate, inanimate, concrete, abstract – is gendered, gender can seem arbitrary, not carrying significant meaning. To me the gender of a noun stands out ‘as though each ...