Translating concrete poetry

Resumo

It is interesting to examine the art form known as concrete poetry with translation -- both practical and theoretical -- in mind, because it was, according to Kopfermann (1974:x1), considered international by its creators: the language-elements are not tied to the author's mother tongue, reduction and reproduction allow elements of different languages to be combined in the scone text. The basis for this is the materiality (mostly understood in an optical or acoustic sense) of the vocable° and elementary structures which are the sane in all (or at least the Indo- -European) languages. This theoretical stance might suggest that it is not necessary to translate concrete poetry from one Indo-European language to another. However, most anthologies of concrete poetry contain translations and/or word glosses (see, for instance, Bann (1967), Solt (1968) and Williams (1967), so there is obviously a perceived need to provide some assistance to speakers of languages other than that in which any particular poem is composed.