Journal article
Activating Translation: Louise Varèse’s Illuminations
Translation review, Vol.120(1), pp.62-72
09/2024
DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2024.2319307
Abstract
Against historically determined conventions that helped launch her career as a translator of French literature in the mid-twentieth century, this article reconsiders Louise Varèse’s translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, published with New Directions in 1946, as activating a range of cultural, historical, and critical interpretations that are not always anticipated by her source text. I read Varèse’s claims about rendering the “prismatic and protean quality” of Illuminations in her Translator’s Note, alongside Marjorie Perloff’s theory of Rimbaud’s “poetics of indeterminacy,” and translation Studies scholar Matthew Reynolds’s prismatic model of translation, to reframe Varèse’s much-lauded “accuracy” as an approach that instead highlights the interdependent relationship between Rimbaud’s French poetic text and its English translation, while also foregrounding Varèse’s historical and cultural intervention. Through a close textual analysis of “Side-Show,” Varèse’s English translation of Rimbaud’s poem “Parade,” and Varèse’s revision of the poem from 1957, I demonstrate the ways Varèse’s translation “activates” Rimbaud’s language for her English readers while thematizing the secondary nature of her translation.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Activating Translation: Louise Varèse’s Illuminations
- Creators
- Diana Thow
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Translation review, Vol.120(1), pp.62-72
- Publisher
- ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
- DOI
- 10.1080/07374836.2024.2319307
- ISSN
- 0737-4836
- eISSN
- 2164-0564
- Language
- English
- Electronic publication date
- 08/12/2024
- Date published
- 09/2024
- Academic Unit
- French and Italian; World Languages, Literatures and Cultures
- Record Identifier
- 9984696780302771
Metrics
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