“Robot Boy”

Having finished some other assignments I was working on, I got to my translation homework. My course doesn’t really have any translation subjects as requirements, but it does have some “free credits”, as they call it, we can spend on whatever subjects we want, even if they’re from different courses.

Translation sounded useful for my future professional life, so that’s mostly where I’m spending my free credits on. I was going for a minor in German Studies at first, but that didn’t really work out. Anyway, I took on another translation subject last semester, very general about social sciences, and it went fine. But this one is about literary translation, from English to Portuguese. Not easy. We started with prose, but have moved on to poetry now. The last few classes were about translating Limericks by Edward Lear, which was kind of fun but very time consuming as well.

This poem here was given to us as homework, with no bibliographic reference so we’d translate it without knowing anything about the author, so as not to be influenced in our own translations I suppose.

The poem was this, named “Robot Boy”:

Mr. and Mrs. Smith had a wonderful life.
They were a normal, happy husband and wife.
One day they got news that made Mr. Smith glad.
Mrs. Smith would would be a mom
which would make him the dad!
But something was wrong with their bundle of joy.
It wasn’t human at all,
it was a robot boy!
He wasn’t warm and cuddly
and he didn’t have skin.
Instead there was a cold, thin layer of tin.
There were wires and tubes sticking out of his head.
He just lay there and stared,
not living or dead.

The only time he seemed alive at all
was with a long extension cord
plugged into the wall.

Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor,
“What have you done to my boy?
He’s not flesh and blood,
he’s aluminum alloy!”

The doctor said gently,
“What I’m going to say
will sound pretty wild.
But you’re not the father
of this strange looking child.
You see, there still is some question
about the child’s gender,
but we think that its father
is a microwave blender.”

The Smith’s lives were now filled
with misery and strife.
Mrs. Smith hated her husband,
and he hated his wife.
He never forgave her unholy alliance:
a sexual encounter
with a kitchen appliance.

And Robot Boy
grew to be a young man.

Though he was often mistaken
for a garbage can.

I don’t know what that says about me, but I’m pretty hooked. So of course I cheated, and went ahead and looked it up. It turns out it’s a poem by Tim Burton. I didn’t even know Tim Burton wrote poetry in the first place. I found the little book on Amazon.co.uk at an affordable price (and of course it’s on my wishlist now), but the whole thing is available online too. Both versions have simple drawings illustrating the poems, like the one above.

I know I’m procrastinating, but I genuinely enjoyed going through those… Going back to work now anyway.