On Translation – sunk ships

Translating the Untranslatable: Erotic Poetry, Song, and the Sonnets of Cancioneiro do Bairro- Alto

Erotic poetry has long been described as one of the most untranslatable literary forms, resisting transfer more than almost any other genre. Its force lies not only in meaning but in timing, rhythm, vulgarity, and cultural resonance. A single misplaced syllable can turn tavern laughter into pornography or bathos. The challenges it poses go beyond those of ordinary verse translation, forcing translators to contend not only with form and semantics but also with questions of tone, cultural resonance, and even propriety.

The Cancioneiro do Bairro-Alto, a collection of bawdy Portuguese sonnets from eighteenth-century Lisbon, illustrates these tensions with unusual clarity. For our project, the task doubled: to translate the poems into English and then render them as songs, scored in fake book notation. This dual challenge exposed how translation is not about fidelity to words, but rather fidelity to the force; what Damion Searls, in his Philosophy of Translation, calls the phenomenological experience of a text. What matters is not what a line “means,” but how it makes its audience laugh, blush, or sing along.

The Challenge of Erotic Translation

Semantic Mismatch and the Caralho Problem

The vocabulary of eroticism resists neat equivalence across languages. Searls’s choice to render Fosse’s dog Brage as Bragi, a vowel shift designed to make Anglophone readers hear affection rather than “rage,” is a microcosm of erotic translation. In the Cancioneiro, the ubiquitous caralho poses the same problem. This Portuguese word functions simultaneously as a vulgar insult, colloquial slang, and a term of endearment. In Sonnet LVIII, the line “chuchei caralhos grossos” was rendered literally as “I sucked on thick cocks.” Yet in English, “cock” is more brutal, less comic, and lacking the earthy familiarity of the Portuguese. To shift toward “prick” would sharpen it into an insult; “dick” would lighten into banter.

Each option alters the affective experience. The translator’s task is not fidelity to a single word but to its affordance, its sonic and cultural invitation to laugh, sneer, or leer. When adapting this line for song, the problem intensified: Portuguese ca-ra-lho has three syllables that swing; “cock” is one percussive beat. We stretched the phrase into “thick, thick cocks” to restore rhythm, trusting the music to recreate the original’s carnivalesque energy where blunt literalism only shocked.

Sonnet LVIII

Portuguese: “chuchei caralhos grossos”
English: “I sucked on thick cocks.”
Song rendering:

[Verse]
| Am7 | % | D9 | G13 |
“I sucked on thick, thick cocks…”

Portuguese ca-ra-lho swings across three beats; English “cock” is one percussive syllable. Repetition (“thick, thick”) padded the rhythm, trusting music to restore tavern humor.

Loss of Poetic Form and the Geography of Rhythm

Form also resists export. In Sonnet LX, the hyperbolic boast “Fodeste de Belém a Trafaria!” (“You fucked from Belém to Trafaria!”) relies on internal rhyme and rhythm that makes the boast ridiculous. Literal translation conveys the absurd image but not the musical wit. To preserve rhythm might require substituting geography (“from Belem right down to Setúbal”), but this distorts the poem’s local specificity. In our musical adaptation, we chose to bend the map to preserve force, setting the domesticated version to chord changes that carried the excess and swagger of the original boast.

Sonnet LX

Portuguese:“Fodeste de Belém a Trafaria!”
English: “You fucked from Belém to Trafaria!”
Song rendering:

We bent the geography to recover rhythm, letting chords carry the comic excess.

Cultural Idioms and the Performance of Understanding

Idioms pose a subtler challenge. Sonnet LIV turns on the conceit of gifting a friend “a pair of horns”—cornos—a universally understood image of cuckoldry in Iberian cultures. English readers require clarification: “cuckold’s horns.” Yet explanation undermines immediacy. Where Portuguese audiences would recognize a wink and sting, English audiences encounter a footnote. The joke is preserved as content but lost as performance.

Our musical solution involved placing “cuckold’s horns” against a clarinet stab, masking the clumsiness of the word “cuckold” with instrumental punctuation that restored the sting that literal English lost. Here, the translator becomes visible, choosing to trust performance to bridge what words cannot.

Sonnet LIV

Portuguese: “Um par de cornos belos e chibantes.”
English: “A fine pair of cuckold’s horns.”
Song rendering:

[Chorus]
| Am7 | D9 | G13 | Cmaj7 |
“A fine pair of cuckold’s horns!” [clarinet hits]

The ungainly English “cuckold” was masked with instrumental punctuation. The joke evolved into a performance, not just wordplay.

Force vs. Equivalence: A Philosophical Framework

Erotic Ambiguity and Affordances

Damion Searls’s phenomenological approach clarifies what literalism cannot: the “meaning” lies in the reader’s or listener’s experience, not in word-for-word correspondence. Ambiguity is central to erotic discourse, and this is where the translator’s choices become most revealing. In Sonnet XLII, Marília is described as “Coçava esse lugar, que lhe dá gozo,” literally: “She scratched that place that gives her joy.” The verb coçar straddles itch and arousal; English “scratch” collapses into the clinical, risking loss of sensual tension. Alternatives like “rubbed” or “caressed” heighten the eroticism but discard the comic grotesquerie of the original.

