Translating the poetry of Apollinaire: Description of a project

This article outlines founding principles and a guiding strategy for the translation of Apollinaire’s poetry; many aspects of the strategy reflect the convictions and practices of Apollinaire’s own poetics. But the article is particularly concerned to argue that translation’s task is the projection of the source text into its future, rather than being an act of recuperation or preservation; this argument is pursued and evaluated with reference to the thinking of Yves Bonnefoy, and entails the differentiation of sense and meaning. The closing section is concerned with the part that might be played in this ‘multilingual’ translational project by photography, and, more particularly, by collages of photographic fragments.