The Wonders of Foreign Words: Translational poetics in English poetry and prose, 20th-21st centuries

The aim of this international conference is to investigate how, in the 20th and 21st centuries, poets and writers have practiced literary translation as a welcome respite from acedia, as a source of fresh inspiration, or as an experimental creative practice (from word-for-word rendering to free-wheeling rewriting). This activity has often filtered in individual work in overt, self-conscious, submerged, or contrapuntal fashion. We will adopt a comparative approach to shed light on the various forms of this creative process through close analyses of the translated text and the new work that often bears traces of its dialogue with its intertextual and translational source(s) through embedded fragments of foreign texts or borrowed words that offer keys to the author’s translational poetics. One aim is to uncover heretofore ignored or understudied translation-rewriting projects based on original documents and archival sources. The other is to draw attention to what English language writers owe to other languages and literary traditions old and new today.