dix-neuf, Vol. 19 No.

3, November 2015, 285–302

Translating the Nineteenth Century:

A Poetics of Eco-Translation
Clive Scott
University of East Anglia, UK

What should we understand by eco-translation, in the translation of nine-

teenth-century French verse? Not the translation of texts that ecocriticism
might deem to be eco-texts. Rather the translation of any text into eco-
consciousness. This process concerns three aspects of the poetic text: the
environment in which the poem locates its subject; the text’s very textuality
understood as a linguistic environment inhabited by the reader; and the
immediate environment of the act of reading itself. The attempt to capture
these three aspects in translation is rendered difficult by language’s own
obstructiveness, and requires the harnessing of a broader array of expres-
sive resources. The article explores this predicament, using translations of
Mallarmé’s ‘Mes bouquins refermés’ and Rimbaud’s ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’ to
make a case for translation’s ecomorphic versatility.

keywords  eco-translation, domestic ecology, textual ecology, psychogeogra-

phy, rhyme, rhythm, acoustics, tabularity, collage, doodling

Literary criticism submerges, makes invisible, the process of self-individuation that

reading is. Criticism deals in consensuality, in the acknowledgement of formal and
generic imperatives, the burden of shared understanding; even the cognitivists reduce
response to the common denominators of conceptual schemata and mental reflexes.
Reading is where we should come to live with ourselves as individuals and to re-
inaugurate our personal relationships with our varied environments. Translation
offers a perceptual posture towards a text that is very different from that of literary
criticism, and eco-translation fosters an eco-alternative to ecocriticism.
Eco-translation wishes a translation, not of interpretation, but of psycho-
physiological involvement. The two things are not always easy to put apart, but one
might say that the translation of interpretation accepts that it is a second-order cre-
ation, a metadiscourse, while the translation of psycho-physiological involvement pro-
poses that that involvement can only be achieved if translation is a first-order creation,
a reformulation of the source text (ST) which enlarges or extends or relocates its
activity by enacting the existential and multisensory response of the reading subject.

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2015 DOI 10.1179/1478731815Z.00000000083

286 CLIVe SCOTT

In other words, reading/translation not only makes manifest the ecology latent in the
ST but also heightens ecological consciousness in the reader, and generates further
ecologies out of the textual material itself. I have always been troubled by the inter-
pretative and extrapolative nature of ecocriticism, as indeed of many other kinds of
criticism. What was Leconte de Lisle’s true attitude to elephants? Where exactly does
Lautréamont stand in relation to post-Darwinian thinking? I am troubled, too, by the
dislocative strategy that these historical enquiries seem to entail: the writer is a body
operating within, but separated from, the environment, by virtue of the capacity for
thought. The environment correspondingly becomes something monolithic, to which
one reacts, rather than in which one inescapably participates. The act of criticism
is itself a withdrawal; interpretation is a moving outside, a termination of contact,
a replacement of contact by representation and construction;1 but properly readerly
interaction never comes to an end. What alternative, then, should we propose? That
reading is in itself an ecological activity, is living-in-an-environment, where environ-
ment is to be understood as the continuous texturing of the life-dynamic and thus
something which fully incorporates ecologies of all kinds, and of all kinds of percep-
tual/conceptual contact: the ecology of the read text incorporates, modulates with, the
ecology of the quotidian; our perceptual relationship with the read text includes all
degrees of distance and proximity, and their fluctuations, all multiplications of con-
sciousness. Translation, for its part, has the task of intensively cultivating ecological
consciousness; a translational language needs to be invented that will function, like
the tools of the hunter-gatherer, as a prosthetic activity, facilitating ecological contacts
and synergies with the ST. Translation is an ecological enterprise in three senses: in
the sense that translation is the way in which we feel our way into the environment
embodied in the ST; in the sense that the text of the ST itself, in its very textuality, is
an environment of which reading is the act of inhabitation; and in the sense that the
text is a material object in the environment of reading.
These three senses require that we cast language in three different guises: as that
through which the environment expresses itself and through which we conduct an
interlocutory synergy; as itself an ecology, an environmental medium, in which we
achieve new forms of perceptual consciousness and experience; and as a constituent
of environment with whose other constituents it symbiotically and fruitfully interacts.
But language, in its habitual use and reception, is itself resistant to these roles. I have
elsewhere argued (Scott, 2011: 42–45) that our very alphabet cuts us off from the
world, is inherently anti-environmental, and that for a variety of reasons: it makes no
room for improvisation, it has little suggestive capacity either acoustically or graphi-
cally, it has habituated us to a narrow range of musics all connected with repetition
(rhyme, alliteration, assonance), it conventionalizes imitative sounds (onomatopoeia),
it has established no relationship with the paralinguistic. We badly need to extend
language’s expressive range by developing new kinds of linguistic notation — through
punctuation, typefaces, fonts, diacritical marks, spacing, textual disposition (already
essayed by Futurism and Lettrism) — and new kinds of enunciatory flexibility, which
translation, conceived experimentally, might help us to do. Another solution that sug-
gests itself is the re-thinking of onomatopoeia. Such a re-thinking has three ambitions:
that we learn to hear all linguistic phenomena as onomatopoeic (that is to say, the
projection even of the non-onomatopoeic as onomatopoeic); that we refine listening
 TRANSLATING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 287

