The poetics of translation : a thinking structure
The Poetics of Translation: A Thinking Structure is concerned with what can be known through the poetic and theoretical vectors of translation, both as a poetics as well as a reading methodology. More precisely, through a reading of contemporary experimental texts – those by Gail Scott, Erín Moure, Chus Pato, Fernando Pessoa and PME-ART – I investigate translation’s poetic and epistemological possibilities as well as translation itself as episteme (as knowledge and understanding). Erín Moure’s generative “intranslations” of the Galician poet Chus Pato (Secession/Insecession), the radical rewriting practice of English and French translations of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and Le Livre de l’intranquillité by the Montreal performance collective PME-ART, and the poetics of translation as dialectical image in the novel The Obituary by Gail Scott all contribute to my understanding of translation’s poetics as a thinking structure. The purpose of this study is not only to furnish an innovative and critical understanding of translation’s various permutations in contemporary experimental texts, but also to contribute to new avenues of research targeting translation and research creation while ultimately bringing translation on the side of poetry rather than the inverse. The works I examine thus offer modes of thinking about translation as a form of poetic juxtaposition and as a cypher that is concerned with what can be apprehended or understood in the elliptical space(s) of an in-between.
Translation poetics reading methodologies Walter Benjamin Canadian literatures experimental writing 20th and 21st century poetry and prose thinking structures Gail Scott Erín Moure Chus Pato Fernando Pessoa PME-ART