DC 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.

Poems of Guido Gezelle

The Bruges-born poet-priest Guido Gezelle (1830–1899) is generally considered one of the masters of 19th-century European lyric poetry. At the end of his life and in the first two decades of the 20th century, Gezelle was hailed by the avant-garde as the founder of modern Flemish poetry. His unique voice was belatedly recognised in the Netherlands and often compared with his English contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). In this bilingual anthology, award-winning translator Paul Vincent selects a representative picture of Gezelle’s output, from devotional through narrative, to celebratory and expressionistic. Gezelle’s favourite themes are childhood, the Flemish landscape, friendship, nature, religion and the Flemish vernacular, and his apparently simple poems conceal a sophisticated prosody and a dialogue with spiritual and literary tradition. However, an important barrier to wider international recognition of his lyric genius up to now has been the absence of translations that do justice to the vigour and musicality of Gezelle’s West Flemish idiom. Two of the translations included go some way to redressing the balance: ‘The Watter-Scriever’ by Scotland’s national poet Edwin Morgan and ‘A Little Leaf . . .’ by Francis Jones. Both translators make brilliant use of their own vernaculars (Glaswegian and North Yorkshire respectively) to bring Gezelle to life for the non-Dutch-speaking reader.

Herman Gorter: Poems of 1890

Commonly viewed as a revolutionary and propagandist Herman Gorter (1864–1927) is often overlooked despite his lasting contribution to Dutch poetry. This selection of thirty-one poems, translated by Paul Vincent, focuses on Gorter’s experimental love and nature lyrics in Poems of 1890, and the Introduction sets the poems in the context of his earlier seminal work ‘Mei’ (May) as well as his often neglected Socialist verse.

The lyrical expansiveness, consistent use of rhyme and vivid imagery of the Dutch landscape that characterises ‘Mei’ evolves into more fragmentary verse in Poems of 1890, and the joyful celebratory tone of Gorter’s poetry increasingly co-exists with a sense of isolation and introspection. This can be viewed in the context of a rapidly changing political scene in Europe in the prelude to the First World War and the Russian Revolution. This is a valuable collection that revisits Gorter’s literary and political legacy, and introduces English-speaking readers to a selection of his most accessible and lyrical poems.