such that the onomatopoeic is experienced not as an imitation, but as a relation-

ship of empathy, the ability to immerse oneself in the phenomenon, or action, which
brings the acoustic event into existence; that we do not confine onomatopoeia solely
to acoustic events, but extend it to the other senses, and thus facilitate experiences
of synaesthesia. We have hitherto found it extremely difficult to think of translation
as an ambition of the ST, as something which, by its very nature, necessitates a re-
disposition and re-sensitization of the ST. Eco-writing, eco-translation, ecocriticism
even, urgently need to imagine themselves as necessitating a revolution in the practice
and perception of language. In this way, we might revive Futurism’s attempt to align
human discourse with the non-human world and to cultivate intuitional contacts with
organic and inorganic matter.
To these remarks I should add that I have elsewhere also canvassed the incorpo-
ration of handwriting and doodling into translational practice, as a means of put-
ting ourselves, as readers and translators, at our own disposal as completely as we
can, as multisensorily as we can, so that we can act, scriptorially, as spontaneously
and improvisationally as we would wish, can act in the here and now of gestures
of the hand, can activate the unconscious in the hand, can capture the calligraphic
performance of the paralanguage of our own voice. Politically, this dissolution by
handwriting of the alphabetic into the calligraphic and graphic is an act of creoliza-
tion, the creative deflection (détournement) of colonizing and patriarchal language,
the reclamation of a space of indigenous individualism, which print had hoped to sup-
press. If print seeks to cast the writing subject as an object, as someone acculturated
and made intelligible by a certain system of discourse, the handwritten is like an act
of civil disobedience, a radical re-drafting of the status quo. Finally, eco-translation,
like eco-writing, because it is an act of inhabitation, must, on the page and quite liter-
ally, negotiate its own Lebensraum. Paginal space, usually inert alongside the linear
printed word, its blanks the accidental outcome of printing conventions, must bestir
itself and become what it is as a particular typographical/topographical ecology, a
certain distribution and dynamization of language, a certain set of pathways, a psy-
chogeography, no longer a surface for the eye to skate across, but a tabular2 location
for the eye, the ear and the voice endlessly to explore and engage with.
I want to begin exploring these propositions with a translation of Mallarmé’s ‘Mes
bouquins refermés’:
Mes bouquins refermés sur le nom de Paphos,
Il m’amuse d’élire avec le seul génie
Une ruine, par mille écumes bénie
Sous l’hyacinthe, au loin, de ses jours triomphaux.

Coure le froid avec ses silences de faulx,

Je n’y hululerai pas de vide nénie
Si ce très blanc ébat au ras du sol dénie
À tout site l’honneur du paysage faux.

Ma faim qui d’aucuns fruits ici ne se régale

Trouve en leur docte manque une saveur égale:
Qu’un éclate de chair humain et parfumant!
288 CLIVe SCOTT

Le pied sur quelque guivre où notre amour tisonne,

Je pense plus longtemps peut-être éperdûment
À l’autre, au sein brûlé d’une antique amazone. (Mallarmé, 1998: 44–45)

