LEFT: Tour5, from Photography in Translation’s Recreation of Reading (2013-2016)
sixteen laminated foamex board panels, 42cm x 29.5cm.
RIGHT: Au Cabaret Vert, from Photography in Translation’s Recreation of Reading (2013-2016)
sixteen laminated foamex board panels, 42cm x 29.5cm.

 
WORKSHOP 26 April 2017, The Shoe Factory Social Club, Norwich. This workshop explores how translation involves the creation of a ‘transcription’ of the experience of reading a text. Participants will be working with a range of English texts & textual designs. SEE EVENTS

This series of panels asks what kinds of cross-sensory and associative creativity might be harnessed by literary translation, and asks, too, in what ways the exercise of these creative resources allows us to re-imagine the ambitions of literary translation. These translational ambitions go beyond providing an equivalent version of a text in another language, and seek, instead, to capture the ongoing life of a text in a reading consciousness, permeable to all the solicitations of the hyper-textual, the extra-textual and the immediate reading environment. Photographs and their more fleeting form, photographic fragments, belong intimately both to our visual imaginations and to memory, and it thus seems natural to draw on them, to help us register and enact the varied motions of the reading experience.

Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the British Academy. His principal research interests lie in French and comparative poetics (The Poetics of French Verse: Studies in Reading, 1998; Channel Crossings: French and English Poetry in Dialogue 1550-2000, 2002); in literary translation, and in particular the experimental translation of poetry (Translating Baudelaire, 2000; Translating Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations’, 2006; Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading, 2012; Translating the Perception of Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology, 2012; and in photography’s relationship with writing (The Spoken Image: Photography and Language, 1999; Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson, 2007). Translation and photography combine in his most recent book, Translating Apollinaire (University of Exeter Press, 2014).

He is at present working on two book-length projects which develop and enlarge his phenomenological approach to translation: The Work of Literary Translation and Imagining a Philosophy of Literary Translation.