The Poetics of Translation

The Poetics of Translation challenges our pragmatic understanding of translation through the discipline’s use in contemporary innovative writing practices, highlighting translation’s ability to create meaning, celebrate uncertainty, and interpret rather than reiterate.

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Translation is a vital method of not just reading but writing and forms the basis of an exciting range of critical, artistic, and literary opportunities.

Combining close readings of literary texts alongside astute critical observations from works by Avital Ronell and Walter Benjamin, amongst others, The Poetics of Translation re-examines key translation studies concepts, challenging our sometimes pragmatic understanding of translation and asking what it is that the discipline can make visible. By highlighting the possibilities of translation as an art form in contemporary innovative writing practices, Geneviève Robichaud reveals translation’s creative and critical potential, arguing that even those literary works that are not exactly translations gain in being apprehended as such. The Poetics of Translation values oblique, even unfinished sources of meaning, dwelling in the speculative spaces of texts and drawing attention to translation as poiesis, as creating that which is tangible and valuable.

Situated at the juncture of translation poetics and literary studies, the book celebrates the uncertainty of translation, the plasticity of language and ideas, and the desire to interpret rather than reiterate.