Intermediality and synaesthesia: Literary translation as centrifugal practice

Scott argues for literary translation as a centrifugal practice. This dispersal is also a proliferation, which looks to develop a prosthetics of language through the multiplication of sensory associations. But there are obvious limitations to overcome: the constraints of the alphabet parallel those of notation in modern music and require a new approach to onomatopoeia, which in turn gives fuller significance to the ambitions of Lettrism. The enterprise suggests a new role for the handwritten, too, as a trace of voice and the assimilation of language to graphic gesture. The author proposes that literary translation should imagine itself as an eco-activity and science fiction, as a record of a reading, as the dynamic of a consciousness, as psycho-physiological experience. The approach is illustrated through a sequence of translations of Apollinaire’s “Le Voyageur” (1913).