Book Section
Sabine I. Gölz
Millay Repairs Baudelaire
I present a contrastive reading of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ and Edna St Vincent Millay’s 1936 retranslation, ‘Invitation to the Voyage’. Baudelaire’s poem is prefigurative and metapoetic: it models and theorizes gendered mechanisms for controlling its readership. Millay translates the poem both from French into English, and from Baudelaire’s misogynist poetics of control into a self-reflexive and open one. Millay repairs Baudelaire’s poem. The divergence between the two is paradigmatic for a deep rift in Western literary and cultural spacetimes, separating two starkly different poetics and two very different subject positions, one assimilated and scripted, one self-reflexive and unrepresentable. A brief look at approaches in retranslation theory that land on different sides of that rift frames the essay.
Keywords: apostrophe; consciousness; gender; indexicals; poetics; retranslation; reading
| Title |
Millay Repairs Baudelaire
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| Author(s) |
Sabine I. Gölz
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| Identifier | |
| Description |
I present a contrastive reading of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ and Edna St Vincent Millay’s 1936 retranslation, ‘Invitation to the Voyage’. Baudelaire’s poem is prefigurative and metapoetic: it models and theorizes gendered mechanisms for controlling its readership. Millay translates the poem both from French into English, and from Baudelaire’s misogynist poetics of control into a self-reflexive and open one. Millay repairs Baudelaire’s poem. The divergence between the two is paradigmatic for a deep rift in Western literary and cultural spacetimes, separating two starkly different poetics and two very different subject positions, one assimilated and scripted, one self-reflexive and unrepresentable. A brief look at approaches in retranslation theory that land on different sides of that rift frames the essay.
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
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| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
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| Date |
28 October 2024
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| Subject |
apostrophe
consciousness
gender
indexicals
poetics
retranslation
reading
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| Rights |
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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| Language |
en-GB
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| page start |
31
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| page end |
70
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| Source |
Rethinking Lyric Communities, ed. by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, and Laura Scuriatti, Cultural Inquiry, 30 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024), pp. 31–70
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Publication scheduled for 28 October 2024
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Cite as:
Sabine I. Gölz, ‘Millay Repairs Baudelaire’, in Rethinking Lyric Communities, ed. by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, and Laura Scuriatti, Cultural Inquiry, 30 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024), pp. 31-70 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-30_02>