Translating Apollinaire

Translating Apollinaire expounds a philosophy of translation that depends on Deleuze, but also calls on Dziga Vertov's cinematic theories, Barthes' on photography and other international linguists and theorists. "Rewriting" is the order of the day, as Scott seeks to liberate translators from inhibitions and any trace of timid inferiority regarding literary writing. Translation is repositioned as "an act of forward propulsion and of reimagination". The book delves into Apollinaire's poetry and poetics through the challenges and invitations it offers to the process of translation. Besides providing a new appraisal of Apollinaire, the most significant French poet of WWI, Translating Apollinaire aims to put the ordinary reader at the centre of the translational project. It proposes that translation's primary task is to capture the responses of the reader to the poetic text, and to find ways of writing those responses into the act of translation. Every reader is invited to translate, and to translate with a creativity appropriate to the complexity of their own reading experiences. Throughout, Scott himself consistently uses the creative resource of photography, and more particularly photographic fragments, as a cross-media language used to help capture the activity of the reading consciousness.