Filipe Guerra. A translator with his ear always on the ground

We know little about the inner history, the transformation of a civilization's forms of consciousness. But it is undoubtedly in this sediment that remains in language, in the way different cultures and eras explore language differently, that we can glean signs of the relationships established between word and object, the meaning and depth to which this remains, like a white stone at the bottom of a well, permeating our awareness of the world and our place in it. Between the classic swaying of the phrase and its mundane convenience, it is as if literature remained on the ground, sustaining it with scraps, crumbs that eventually sow themselves, take root, and return strange forms to us in the more or less intersecting paths. Thus, Filipe Guerra's death does not extinguish a name: it disarticulates a system of listening. He was unraveled by cancer, with the mimetic labor of a translator. Death finished the work last Sunday, July 6th, in a bed at the Garcia de Orta Hospital in Almada.

What is lost with him, besides an overwhelming erudition, gathered so often according to the research needs imposed on him by the monumental works he translated, is a collaboration that, over three decades, gave rise to one of the most reliable translation methodologies ever established in our literary world. He and his wife, Nina Guerra, jointly translated some 70 works directly from Russian, from the giants of the novelistic tradition, such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, to the absolute master of the short form, Chekhov, and back to the Romantics, such as Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, who marked the dawn of Russian modernity. And also Gogol, Ivan Bunin, Andrei Beli, Bulgakov, and Stanislavsky, among others. And special attention should be paid to the anthologies of poets such as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Marina Tsvetaeva. All of this conveyed to us fragments of a clamorous map of that country-continent, whose immense area on the globe finds full expression in the radical contrasts of its literature, with those stone-like figures whose whiteness and weight define the points of articulation of that region, infinite through the many folds and extremes that its interior history offers us. "Writing burns black as blood," says the Hungarian poet and translator István Bella, in a poem he dedicates to Mandelstam, and in which he assumes his voice: "I do not play the lyre, but the chain; / Like chains rattle my vocal chords, / or like the stars above, / iron-clad worlds gravitating, / lands shackled, / like my heart. (…) And I teach new words / and singing trees to human speech, / I teach birds to the sky…"

Filipe António Guerra was born in 1948 in Vila Pouca de Aguiar. He graduated in Romance Philology from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon and continued his studies in Linguistics at the Université Paris VIII (Vincennes). In 1975, he joined the board of the Cooperativa Livreira Esteiros, and between 1979 and 1982, he conceived and produced radio programs about books for RDP1 and Antena 2. He contributed regularly to newspapers and literary magazines, often under a pseudonym. Between 1986 and 1989, he worked as a proofreader and literary translator at Editorial Progresso in Moscow. It was there that he met Nina, with whom he would build one of the most important partnerships in literary translation into Portuguese. Returning to Portugal, he worked until 1991 at Editorial Caminho, where he held editorial, proofreading, and translation positions. From 1994 onwards, he dedicated himself exclusively to literary translation from Russian, and although he authored around 40 titles individually, and even in other languages such as French, Spanish and Italian, it is the couple's joint legacy that will leave a lasting mark on the reception of Russian literature in Portuguese.

What they did together cannot be reduced to efficiency or lexical accuracy. They translated as if assembling a critical device: Nina brought the Russian text to the blank page, with meticulous literalness; Filipe dismantled what was untransferable and sought equivalent forms in Portuguese, not by transposition, but by harassment. They took turns. They returned to the beginning. Link after link, sentence after sentence, with the original always present—not as a fetish, but as a witness. The result: Dostoevsky without refinements or folkloric excesses, Tolstoy without too much perfume, Chekhov after the anecdotal had been scraped away.

For his part, and more discreetly, Filipe Guerra also wrote short stories, leaving some scattered about. According to his friend Rui Manuel Amaral, at the time of his death, he was compiling an anthology. One of these stories, written about twenty years ago, contained this note: "I was dying. Dying is uncomfortable, even unpleasant. They engrave our names in an intermediate zone (between Praia das Maçãs and Cassiopeia Bar), prominently displayed, haloed with lights, but who reads it? I think only the dead. / Another night, he would be resurrected. It's not pleasant. We return, open our arms, have breakfast at the bakery, want to talk, but our voices won't leave our throats, like in dreams. We pass unnoticed."