Translation is a vital method of not just reading but writing and forms the basis of an exciting range of critical, artistic, and literary opportunities.

Combining close readings of literary texts alongside astute critical observations from works by Avital Ronell and Walter Benjamin, amongst others, The Poetics of Translation re-examines key translation studies concepts, challenging our sometimes pragmatic understanding of translation and asking what it is that the discipline can make visible. By highlighting the possibilities of translation as an art form in contemporary innovative writing practices, Geneviève Robichaud reveals translation’s creative and critical potential, arguing that even those literary works that are not exactly translations gain in being apprehended as such. The Poetics of Translation values oblique, even unfinished sources of meaning, dwelling in the speculative spaces of texts and drawing attention to translation as poiesis, as creating that which is tangible and valuable.

Situated at the juncture of translation poetics and literary studies, the book celebrates the uncertainty of translation, the plasticity of language and ideas, and the desire to interpret rather than reiterate.

Geneviève Robichaud is the author of Exit Text (Anstruther Press, 2016), a nano-essay on the errant and secret life of ideas. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century writings with an emphasis on translation as the poetry of thought still to come. She holds a PhD in English literature from the Université de Montréal.

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“The Poetics of Translation is a wonderfully nuanced and successful attempt at theorizing translation as a genre of thought onto itself.” Elena Basile, York University