Searls’s emphasis on affordances clarifies the dilemma: the translator must decide which invitation to extend, comic awkwardness or erotic suggestion. Neither is “right”; both are experiential recreations. In our song version, we padded for rhythm with “kept scratching that place,” letting the ambiguity live not in the word but in the delivery, a sly hesitation before “joy” that preserved the original’s delicious uncertainty.

Sonnet XLII

Portuguese:“Coçava esse lugar, que lhe dá gozo.”
English: “She scratched that place that gives her joy.”
Song rendering:

We padded the English with “kept scratching” to restore swing. The ambiguity lived in delivery: a sly hesitation before “joy.”

The Grotesque as Carnival

Take Sonnet LVI: “O caralho é um pão com duas bolas” (“The cock is a bread with two balls”). The literal equivalence is straightforward, but what matters is the grotesque force of the metaphor, its power to provoke laughter through sheer absurdity. When sung as a Pimba-like chorus, the line regained its carnivalesque energy, the rhythm giving space for the audience to laugh. Phenomenologically, the force, comic bawdiness, was restored not by preservation of words but by recreation of experience.

Portuguese: “O caralho é um pão com duas bolas.”
English: “The cock is a bread with two balls.”
Song rendering:

Sung as a Pimba-like refrain, the rhythm creates a space for laughter. The carnivalesque force returns in performance, not in equivalence.

Ethical and Reception Challenges

Aesthetic Compromise and Censorship

The very act of publishing these texts raises questions of propriety that complicate the translator’s task. In academic contexts, Sonnet LVI’s opening may be masked as “The **** is a bread with two balls.” Such censorship preserves publishability at the expense of humor: the grotesque image of genitals as baked goods loses its vulgar shock. The translator confronts not only what the text means, but what readers or publishers will tolerate.

Musical adaptation added another layer: how explicit can performance be? The market exerts pressure; how should the work be framed? Annotated for scholars, sung for performers, or packaged as underground literature? Each choice reshapes the poem’s reception and reveals the translator’s ideological position.

The Translator’s Ideology and Contemporary Taste

Translation inevitably refracts through ideology. When Sonnet XLVI (“Ao casamento”) was adapted into trip-hop style, the raw satire of marriage was softened into dreamlike melancholy. This rendering was not a neutral choice: it bent the text toward modern sensibilities of ironic romance, revealing as much about contemporary taste as about the original poem.

Erotic norms are neither timeless nor universal. Eighteenth-century Lisbon tavern audiences heard “foderás várias putas” (LVII) as bawdy banter; a twenty-first-century Anglophone audience may read it as obscene or misogynistic. To bridge this gap, translators may choose to lean into humor (using picaresque slang) or to preserve bluntness; however, each choice reshapes the reception.

The Translator’s Burden: Choosing Betrayals

Some poems foreground the impossibility of the task while exposing what Searls calls the translator’s visibility. Sonnet L’s grotesque portrait of Maria Rosa: “Nunca lavou a cona… no caralho mijar, cagar na cama” was translated literally as “She never washed her cunt… pissed on cock, shat in bed.” Portuguese audiences would have perceived both disgust and comic rhythm. In English, monosyllables like “pissed” and “shat” turn brutally percussive, tipping the balance heavily toward disgust.

Sonnet L (Maria Rosa)

Portuguese: “Nunca lavou a cona… no caralho mijar, cagar na cama.”
English: “She never washed her cunt… pissed on cock, shat in bed.”
Song rendering:

[Verse]
| Em7 | A7 | Dm7 | G7 |
“She never washed her cunt…
pissed on cock, shat in bed…”

The absurdity returned not in words but in performance: clarinet slides, bass walking, and ironic phrasing. Here, the translator is visible, choosing to preserve filth intact and trusting the music to restore humor.

To tame the language would betray the poem’s filth; to retain it risks alienating the audience. Here, translation becomes an exercise in choosing which betrayal to embrace.

Conclusion: Toward a Phenomenology of the Obscene

The Cancioneiro do Bairro-Alto lays bare the high-wire act of erotic translation while revealing what Searls’s philosophy illuminates: translation is not about fidelity to words but about developing an experience, like coaxing an image from a photographic negative. Erotic poetry intensifies the stakes because ambiguity, vulgarity, and rhythm are its lifeblood. Fidelity to words often betrays the poem; fidelity to force keeps it alive.

Semantic mismatches, lost forms, idioms, and grotesqueries all collapse in English if treated literally. Yet in song, through rhythm, chords, and performance, force can be reborn. Fake book notation itself becomes a kind of translation: placing “cock” on the downbeat, stretching “scratch” across swing time, letting clarinet punctuate idioms. The result may not be faithful and beautiful at once, but it can still be, like a tavern laugh or a song in a Lisbon alley: alive.

The process revealed that translation is less about preserving what a text “says” than recreating how it “lands,” how it makes its audience laugh, blush, or sing along. Every decision, whether to preserve, soften, or reinvent, runs the risk of betrayal. Still, it is precisely in these failures, in these calculated betrayals, that the vitality of the text endures. The translator of bawdy Verse walks the same tightrope as any translator: not preserving what a text means, but recreating how it means.