Papers by Anna Saroldi
Encounters in Translation, 2026
https://publications-prairial.fr/encounters-in-translation/index.php?id=1637
This article discus... more https://publications-prairial.fr/encounters-in-translation/index.php?id=1637
This article discusses the role of actress and playwright Franca Rame (1929-2013) in the international success of her creative partnership with Dario Fo, particularly when it comes to on- and off-stage translations of their theatrical production. Despite recent scholarly publications on the artistic legacy of the couple, the details of how Rame and Fo’s works were translated and received outside Italy have so far remained underexamined. The article argues that Rame and Fo’s performances abroad were key to their international success, focusing in particular on their American tour of 1986. It demonstrates that Rame, often overshadowed by Fo, was the true agent of translation of the couple’s works. The discussion also brings forward Rame’s pioneering use of theatre surtitles, through the analysis of archived documents and tapes, opening to new avenues of research on Rame’s own career as a translation practitioner. Rame’s translation techniques and tendencies will be exemplified, comparing her on-stage strategies to selected instances from the published translation of her and Fo’s works.
The Italianist, 2024
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02614340.2024.2435229#abstract
The Italianist
Vol... more https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02614340.2024.2435229#abstract
The Italianist
Volume 44, 2024 - Issue 2: Narratives Beyond the Self: Relationality in Contemporary Italian Literature
This article examines Michela Murgia’s influence, within the Italian cultural and literary field, on the reception of the Catalan theologian and activist Teresa Forcades i Vila. Employing an agent-oriented methodology in the context of feminist translation studies, the article explores how Forcades i Vila’s theology disrupts binary norms, emphasizing queerness and uniqueness, while also focusing on the Trinity’s relationality. The study introduces Forcades i Vila’s work and her Italian translations published by Castelvecchi, highlighting the contribution by the editor Cristina Guarnieri. It argues that Murgia’s God Save the Queer was influenced by Forcades i Vila’s thought, particularly in its recentring of the Trinity and in its adoption of a queer perspective in the context of Catholic feminist theology.
Ticontre , 2022
https://teseo.unitn.it/ticontre/article/view/2261
This article presents a previously unknown tr... more https://teseo.unitn.it/ticontre/article/view/2261
This article presents a previously unknown translation by Vittorio Sereni of Charles Tomlinson’s Up at La Serra. The text will be analysed and discussed with reference to recent critical debates on retranslation. The (re)discovery enriches our understanding of Sereni, a key poet of Italian twentieth-century writing, and furthermore offers new theoretical reflections regarding the Italian reception of Charles Tomlinson. The article ends by considering the importance of archival materials within the context of the retranslation debate.
Nouveaux Cahiers de Marge, 6, 2022
https://publications-prairial.fr/marge/index.php?id=547 Dialogical and temporal metaphors can be ... more https://publications-prairial.fr/marge/index.php?id=547 Dialogical and temporal metaphors can be successfully adopted to describe and understand a writer’s approach to inter-linguistic dynamics and translation practices. This article investigates the understanding that poets Jacqueline Risset and Peter Robinson have of their self-translations into Italian, and how this is reflected in their works. The dialogue between their criticism and poetical practice is embodied in their self-translations, which follow two different models. In Robinson’s work languages are clearly distinct; they constitute two different systems separated by firm boundaries, whereas for Risset, Italian and French maintain a fluid dialogue, where the self-translation becomes a continuation of the poem.
Les métaphores dialogiques et temporelles peuvent être un excellent point de départ pour décrire et comprendre l’approche des dynamiques interlinguistiques et la pratique traductive d’un écrivain. Cet article examine la compréhension que les poètes Jacqueline Risset et Peter Robinson ont de leurs autotraductions en italien, et comment cela se reflète dans leur travail. Le dialogue entre leur critique et leur pratique poétique s’incarne dans ces autotraductions, qui constituent deux modèles différents. Chez Robinson, les langues sont nettement distinctes ; elles forment deux systèmes différents séparés par des frontières fermes, tandis que chez Risset l’italien et le français entretiennent un dialogue fluide, où l’autotraduction se fait continuation du poème.
