Translation as illustration: the visual paradigm in Mallarmé’s translations of Poe

Abstract

Focusing on Mallarmé’s translations of Poe, this essay articulates two issues: on the one hand, the foreignizing ideal which dominated translation practice and theory in nineteenth century France; on the other hand, the “pictorialist poetics” (in David Scott’s terms) prevalent in nineteenth-century French culture and literature, with its exceptional intensity of interarts relations. In privileging foreignizing choices, translation theory followed the same trend as painting or travel writing: departing from the classical ideal of domestication, local color, the picturesque, and the exotic were prized, all in the name of visual effects. When translating Poe’s notoriously untranslatable poems, specifically “The Bells” and “The Raven”, this study argues, Mallarmé’s foreignizing choice of a prose translation (with the consequent and inevitable forsaking of Poe’s quintessential musicality) required the transposition of musical effects into visual ones: thus the translation of Poe’s poetry was shaped by a theoretical model analogous to Jakobson’s “intersemiotic translation”. This strategy was best exemplified by the joint Lesclide edition of “Le Corbeau” illustrated by Edouard Manet (1875), where the translation was complemented and indeed completed by the illustrations. Revisiting some well-studied questions (pertaining to translation theory and to pictorialist poetics) the present essay situates Mallarmé’s translations at their point of convergence, and shows that these translations are best understood when framed by the debate on artistic transposition. In turn, this helps account for the high degree of self-representation observable in both text and images: this search for self through another’s text or another’s artistic medium, it is suggested, rests on a profoundly Mallarméan mechanism of failure-and-transposition.