a o a the the the

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 word had been carved’, in Jorge Luis Borges’s phrase, because I am new to the language and I’m attentive to commonplace features. In ‘That heron there’ the pattern of a-o-a-o-a-o could be flattened into the-the-the-the-the-the without too much loss to the poem.

In other poems the gender of nouns was crucial. The poem ‘Gostaria de partilhar comigo o resto da sua vida?’ (or ‘Would you like to share the rest of your life with me?’) takes the form of an automated call menu. In this poem both the male and female versions of a noun are used in the same sentence:

Para transferir a pergunta para
o seu melhor amigo (a
sua melhor amiga)
marque 7.

A word-by-word translation could be:

To transfer the question to 

your best male friend (to
your best female friend)
press 7.

The gendered options in English were all unsuitable. ‘Male friend’ and ‘female friend’ are dry and technical. ‘Girlfriend’ and ‘boyfriend’ create a romantic link. I kept the repetition but found the variation within the register of tone instead of within the category of gender. The effect was this:

To pass the question on
to your best buddy (to
your dearest friend)
press 7.