Book Chapters by Anna Saroldi
I GESTI DEL MESTIERE Traduzione e autotraduzione tra Italia e Francia dal XIX al XXI secolo, 2021
https://www.padovauniversitypress.it/system/files/attachments_field/9788869382772.pdf
Dalla se... more https://www.padovauniversitypress.it/system/files/attachments_field/9788869382772.pdf
Dalla seconda metà del Novecento, l’interesse scientifico attorno ai temi della traduzione non ha mai smesso di svilupparsi. Non solo per quegli aspetti che riguardano la traduzione come “genere” e quindi per le sue implicazioni prettamente letterarie, ma anche e soprattutto per i suoi connotati più ampiamente sociologici e culturali. Si è quindi sviluppato un crescente interesse per il ‘transfer letterario’ inteso come tentativo critico di reinterpretare la storia letteraria in una prospettiva transnazionale, di cui la traduzione è in tutti i suoi aspetti una privilegiata cartina al tornasole. È in questo contesto che si inserisce il presente volume, maturato all’interno del progetto di ricerca TRALYT. Translation and Lyrical Tradition between Italy and France (19th-21st Century), che raccoglie gli interventi di giovani studiose e studiosi sui temi della traduzione e dell’autotraduzione tra Italia e Francia dall’Ottocento ai giorni nostri. Con un approccio transdisciplinare, che spazia dalla teoria della traduzione all’analisi stilistica, dalla lettura delle dinamiche del mercato editoriale alla fenomenologia socio-culturale della traduzione, il volume ricostruisce la fitta rete degli scambi culturali tra Italia e Francia negli ultimi due secoli, adottando come prospettiva di studio privilegiata appunto quello della traduzione (e dell’autotraduzione) di testi poetici.
Peter Robinson: A Portrait of His Work, ed. by Tom Phillips, 2021
A note on referencing References to frequently cited works by Peter Robinson use the abbreviation... more A note on referencing References to frequently cited works by Peter Robinson use the abbreviations given below together with the relevant page numbers. All other works cited are referenced in full in the footnotes. Where poems don't appear in the Collected Poems or the reference is to an earlier version of a poem which is substantially different to the version in CP, the reference is given to its original publication.
Talks by Anna Saroldi
A Mountain of Pages: British Women Translators of World Mountain Literature
TransAlpine: The Women of Mountain Writing
Conference talks by Anna Saroldi
Paper for the conference "‘Il mondo deve sapere’: Reading Michela Murgia"
University of Oxford-University of Warwick
PG SIS Colloquium
Scientific and Technological Imag... more University of Oxford-University of Warwick
PG SIS Colloquium
Scientific and Technological Imaginaries in Italian Literature and Culture
Taylorian Institution Library, Oxford
Franca Rame: Actress, Activist, Archivist
Journée d’étude internationale
One-day International Conference
Les Femmes dans les archives li... more Journée d’étude internationale
One-day International Conference
Les Femmes dans les archives littéraires et éditoriales :
traduire au XXe siècle et au début du XXIe siècle
Translators’ archives: a gendered approach
Université Bordeaux Montaigne
History and Translation: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
25-28 May 2022
University of Tallinn
... more History and Translation: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
25-28 May 2022
University of Tallinn
As highlighted by recent publications (Hersant, Cordingley, Meta 2021), translators’ archives constitute a rare, extremely precious resource for scholars of translation history, genetic translation studies, translator studies, and the sociology of translation. While the richest translator’s archives are well known among scholars of the field (such as the Lilly Library, Harry Ransom Center, and the IMEC/ Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives), they are clearly not the only places where such important material can be found.
This paper deals with the methodological challenges facing the researcher in translation studies who is working on writers whose papers are privately available but not (yet) fully catalogued and organised. I will first focus on archives as material spaces (Guzmán 2020), on the very challenge of locating and working with previously unknown ones, considering the archive itself as object of research. Adopting a descriptive approach, I will focus on the case studies derived from my own research of the papers of three contemporary translators, Jacqueline Risset, Peter Robinson, and Charles Tomlinson.
