Parmi les motifs récurrents liés à la problématique de la traduction de la poésie demeure celui de son impossibilité. Pourtant, l'histoire de la poésie occidentale est intimement liée à celle de la pratique traduisante au point où il serait aisé de reconnaître à l'activité poétique un penchant intrinsèque au traduire, comme si poésie et traduction allaient de pair, comme si composer un poème était toujours déjà traduire-adapter une forme linguistique et littéraire préalablement existant et appelant à sa transposition et par celle-ci à son renouvellement 1. La traduction d'un poème est toujours un événement parce que si la traduction de la poésie est considérée comme impossible, elle est toutefois absolument nécessaire2. Ici nous étudions ce qui lie la traduction de la poésie à la création littéraire en lisant-écrivant l’une des figures emblématiques de poètes traducteurs : Ezra Pound3.

The Two Tone movement appeared in the wake of punk in the late 1970s and was based on the commercial success of The Specials and other ska revival bands such as Madness, The Selector and The Beat. It quickly became a mass movement, one of the fundamental particularities of which was its multiracial nature as it attracted young black people of Caribbean origin and white youngsters. There has consequently been a tendency to celebrate Two Tone and to see it as the culmination of the anti-racist struggles of Rock Against Racism. Twenty years later the Asian Underground scene appeared, as British Asian artists ranging from Asian Dub Foundation to Nitin Sawnhy came to the fore. Comparing the two movements and the contexts in which they emerged allows the dominant vision of Two Tone to be challenged and suggests that Asian Underground developed, at least partly, as a reaction to the limited nature of Two Tone’s appeal to all ethnic minorities.

This article considers Kano’s 2016 album Made in the Manor as a reflection on the ways in which grime challenged the white, Anglocentric tradition of post-war English pop and its narrow, exclusive representations of national identity. It looks at how Kano celebrates black music - both past and present - while self-consciously writing it into the popular cultural history of the UK as an evolving and powerful presence within the equally evolving nation.