La traduction des calligrammes
The Translation of Calligrammes

Summary/Abstract: In the wider frame of a reflection upon the translatability of plays on language, the concrete poetry – and we have deliberately chosen Guillaume Apollinaire’s famous Calligrammes – raises major problems for the translator as it is double in nature: both text and image. Is the mix of the two codes – the linguistic and the visual – easily translated through a word forword method? In this paper, we aim at a closer look to the textual mechanisms within the concrete or visual poems and propose to the translator, as a tool, the identification of the language functions that such a poem fulfils. What at a first glance might have seemed obvious for the simple visual poems, turns out to be a complex process, requiring all the knowledge of a literary translator, in the case of hybrid poems wherein either the concrete verse are inserted in a longer sequence of habitual verse, or the play is on the different object of reference of the picture and of the words in the visual poem.

• Details
• Contents