In the first part, I will outline the research trajectory that the researcher can follow to find previously unknown and/or uncatalogued papers (such as translation drafts and private correspondence) and get access to them. I will then move to discuss the methodological challenges and necessary etiquette of working in a previously unknown fond, the ethical considerations of working closely with the relatives and at the authors’ home, the precious help of oral history methods, as well as the challenges of referencing uncatalogued material, still preserved in the conditions in which the author or their relatives left it – potentially working under their very eyes. This kind of research, despite its many difficulties, can lead to surprising discoveries, such as locating manuscripts that were considered lost, identifying authorial drafts, and working in the very same environment in which the translator worked, while often also gaining access to their library.
International Workshop
Gender, Networks and Collaboration
Across Cultures and History
6 May ... more International Workshop
Gender, Networks and Collaboration
Across Cultures and History
6 May 2022
This paper will draw attention to parallels between collaboration practices in literary translation and mountaineering.
I will focus on two British mountaineers and translators, Nea Barnard Morin (1906–1986) and Janet Buchanan Adam Smith (1905–1999). Together, they collaboratively translated four works of mountaineering non-fiction from French and Italian. I will argue that they played an active role as agents of both the literary and mountaineering fields, reclaiming their belonging to a genealogy of female literary agents and mountaineers. I will discuss their memoirs, recollecting their impressive alpine curricula, emphasising Morin’s active advocacy of the cordée feminine (climbing with roped parties of only women). By highlighting key passages related to gender in the source texts, I will look at how Morin and Adam Smith rendered them into English, to see how they negotiate the gender norms of mountaineering nonfiction. Finally, I argue that there is a parallel between their collaborative translation and all-female climbing.
My paper intends to explore the role of Louise Labé (c. 1516-1566) as renovator and new interpret... more My paper intends to explore the role of Louise Labé (c. 1516-1566) as renovator and new interpreter of
Italian lyric tradition. I will focus in particular on the first sonnet of her Evvrez, centred on the myth of
Ulysses.
As most of male-authored lyric poetry, Labé’s work deals with the absence of the lover.
Nonetheless, her poetry is far from being a repetition of male tradition. By deciding to write the first
sonnet of her collection in Italian, she is choosing the language of a specific man: Petrarch. According
to Brugnolo, her choice of Italian is “strutturale”: it is intended to show that the sonnet is the first of a
canzoniere. But her touch on the shape is evident: the sonnet has an Italian rhyme scheme, but not one
featured in Petrarch, her syntax is ‘spigolosa’ (Brugnolo), her canzoniere is made of twenty-four
sonnets. The Petrarchan example is accepted and violated at the same time: Italian language is a way to
make the debt explicit, but this does not stop Labé from reinterpreting it. Labé is not Penelope waiting
for her man, but rather the cunning Ulysses, a parallel rare in the poetry of the time, and particularly
unexpected for a woman. My claim is that the Italian sonnet is not merely an empty homage to Petrarch
(as many French critics have said), but the key to a coherent reading of the entire cycle based on the
concept of μῆτις (as described by Detienne and Vernant).
Finally, I will discuss the style and thematic patterns of the first sonnet in relation to the Evvrez,
in order to examine the female ‘difference’ (Jones, Lesko Baker, Sieburth) of Labé’s poetry, as a
counterargument to Huchon’s thesis, according to which Labé is but a nom de plume for a circle of
male authors.
Across Languages: Translingualism in Contemporary Women's Writing, London 30-31 May 2019
My p... more Across Languages: Translingualism in Contemporary Women's Writing, London 30-31 May 2019
My paper focuses on trilingual poets Jorie Graham (1950) and Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996).
Graham was raised in Rome, wrote her first poetry in French, and moved to the US in her twenties,
enrolling at the NYU film program, as she did not feel confident enough of her English and
preferred to use images. Vendler affirmed that ‘these biographical facts [...] help to account for
certain technical aspects of her poetry – its cinematic strategies’ (The Given and the Made).
Rosselli, who had an Italian father, an English mother, and grew up in France as a political refugee,
is also known for a characteristic use of montage in her poems: in Impromptu ‘shot relationship are
as the equivalent of syntactic ones’ (Annovi).