As I have said, environment is not a single entity, but a compound of environments,

a multi-layered complex. The ‘outer’ environment of this poem is the domestic inte-
rior, the result of ever more marked lines of demarcation between public and private
spheres, a refuge from the politics of the street and its exertions of force (demonstrat-
ing, policing), a space for quietistic religious behaviours, for self-recollecting recreations
(reading, piano-playing, journal-writing), for a secretive eros. Here we might find devel-
oped new languages of furnishing, the nuanced expressivity of decor, a suddenly loaded
relationship with windows and the scenes they frame. ‘Mes bouquins refermés’ explores
two aspects of this domestic ecology: the book collection/study and the fireplace/hearth.
The book collection is an autobiography — of acquisitions, gifts, inscriptions, textual
encounters, an aide-mémoire of travels, visits, friendships; it is also a history of the
reader’s adventures in fantasy and illusion, and in self-discovery. The fireside is the site
of the familial, but also of recovered intimacies and errant reflection, the play of flames
enacting the fluctuating mutabilities of mind and imagination.
These two environments are intricately woven into the fabric of the verse. Mallarmé
is the master of the domestic sonnet; not that he cultivates only one form (see his
Shakespearean alternative), but this classic version of the Petrarchan — abba/abba/
ccd/ede — is hugely preferred. The rimes embrassées of its quatrains embody a with-
drawal into the domestic heartland, enclosed by protective walls and windows. The
withdrawal is both self-recuperative (first quatrain) and defensive (second quatrain):
‘Coure le froid avec ses silences de faulx’ is not just the wind-driven snow outside,
but any external force which tries to undermine the making of the interior, and which
the fabulating inner self must withstand. At the volta, we shift from the library/
study to the hearth and into a rhyme-scheme which has some of the characteristics
of a reversed Shakespearean sestet: an apophthegmatic couplet (cc) whose confident,
detached summary is shown to be inadequate to the narrative which follows — a pro-
gressive/recursive pattern of telling about and dwelling on (dede) — inadequate, that
is, both in intensity of feeling (docte > éperdûment), and temporal span (ici > plus
longtemps, antique amazone). If the couplet captures the security (self-satisfaction?)
of domestic abstemiousness, the rimes croisées tell of the tempting volatility of the
stirred flames. Looked at from a ternary-structured point of view (tercets), the sum-
mative space of self-denying contentment that the hearth-couplet is, generates and
lets loose a momentarily suspended act of optation (Qu’un éclate […] parfumant),
which summons to itself an answer (éperdûment) in the key of domestic disorder,
just about brought into equilibrium by the outflanking /ɔ n/ rhymes and the 3>3 of
c
the final hemistich. If the sonnet conjures up spaces of domestic retreat, daydream-
ing, intimacy, desire, then its structure moves from ‘rooms’ which are self-contained,
stable, and of closely related proportions (quatrains) to spaces caught in a dynamic,
redisposable relationship which can never be stabilized (tercets). We are left with a
foyer in which the wyvern can never quite be kept underfoot.
But rhythm, too, is the inhabitation of this domesticity because it is, partly, the
rhythm of that domesticity. One might argue that this poem is about the disruption of
a certain order of perception, that order being the 3>3>3>3 of its first line. The initial
 TRANSLATING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 289

