Translation and Transmission: Modern Poetry and Transatlantic Connection

Ignacio Infante’s After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic offers five case studies of poet-critics working in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese to demonstrate the need for a multilingual approach to studying modern poetry. He argues that modern poetics did not develop in a unilingual or strictly national context. Both within and outside of the Anglo-American canon, many poets worked and wrote in multiple languages, translating, reimagining, and fusing diverse poetic traditions and forms for multiple audiences. By looking to individual poets’ transnational travel and affiliations, multilingual practices, and transhistorical influences, After Translation demonstrates that the poetic forms associated with Anglo-American modernism overlap with or run closely parallel to similar forms beyond geographic or linguistic categories.