Article,
Translation as illustration: the visual paradigm in Mallarmé’s translations of Poe
Word & Image, 30 (3): 249--260 (November 2014)
DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2014.938531
Abstract
Focusing on Mallarmé’s translations of Poe, this essay articulates two issues: on the one hand, the foreignizing ideal which dominated translation practice and theory in nineteenth century France; on the other hand, the “pictorialist poetics” (in David Scott’s terms) prevalent in nineteenth-century French culture and literature, with its exceptional intensity of interarts relations. In privileging foreignizing choices, translation theory followed the same trend as painting or travel writing: departing from the classical ideal of domestication, local color, the picturesque, and the exotic were prized, all in the name of visual effects. When translating Poe’s notoriously untranslatable poems, specifically “The Bells” and “The Raven”, this study argues, Mallarmé’s foreignizing choice of a prose translation (with the consequent and inevitable forsaking of Poe’s quintessential musicality) required the transposition of musical effects into visual ones: thus the translation of Poe’s poetry was shaped by a theore...