act of closure is, of course, also an act of eruption: the name (‘Paphos’) lets a poem,
a sonnet, escape from a closed book. But this initial eruption cannot find its rhythmic
footing, partly because the dominant hemistich of the quatrains, after this first line,
is 4>2 (five instances), that is, a repeated movement of closure, reduction, denial,
partly because the anarchic trimètres are as much about disruption, distraction (lines
5–6), as about release (line 3) from a certain established, tetrametric domestic regime.
4>2 does not disappear from the sestet where it brings the couplet to a decisive end,
brooking no disagreement, and affirms a conjugal, or at least Edenic crushing of
the serpent (wyvern) in line 12 (‘où notre amour tisonne’); and if we imagine it as a
reading of the first hemistich of line 10, it underlines the peremptory self-assurance
of ‘docte manque’. But it is nonetheless heavily outnumbered in this sestet by 2>4
(7 instances). This latter combination of measures traces movements of expansion in
negative indulgence (‘Ma faim qui d’aucuns fruits ici ne se régale’), in sensory inten-
sity (‘humain et parfumant’), in time (‘Je pense plus longtemps’), in emotional disar-
ray (‘peut-être éperdûment’), in sensual definition (‘À l’autre, au sein brûlé’), all set
within the enveloping fireside illusion of temptation overcome (‘Le pied sur quelque
guivre’). Withdrawal is no safeguard; as the hearth for the study, so the sestet for the
octave is a space of risk, gamble, overreaching, reconfigurative mutability.
But here we must begin to adjust our view, because the domestic environment
coincides with that other environment that the text is in its very textuality. As we
have said, the closing of books begets a text, a domestic sonnet. It is as if those
books were the gathering, the weaving together, of a multiplicity of senses which
the proper name, ‘Paphos’, is alone able to encompass and which it now must let
loose in an alternative text, and which the translator, in his/her turn, will again let
loose, in another text. This name is made of unvoiced consonants (/pafo/) which
must come to voice, and of a vocalic shift from unrounded, low (open) front /a/ to
rounded, high-mid (half-closed) back /o/, from an airy buccal laxity to a darkened
buccal directedness. As we read, we listen to the calls of language, to the text’s bird-
song and environmental noise.
‘Paphos’ is a centre of distribution for the poem’s activity. The name, however, is
not defined by its historical identity, it has no quiddity in its having been founded by
the Amazons, or in being Aphrodite’s first landfall after her birth, or a village/city in
south-west Cyprus, or the name of the son of Pygmalion and Galatea. The poem cer-
tainly makes Paphos’ history available, but it also re-activates the name in language
as rhythm, rhyme, acoustic node: pas faux, pathos, Sappho. Graham Robb suggests
that ‘Sappho’, an exact anagram of ‘Paphos’, is an absent rhyme, speaking of illicit
love and/or the love of poetry (1996: 18–19). Names are neither designations nor quid-
dities, and what that implies of distillations and irreducibilities; on the contrary, they
are haecceities in the Deleuze/Guattari sense of inclusively eventful singularities —
‘tout y est rapport de mouvement et de repos entre molécules ou particules, pouvoir
d’affecter et d’être affecté’, ‘commandant la métamorphose des choses et des sujets’,
‘autant de lignes flottantes constituant un individu complexe’ (Deleuze and Guattari,
1980: 318–19). One might say that Paphos is a haecceity that becomes the haecceity
of the poem. For, after all, not only does the proper noun resist identity in the name
of haecceity, not only does it become ‘l’appréhension d’une multiplicité’, or ‘le sujet
d’un pur infinitif [becoming] compris comme tel dans un champ d’intensité’ (Deleuze
290 CLIVe SCOTT

and Guattari, 1980: 51), but also the common noun is ever on the way to finding its
name — ‘une ruine’, ‘une antique amazone’ — not as part of a generic taxonomy,
but as a self-individuating emergence from a collectivity, uncontrollably occurrent,
random, free to be/become. For Mallarmé, this meshwork of actions is driven by a
subjunctivity, an optativity, inflected by the jussive and the defiant. And the subjunc-
tivity and optativity are not just to be found in moods and tenses, they are lodged
deep in the linguistic textures, in the changing rhythms and the acoustic weave, in the
voicings and unvoicings, elisions and phonations.
Pathways of sound — /p/ and /f/ and /a/ and /b/ and /y/ and /u/ and /i/, and so
on — find their way across the poem’s landscape, pathways which are not networks
of points (semantic plotting, metaphor-building), but a meshwork of metamorphic
variation, at one and the same time generating a potential sense-nucleus, an acoustic
identity, and refusing it, eluding it, in an a-signifying chain or line of flight. The
poem certainly has a structure (the sonnet and what it entails) and a trajectory (from
Paphos via Aphrodite to Amazon), but it harnesses that structure to activate what
is unstructured, indeterminate, mobile in it. Paronomasia, homonymy, homophony,
metathesis, and other associative mechanisms hold the reader in the world of verbal
mirage, of acoustic and graphic hallucination, of the slidings of linguistic conscious-
ness and perception.
Consider ‘Une ruine’, for example. It is on what one might call a linguistic ‘prom-
ontory’, not only because it acts as a passing gravitational and radiational focus of
the ongoing transformations of /y/ and /i/, but also because it brings into readerly
consciousness, through its coupe lyrique, the poem’s play on articulated and elided
e’s. What kind of perceptual condition is produced by its buffering e, echoing and
reinforcing the e of its ‘une’? A certain isolation, insulation, atmospheric cocoon, of
course, to which its reverberative value adds a solidity, a sense of physical volume,
an insistence. One might say that, in refusing it the liaisory function of a coupe
enjambante (‘Une rui/ne, par mille écu/mes bénie’) we withdraw it from a purely dis-
cursal role (collocative, fluency-inducing) and endow it with an enhanced perceptual
intensity. But also, as indicated, it alerts us to the linguo-environmental interaction of
articulated and elided e’s. It comes as no surprise that the poem’s final line, address-
ing the Amazon’s seared breast, should be marked by elision:
À l’autr(e), au sein brûlé d’un(e) antiqu(e) amazone