These features suggest that the struggle with language creates a ‘different’ form, as
acknowledged by critics and evident to any reader of their poetry. I will examine how cinematic
techniques can be a support to this inappropriateness, dealing with inadequacy by juxtaposing
images and cutting the most explicative parts of poems. Also, I will explore how the feeling of
extraneousness pushes both writers to an estranging and hallucinated reflection on language and on
its minimal components.
While Rosselli’s reputation for difficult and unintelligible poetry is commonly linked to her
trilingualism, Graham’s is not: I intend to discuss to what extent her style is not simply the result of
a deeply philosophical poetry, neither it is ‘deliberately intended to frustrate the reader’ (Kirsch),
but rather it could be connected to a sense of un-belonging to English.
B/LATENT, REVISIONS OF THE OBVIOUS. Cambridge French Graduate Conference, Trinity College, 26-27 ... more B/LATENT, REVISIONS OF THE OBVIOUS. Cambridge French Graduate Conference, Trinity College, 26-27 April 2018
My paper will focus on the poetry collection Jeu (1971) by the Tel Quel member and poet
Jacqueline Risset (1936-2014). Josanne Duranteau said about this collection: ‘Jacqueline Risset se
moque de notre naïveté grossière. Son livre est une boîte à lettres qui ne contient aucune lettre, mais
qui détient sa propre clef’.
Risset’s Jeu is shamelessly hiding nothing from the reader. The purpose of the text is to show the
process of thought in the making. Risset challenges her readers to accept the surprising immediacy
of her work: there is no difference between form and content, the object of the poem is the poem
itself. But there is something disseminated through the text that has to be collected: the rules of the
game. Also, the appearance of the poem matters: the shape of the poem, spaces, and punctuation,
count.
In my paper, I will discuss to what extent the central question that the reader of Jeu must face is not
‘what does it mean?’, but instead ‘how does it work?’, and I will analyse how Risset reinvents the
tradition of the game in literature and deals with the influence of Mallarmé and Wittgenstein. My
aim is to explore Risset’s method of challenging the traditional quest for meaning by building a text
that has no centre, no clear structure, no topic, no targeted ideology. The meaning is not yet there -
it will be the reader who, through his collaboration, will create many.
Events Convened by Anna Saroldi
Translation archives: discovery, engagement, presentation.
History and Translation: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
25-28 May 2022
University of Tallinn
ORG... more History and Translation: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
25-28 May 2022
University of Tallinn
ORGANISERS
Nadia Georgiou
Anna Saroldi
ABSTRACT
The panel aims to explore some of the methodological issues frequently encountered but less frequently discussed when Translation History scholars design, plan, conduct and report the findings of their archival research. This is achieved by following one of the more standard trajectories of archival research: first by seeking and discovering the archival material, then by engaging with it, and finally by presenting it in a form that may be accurate, informative, and thought-provoking. The first paper of the panel discusses some of the challenges and limitations of finding translator archives and accessing them, and will gather suggestions, in the form of useful metadata, for the creation of a search tool to aid Translation as well as other interested scholars in their searches. The second paper of the panel addresses issues of discovering and then engaging with un-edited and un-archived material, while discussing the ethical and practical aspects of such discoveries. The third paper discusses issues of working with diasporic archives or mitigating contexts of diminishing scholarly access to archives. The final paper explores potential avenues for visualising archival data, such as in the form of graphs, maps, and timelines, and how such visualisations may help reconceptualise translation history.
Book Reviews by Anna Saroldi
Alta quota, dal basso: Controstoria dell’alpinismo
La balena bianca , 2025
Publishing Contemporary Foreign Poetry: Transnational Exchange in the Italian Publishing Field, MILA MILANI
Modern Language Review , 2025
https://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Modern-Language-Review-120-3
Uploads
Papers by Anna Saroldi
This article discusses the role of actress and playwright Franca Rame (1929-2013) in the international success of her creative partnership with Dario Fo, particularly when it comes to on- and off-stage translations of their theatrical production. Despite recent scholarly publications on the artistic legacy of the couple, the details of how Rame and Fo’s works were translated and received outside Italy have so far remained underexamined. The article argues that Rame and Fo’s performances abroad were key to their international success, focusing in particular on their American tour of 1986. It demonstrates that Rame, often overshadowed by Fo, was the true agent of translation of the couple’s works. The discussion also brings forward Rame’s pioneering use of theatre surtitles, through the analysis of archived documents and tapes, opening to new avenues of research on Rame’s own career as a translation practitioner. Rame’s translation techniques and tendencies will be exemplified, comparing her on-stage strategies to selected instances from the published translation of her and Fo’s works.
