Translating the poetry of Apollinaire: Description of a project

This  article  outlines  founding  principles  and  a  guiding  strategy  for  the  translation  of Apollinaire’s  poetry;  many  aspects  of  the  strategy  reflect  the  convictions  and  practices  of Apollinaire’s own poetics. But the article is particularly concerned to argue that translation’s task is the projection of the source text into its future, rather than being an act of recuperation or preservation; this argument is pursued and evaluated with reference to the thinking of Yves Bonnefoy,  and  entails  the  differentiation  of  sense  and  meaning.  The  closing  section  is concerned  with the part that  might be played in this  ‘multilingual’  translational project by photography, and, more particularly, by collages of photographic fragments.

Keywords:

Phenomenology , multilingualism , paralanguage , Performance , projective translation , photography