Reflective voices: peering into Anne Carson’s translational writing through Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls

Abstract

Circumventing the conventions of traditional translation, Anne Carson, who is a translator, an academic and a poet handles her translation practice like a literary genre in its own right. Her relationship to the source text and its author is distinctly erotic, and allows her to approach translation with radical freedom. In Decreation, when she explores Le Miroir des âmes simples et anéanties, a religious manifesto written by medieval mystic Marguerite Porete, Carson suggests her own relationship with the source author and with hybrid writing: a relationship that is rooted in desire.This article compares the way Porete and Carson approach desire in creation. Through these parallels, the article analyses Anne Carson’s creative process and her translational practice’s ethics, stylistics, and creatively fruitful subversions.