Translation and the Aesthetics of Prose Poetry

TL;DRAbstract

Translation is generally understood as the transformation of text from one language into another. But translation is also a dialogue between two languages, between two versions of a text, and between author and translator. Such dialogue involves thought on language, its usage and potential, and on literary creation itself. Poetry also involves attention to, and experimentation with, language and contains a constant analysis of its own expression. This dissertation examines this coincidence of translation and poetry and seeks to explore how translation, both in theory and in practice, illuminates the understanding of a key development in modern French poetry: the prose poem. It analyses the relationship between the practice of translation and thought on translation, and the development of the new poetic form which is prose poetry. It concentrates on the aesthetics of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud, and shows that in each case an intensely self-reflexive poetics is driven by an engagem

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