LIT004150 Archives

Cécile Sauvage

This book offers a creative critical approach to translating the poetry of French writer, Cécile Sauvage (1883–1927). Sauvage was a remarkable poet who wrote of pregnancy, maternity, the self, sex and death, yet the story of her reception across the last century is a sequence of versions, as different readers and editors reworked Sauvage’s corpus to create new images of the poet. This book presents itself as the latest versioning of Sauvage, using the creative critical framework to challenge the traditionally strict separation between translation and commentary, between practice and theory. Figuring the literary translator as a fan, this approach makes the case for understanding translation as a participatory, possessive practice, and argues for Sauvage’s importance from the starting point of the personal.

Cécile Sauvage: Translation as desiring practice makes a wide-ranging selection of Sauvage’s poetry available in English for the first time and draws upon the poet’s recently discovered manuscripts and correspondence. It brings translation into interdisciplinary conversation with topics such as fan studies, genetic criticism and literary genre. Ultimately, it advocates for creativity in translation and a reappraisal of scholarly modes of working, arguing on behalf of rigorous scholarship that is unafraid to confess the desiring and subjective position from which it operates.

Exile, Non-Belonging and Statelessness in Grangaud, Jabès, Lubin and Luca

At least since the Romantic era, poetry has often been understood as a powerful vector of collective belonging. The idea that certain poets are emblematic of a national culture is one of the chief means by which literature historicizes itself, inscribes itself in a shared cultural past and supplies modes of belonging to those who consume it. But what, then, of the exiled, migrant or translingual poet? How might writing in a language other than one’s mother tongue complicate this picture of the relation between poet, language and literary system? What of those for whom the practice of poetry is inseparable from a sense of restlessness or unease, suggesting a condition of not being at home in any one language, even that of their mother tongue?

These questions are crucial for four French-language poets whose work is the focus of this study: Armen Lubin (1903-74), Ghérasim Luca (1913-94), Edmond Jabès (1912-91) and Michelle Grangaud (1941-). Ranging across borders within and beyond the Francosphere – from Algeria to Armenia, to Egypt, to Romania – this book shows how a poetic practice inflected by exile, statelessness or non-belonging has the potential to disrupt long-held assumptions of the relation between subjects, the language they use and the place from which they speak.

Georges Perec’s Geographies

Georges Perec, novelist, filmmaker and essayist, was one of the most inventive and original writers of the twentieth century. A fascinating aspect of his work is its intrinsically geographical nature. With major projects on space and place, Perec’s writing speaks to a variety of geographical, urban and architectural concerns, both in a substantive way, including a focus on cities, streets, homes and apartments, and in a methodological way, experimenting with methods of urban exploration and observation, classification, enumeration and taxonomy.

Georges Perec’s Geographies is the first book to offer a rounded picture of Perec’s geographical interests. Divided into two parts, Part I, Perec’s Geographies, explores the geographies within Perec’s work in film, literature and radio, from descriptions of streets to the spaces of his texts, while Part II, Perecquian Geographies, explores geographies in a range of material and metaphorical forms, including photographic essays, soundscapes, theatre, dance and writing, created by those directly inspired by Perec.

Georges Perec’s Geographies extends the body of Perec criticism beyond Literary and French Studies to disciplines including Geography, Urban Studies, Planning and Architecture to offer a complete and systematic examination of Georges Perec’s geographies. The diversity of readings and approaches will be of interest not only to Perec readers and fans but to students and researchers across these subjects.