Poetry as a Foreign Language in Heather Dohollau and André du Bouchet

Abstract

This essay focuses on André du Bouchet (1924–2001) and Heather Dohollau (1925–2013), a Welsh poet who lived most of her life in France and is only published in French. Poised as they are between French and English, these poets are uniquely placed to participate in current reassessments of language and bilingualism. Both poets were translators and relied on the experience of linguistic defamiliarization in their poetic practice. They view poetry as the translation of a language into, and out of, itself. By drawing attention to language in its materiality, and to the poem as a visual form, their poetics of ‘difficulty’ (Dohollau) or ‘surprise’ (du Bouchet) compels the Francophone reader to adopt a foreign perspective on his or her own language. Poetry is thus reinvented as the idiome dreamt of by Derrida: a defamiliarizing other language, potentially able to translate otherness in its own terms.