What is it about?
This edited collection of essays charts the global dissemination and reception of "untranslatable" concrete poetry. Featuring contributions from an international group of literary and translation scholars and practitioners, working across a variety of languages, the book views the development of the international concrete poetry movement through the lens of "transcreation", that is, the informed, creative response to the translation of playful, enigmatic, visual texts. Contributions range in subject matter from ancient Greek and Chinese pattern poems to modernist concrete poems from the Americas, Europe and Asia. This challenging body of experimental work offers creative challenges and opportunities to literary translators and unique pleasures to the sympathetic reader. My own chapter in the collection focuses on the ways that social network analysis can illuminate the relationship of a concrete poet and translator (in this case, Edwin Morgan) with the writers he corresponded with and translated.
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Why is it important?
Highlighting the ways in which literary influence is mapped across languages and borders, this volume as a whole will be of interest to students and scholars of experimental poetry, translation studies and comparative literature. My own chapter's methodological focus on social network analysis demonstrates the potential of this means of investigating literary correspondence to illuminate the nature of the global community of practice that concrete poets, for a time, constituted.
Perspectives
I co-edited this volume with my then doctoral student, Ting Huang, who is fluent in Chinese, Portuguese and English. Together we navigated the different global realizations of concrete poetry, in China, Europe and North & South America, coming into contact with a marvellous set of schoars and practitioners, and learning much about the way literary ideas disseminated across the globe in the pre-digital era of airmail.
Professor John Corbett
Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University
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This page is a summary of: Mapping the International Concrete Poetry Network, October 2019, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9781315145563-12.
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