Abstract

Abstract:

This article explores the ways the perception of Beat writers in France was influenced by the translations produced from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s by Mary Beach and Claude Pélieu. It combines an editorial history of Beat translation in France with a close textual reading of Beach and Pélieu’s 1967 version of Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish. This study points to an innovative albeit idiosyncratic approach, heavily influenced by Pélieu’s own poetics. An analysis of this first effort alongside Ginsberg’s later revisions to the French text further reveals divergent literary projects that crystallize within in the cultural transfer implied by the translation.

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