Barbecued sunrise
Keywords:
translation, poetry, transnationalism, Stéphane Mallarmé, Christopher Brennan, Chris Edwards, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Australian poetry, carnivalesque, Walter BenjaminAbstract
This essay argues for an expanded definition of the category of ‘Australian Literature’ by analysing work at its fringes: experimental literary translation by Australian, English-language, writers. While considerable attention has been given to translation as a mode of literary circulation and as a metaphor for an ethics of cross-cultural exchange, there has been little work done by proponents of World Literature on the linguistic problem of what happens in translation. By contrast, this essay develops a mode of close reading, via theories of transnationalism and translation, applied to two playful translations of Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ (1895) by Christopher Brennan (1897) and Chris Edwards (2005).
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