The Italianist
Volume 44, 2024 - Issue 2: Narratives Beyond the Self: Relationality in Contemporary Italian Literature
This article examines Michela Murgia’s influence, within the Italian cultural and literary field, on the reception of the Catalan theologian and activist Teresa Forcades i Vila. Employing an agent-oriented methodology in the context of feminist translation studies, the article explores how Forcades i Vila’s theology disrupts binary norms, emphasizing queerness and uniqueness, while also focusing on the Trinity’s relationality. The study introduces Forcades i Vila’s work and her Italian translations published by Castelvecchi, highlighting the contribution by the editor Cristina Guarnieri. It argues that Murgia’s God Save the Queer was influenced by Forcades i Vila’s thought, particularly in its recentring of the Trinity and in its adoption of a queer perspective in the context of Catholic feminist theology.
This article presents a previously unknown translation by Vittorio Sereni of Charles Tomlinson’s Up at La Serra. The text will be analysed and discussed with reference to recent critical debates on retranslation. The (re)discovery enriches our understanding of Sereni, a key poet of Italian twentieth-century writing, and furthermore offers new theoretical reflections regarding the Italian reception of Charles Tomlinson. The article ends by considering the importance of archival materials within the context of the retranslation debate.
Les métaphores dialogiques et temporelles peuvent être un excellent point de départ pour décrire et comprendre l’approche des dynamiques interlinguistiques et la pratique traductive d’un écrivain. Cet article examine la compréhension que les poètes Jacqueline Risset et Peter Robinson ont de leurs autotraductions en italien, et comment cela se reflète dans leur travail. Le dialogue entre leur critique et leur pratique poétique s’incarne dans ces autotraductions, qui constituent deux modèles différents. Chez Robinson, les langues sont nettement distinctes ; elles forment deux systèmes différents séparés par des frontières fermes, tandis que chez Risset l’italien et le français entretiennent un dialogue fluide, où l’autotraduction se fait continuation du poème.
Book Chapters by Anna Saroldi
Dalla seconda metà del Novecento, l’interesse scientifico attorno ai temi della traduzione non ha mai smesso di svilupparsi. Non solo per quegli aspetti che riguardano la traduzione come “genere” e quindi per le sue implicazioni prettamente letterarie, ma anche e soprattutto per i suoi connotati più ampiamente sociologici e culturali. Si è quindi sviluppato un crescente interesse per il ‘transfer letterario’ inteso come tentativo critico di reinterpretare la storia letteraria in una prospettiva transnazionale, di cui la traduzione è in tutti i suoi aspetti una privilegiata cartina al tornasole. È in questo contesto che si inserisce il presente volume, maturato all’interno del progetto di ricerca TRALYT. Translation and Lyrical Tradition between Italy and France (19th-21st Century), che raccoglie gli interventi di giovani studiose e studiosi sui temi della traduzione e dell’autotraduzione tra Italia e Francia dall’Ottocento ai giorni nostri. Con un approccio transdisciplinare, che spazia dalla teoria della traduzione all’analisi stilistica, dalla lettura delle dinamiche del mercato editoriale alla fenomenologia socio-culturale della traduzione, il volume ricostruisce la fitta rete degli scambi culturali tra Italia e Francia negli ultimi due secoli, adottando come prospettiva di studio privilegiata appunto quello della traduzione (e dell’autotraduzione) di testi poetici.