But it is noticeable that this need to elide only manifests itself with any purpose
in the second tercet. In the quatrains, there are only three elisions (‘d’éli/r(e) avec’,
‘mill(e) écumes’, ‘hyacin/th(e), au loin’), as against nine articulated e’s. This might
suggest that the fictions of the first quatrain generate a fuller, more lingering experi-
ence than the intrusion of the snowy landscape might lead one to suppose; indeed,
that the intrusion is itself an intimate and necessary part of that fullness. And it is
similarly revealing that although ‘manque’ in the first tercet has its e elided, that eli-
sion is flanked by the articulated e’s of ‘docte’ and ‘une’, endorsed by the final e of
‘éclate’. One might say, of course, that these patterns merely reinforce the thematics
of presence/absence that the poem insistently explores. But that is to miss the point
of eco-reading, since its values lie not in the conceptual, but in the experiential, the
bodily digested and enacted, in all that is language-immanent, since its function is
 TRANSLATING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 291

not to derive a meaning but to plunge us more deeply into the psycho-physiology of
the medium.
Equally, rhythm may cross a line from the linguistically defined and mono-dimen-
sional (accent, syllabic number) of the depicted environment to the specific, multi-
dimensional and multiple paralinguistic realizations of the depicting environment.
Paralinguistic realizations, we might say, are the weather, the climate, the physical
atmosphere of the text’s world. Performance recovers, makes manifest, the animating
force of reading, the physical interaction that reading is. Thus reading has two faces:
it is both the weather of the text and the integration of weather with textual land-
scape in a particular textual-perceptual mode. My further proposition is that trans-
lation is necessary to the deepening of the ecological experience of reading because
it allows a modification of the text’s landscape and weather, a deeper kinaesthetic
involvement, a multiplication of types of linguistic and sensory contact, through the
distribution and navigation of textual space, through particular typographic topog-
raphies and through the interventions of various kinds of graphism.
If I speak of eco-translation as necessarily multiple in a variety of ways, it is because,
as a way of living in the environment of the text, the single-version translation makes
no sense; the multiplication of versions is the way in which one ensures that the
relational field keeps its dynamic, keeps alive its ‘formative and transformative pro-
cesses’ (Ingold, 2011: 117), remains a world-in-formation. Translation is an account
of the appropriation of a living space that reading is. I can read in order to inhabit
Mallarmé’s domestic interior, but I must move the furniture, change the disposition
of the house, rewrite the rhythm, so that it renews that space or else constructs a new
living space. All this is necessarily experimental living. Rhyme-scheme, rhythm/metre,
and acousticity have a function as agency; they are the channels by virtue of which we
participate in environment, in its restless dynamic and in the totality of its relations.
Inasmuch as it is through these same channels that perception becomes performative,
generates its own actions, and inasmuch as one goal of translation is, precisely, to
translate the textual into the performative, we might say that translation is indeed
the very exercise of perception. To concentrate thus on perceptual experience is to
continue to maintain that translation is a-signifying, in the sense that it does not
display meanings, to which both the ST and the target text (TT) can be reduced, or
by which the ST can be reduced to the TT, but explores the ductilities and labilities
of participational consciousness. Translation is a non-aligned and subversively fluid
activity, where the differences between the ST and TT might be accounted a kind of
dissidence. So to my first version of Mallarmé’s poem:
Con[firmed]cealed in the pages [that bouquet] (at what
depth) fast shut again
A name: Paphos [pathos, bathos, sopha]
then conjured up by wit alone
A ruin far off sprayed by countless
Foams and swathed in hyacinth, a
Hyacinthine cloak of glorious days.
Even in the headlong rush
Of the cold’s
292 CLIVe SCOTT

sss… ss- [forks] scything silences I’ll intone

No empty [see] ululating wail even if this white
And tumbling scuffle hugging the
Earth refuses any site the honour
Of its fictions My hunger indulging here
In no fruits finds
In their finely calculated lack an equal [document]
Tastiness one only has to
Burst fleshy human heavy scented My foot
Propped on some wyvern fire-dog where
Our love pokes at [teases on] the flames I fix in thought
Much longer and maybe to distraction
The other the seared breast [verbrannte Brust]
Of an antique Amazon [antiker Amazonen]

