Currently and emotion: activism and affect in contemporary poetry translation

The use of •emotion' (in lieu of'subjectivity', ‘identity' or any number of associated terms) is intended to underline the advocacy, throughout this study, of epistemologies that embrace affective response and the promotion of sharing, trust, responsibility, bodies and process over equivalent dominant values that include products, hierarchies and (ostensive) universality and impartiality.<br><br>Sited in the context of contemporary Anglophone poetry, this thesis aims to examine and subvert dominant perceptions of literary translation as rule-governed and uniquely interlingual, arguing that such a perception reduces our understanding of the process of translation and so too of representation.

Adopting Roman Jakobson's three categories of translation - intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic - as a guiding conceptual and organisational principle, this thesis joins a creative component, an anthology of contemporary poetry translations, with a complementary critical component that seeks to name and propagate activist strategies of translation.<br><br>Beginning with intersemiotic translation, the first of this component's core chapters, ’§ Ekphrasis: "an ethics of seeing"', considers how the conventional ekphrastic dynamic, as informed by sexist formulations of Michel Foucault’s gaze, might be subverted through engagement with alternative strategies, source materials and contexts of reception.