Crossbars of the Universe: Guillevic and the Physics of Translation. Issue 1 (April 2020) - ALLEN, ESTHER
Abstract : The French poet and translator Eugène Guillevic (1907-1997) once said that translation was impossible, though "human beings have only succeeded in achieving the impossible … and failed to accomplish the possible". The Guillevic scholar and translator Monique Chefdor locates a kind of physics in his poetry, an almost scientific inquiry into universal properties of human being in relation to matter itself, prehistory, and interstellar and subatomic space. The elemental, almost ahistorical self that Guillevic's poetry proposes may offer a way out of the outdated conceptual binary of "domestication" vs. "foreignization" that has persistently dogged translation studies.