Hybrid, Transgression, Echo: Translation as a Space of Play

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At the border between translation, creative writing and literary criticism, my project will explore the disciplines' shared recourse to writing practices that reimagine, recontextualise or subvert their source texts. Approaching experimental translation and its fictive depiction as a prism through which to pose wider philosophical and stylistic questions, I aim to showcasetranslation's plurivocal potential: less conduit than "space of play" (Berman, 1984).My critical project will explore ludic translation through thematic chapters. "Infinite Jest" will examine self-reflexive translations championing a procedural, plural idea of translation. "Translation as the 'third place to be'" will consider hybrid texts offering a "dual" reading experience lying beyond, or in the tension between, their parts. "Translation as catastrophe" will reflect on the ethics of (mis)translation, using Blanchot's view of the writing of disaster (1980) as an "impossible" but ethically imperative task. My creative project, "Nada", is an experimental translation seeking to uncover the aporia at the heart of "Nadja": Léona Delcourt, whose liaison with Breton inspired the autobiographical account. Many critics have noted the "psychic vampirism" involved in Breton's assimilation of Nadja/Léona's words and drawings-the author rejecting this wandering soul embodying surrealism as mad: a fate echoing Delcourt's. A hybrid work in Carson's vein, "Nada" will chart my research into Delcourt's life, and translation of the second edition of "Nadja", never available in English. Here, decades on, reinforcing his elision of Léona, Breton erased the book's only love scene. Part experimental translation, part meditation on translatorial ethics, "Nada" will deploy multiple forms of writing to speak beyond "Nadja", re-sounding Delcourt's voice.