Talks by Anna Saroldi
https://www.sorbonne-nouvelle.fr/activites-scientifiques-tract-69438.kjsp
6 March 2025
https://www.gla.ac.uk/events/listings/index.html/event/14003
Conference talks by Anna Saroldi
PG SIS Colloquium
Scientific and Technological Imaginaries in Italian Literature and Culture
Taylorian Institution Library, Oxford
One-day International Conference
Les Femmes dans les archives littéraires et éditoriales :
traduire au XXe siècle et au début du XXIe siècle
Translators’ archives: a gendered approach
Université Bordeaux Montaigne
25-28 May 2022
University of Tallinn
As highlighted by recent publications (Hersant, Cordingley, Meta 2021), translators’ archives constitute a rare, extremely precious resource for scholars of translation history, genetic translation studies, translator studies, and the sociology of translation. While the richest translator’s archives are well known among scholars of the field (such as the Lilly Library, Harry Ransom Center, and the IMEC/ Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives), they are clearly not the only places where such important material can be found.
This paper deals with the methodological challenges facing the researcher in translation studies who is working on writers whose papers are privately available but not (yet) fully catalogued and organised. I will first focus on archives as material spaces (Guzmán 2020), on the very challenge of locating and working with previously unknown ones, considering the archive itself as object of research. Adopting a descriptive approach, I will focus on the case studies derived from my own research of the papers of three contemporary translators, Jacqueline Risset, Peter Robinson, and Charles Tomlinson.
In the first part, I will outline the research trajectory that the researcher can follow to find previously unknown and/or uncatalogued papers (such as translation drafts and private correspondence) and get access to them. I will then move to discuss the methodological challenges and necessary etiquette of working in a previously unknown fond, the ethical considerations of working closely with the relatives and at the authors’ home, the precious help of oral history methods, as well as the challenges of referencing uncatalogued material, still preserved in the conditions in which the author or their relatives left it – potentially working under their very eyes. This kind of research, despite its many difficulties, can lead to surprising discoveries, such as locating manuscripts that were considered lost, identifying authorial drafts, and working in the very same environment in which the translator worked, while often also gaining access to their library.
Gender, Networks and Collaboration
Across Cultures and History
6 May 2022
This paper will draw attention to parallels between collaboration practices in literary translation and mountaineering.
I will focus on two British mountaineers and translators, Nea Barnard Morin (1906–1986) and Janet Buchanan Adam Smith (1905–1999). Together, they collaboratively translated four works of mountaineering non-fiction from French and Italian. I will argue that they played an active role as agents of both the literary and mountaineering fields, reclaiming their belonging to a genealogy of female literary agents and mountaineers. I will discuss their memoirs, recollecting their impressive alpine curricula, emphasising Morin’s active advocacy of the cordée feminine (climbing with roped parties of only women). By highlighting key passages related to gender in the source texts, I will look at how Morin and Adam Smith rendered them into English, to see how they negotiate the gender norms of mountaineering nonfiction. Finally, I argue that there is a parallel between their collaborative translation and all-female climbing.
Italian lyric tradition. I will focus in particular on the first sonnet of her Evvrez, centred on the myth of
Ulysses.
As most of male-authored lyric poetry, Labé’s work deals with the absence of the lover.
Nonetheless, her poetry is far from being a repetition of male tradition. By deciding to write the first
sonnet of her collection in Italian, she is choosing the language of a specific man: Petrarch. According
to Brugnolo, her choice of Italian is “strutturale”: it is intended to show that the sonnet is the first of a
canzoniere. But her touch on the shape is evident: the sonnet has an Italian rhyme scheme, but not one
featured in Petrarch, her syntax is ‘spigolosa’ (Brugnolo), her canzoniere is made of twenty-four
sonnets. The Petrarchan example is accepted and violated at the same time: Italian language is a way to
make the debt explicit, but this does not stop Labé from reinterpreting it. Labé is not Penelope waiting
for her man, but rather the cunning Ulysses, a parallel rare in the poetry of the time, and particularly
unexpected for a woman. My claim is that the Italian sonnet is not merely an empty homage to Petrarch
(as many French critics have said), but the key to a coherent reading of the entire cycle based on the
concept of μῆτις (as described by Detienne and Vernant).
Finally, I will discuss the style and thematic patterns of the first sonnet in relation to the Evvrez,
in order to examine the female ‘difference’ (Jones, Lesko Baker, Sieburth) of Labé’s poetry, as a
counterargument to Huchon’s thesis, according to which Labé is but a nom de plume for a circle of
male authors.
My paper focuses on trilingual poets Jorie Graham (1950) and Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996).
Graham was raised in Rome, wrote her first poetry in French, and moved to the US in her twenties,
enrolling at the NYU film program, as she did not feel confident enough of her English and
preferred to use images. Vendler affirmed that ‘these biographical facts [...] help to account for
certain technical aspects of her poetry – its cinematic strategies’ (The Given and the Made).
Rosselli, who had an Italian father, an English mother, and grew up in France as a political refugee,
is also known for a characteristic use of montage in her poems: in Impromptu ‘shot relationship are
as the equivalent of syntactic ones’ (Annovi).
These features suggest that the struggle with language creates a ‘different’ form, as
acknowledged by critics and evident to any reader of their poetry. I will examine how cinematic
techniques can be a support to this inappropriateness, dealing with inadequacy by juxtaposing
images and cutting the most explicative parts of poems. Also, I will explore how the feeling of
extraneousness pushes both writers to an estranging and hallucinated reflection on language and on
its minimal components.
While Rosselli’s reputation for difficult and unintelligible poetry is commonly linked to her
trilingualism, Graham’s is not: I intend to discuss to what extent her style is not simply the result of
a deeply philosophical poetry, neither it is ‘deliberately intended to frustrate the reader’ (Kirsch),
but rather it could be connected to a sense of un-belonging to English.
My paper will focus on the poetry collection Jeu (1971) by the Tel Quel member and poet
Jacqueline Risset (1936-2014). Josanne Duranteau said about this collection: ‘Jacqueline Risset se
moque de notre naïveté grossière. Son livre est une boîte à lettres qui ne contient aucune lettre, mais
qui détient sa propre clef’.
Risset’s Jeu is shamelessly hiding nothing from the reader. The purpose of the text is to show the
process of thought in the making. Risset challenges her readers to accept the surprising immediacy
of her work: there is no difference between form and content, the object of the poem is the poem
itself. But there is something disseminated through the text that has to be collected: the rules of the
game. Also, the appearance of the poem matters: the shape of the poem, spaces, and punctuation,
count.
In my paper, I will discuss to what extent the central question that the reader of Jeu must face is not
‘what does it mean?’, but instead ‘how does it work?’, and I will analyse how Risset reinvents the
tradition of the game in literature and deals with the influence of Mallarmé and Wittgenstein. My
aim is to explore Risset’s method of challenging the traditional quest for meaning by building a text
that has no centre, no clear structure, no topic, no targeted ideology. The meaning is not yet there -
it will be the reader who, through his collaboration, will create many.
Events Convened by Anna Saroldi
25-28 May 2022
University of Tallinn
ORGANISERS
Nadia Georgiou
Anna Saroldi
ABSTRACT
The panel aims to explore some of the methodological issues frequently encountered but less frequently discussed when Translation History scholars design, plan, conduct and report the findings of their archival research. This is achieved by following one of the more standard trajectories of archival research: first by seeking and discovering the archival material, then by engaging with it, and finally by presenting it in a form that may be accurate, informative, and thought-provoking. The first paper of the panel discusses some of the challenges and limitations of finding translator archives and accessing them, and will gather suggestions, in the form of useful metadata, for the creation of a search tool to aid Translation as well as other interested scholars in their searches. The second paper of the panel addresses issues of discovering and then engaging with un-edited and un-archived material, while discussing the ethical and practical aspects of such discoveries. The third paper discusses issues of working with diasporic archives or mitigating contexts of diminishing scholarly access to archives. The final paper explores potential avenues for visualising archival data, such as in the form of graphs, maps, and timelines, and how such visualisations may help reconceptualise translation history.
Book Reviews by Anna Saroldi
recensione di Andrea Zannini, Controstoria dell’alpinismo, Roma-Bari, Laterza 2024, € 18, 208 pp.