If the sonnet is a particular kind of psychologization of domestic space, then the

adoption of free verse radically changes that psychology. In eco-translation, the fun-
damental question never relates to questions of translational correctness or felicity,
and to ask whether it is a good or bad translation is quite beside the point; the
fundamental question is: what kinds of perceptual coordinates does this TT activate
and how has it redisposed the qualities and orientations of attention to be found in
the ST? What we find here is a domestic space in which verse-structure is no longer
a ground-plan, nor a behavioural gestalt corresponding to that ground-plan, nor a
clearly sequenced movement from space to space accompanied by different kinds of
dwelling and acting. Instead, the ST’s outlines are absorbed into a fluid, porous, poly-
morphous dynamic of spatial fusion or metamorphosis, a non-demarcative open-plan
environment. Traces of the old structures might just about be surmised: a full-stop
and line-internal capital letters are the relics of stanzaic structure, and from to time
to time we suspect the debris of a rhyme-scheme: in the first ‘stanza’, for example,
‘shut/conjured up’, ‘sprayed/swathed’, ‘alone/foam’. But to all intents and purposes
the partitional walls have been knocked down; what were once the shapes of per-
ceptual attitudes are now the tentative transactions of the perceptual apparatus as it
tries to map the spaces it now occupies. In the first stanza, for example, the absence
of the first-person possessive and pronoun (mes, m’amuse), the consequent passive
constructions, and the weakening of causality make the study and its books feel less
marked by ownership, less imprinted with a mentality. Instead, the books seem to
be the principal occupants, enjoying a rather mysterious autonomy. And the intro-
duction of the first person in the second stanza (‘I’ll intone’) is not enough to secure
ownership, but seems to designate a random member of the accompanying chorus.
In the ‘sestet’, the possessive that opens the ‘first tercet’ creates a vector of energy
which the opening possessive of the ‘second tercet’ resets, but on the dominant /f/
already established; but these are tercets only by virtue of capital letters, which are not
stanza-producing but rather moments in the re-focussing of discourse-consciousness.
Without stanza-breaks, space drifts. Where is ‘here’? And how does ‘here’ relate to
the dispersive ‘some [quelque] wyvern fire-dog’? Space loses its disciplines, its behav-
ioural implications, allows spatial promiscuities and contaminations and impinges
 TRANSLATING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 293

only when the voice takes its bearings anew. The changing ethics and aesthetics of
experiential engagement demand a correspondingly more fluid and indeterminate ver-
sion of domestic ecology.
When it comes to considering text itself as an environment, as a field of sounds,
syntactic structures, tenses and moods, prefixes and suffixes — that is, as modali-
ties of sense with which we establish a range of changing relationships, a linguistic
habitat, never to be exhausted in its variations — then we need to understand
what kind of ecomorphosis translation is. As I have intimated, it is as if we had
changed the weather, the climatic conditions and atmospheric pressures, as if, too,
we were taking different paths in order to awaken a linguistic milieu to different
perceptual configurations. This is not a relation of equivalence, nor even of con-
vergence; it is a renewal of topographical traversal, with a previous traversal in
mind, as if reading and writing were at one and the same time explorations of, and
psycho-physiological re-adaptations to, a linguistic landscape. Thus, for example,
‘sprayed’ is not a translation of ‘bénie’ in a conventional sense, not an attempt to
confirm ‘bénie’ as a lexical item, to repeat it in another language, but an attempt
to capture a perception that will maximize its immediacy, its implicatedness, its
productivity. ‘Sprayed’ not only introduces floral overtones (bouquins/bouquet) —
such that ‘foams’ begins to affiliate itself to ‘blooms’ and hyacinth is more flower
than colour — but it picks up the /eI/ which has grown out of ‘pages’, ‘name’ and
‘Paphos’ (and anglicizes /e/ of ‘bénie’); it also insinuates itself into the /s/ sequence
and its combinations /sw/, /sk/, /st/; and it confirms the past-participial colouring
of the ‘first quatrain’.
It is under this head, too, that we need to think of rhythm, because it is no longer,
as in the ST, metrically driven, part of a circumscribed expressive range of hemistichal
models. Instead, rhythm, now conceived multi-dimensionally, is the instrument of
restless, active relating, a mode of palpation of sense, of linguistic becoming. In these
lines from the ‘second tercet’, for example:
[where]
Our love pokes at the flames I fix in thought x//xx/x/x/
Much longer and maybe to distraction x/xx/xxx/x

we first cross a teasing, or quizzical, syncopation (Our love … pokes), relax into
an ‘anapaest’ (at the flames), and then steady ourselves for a more purposive pair
of iambs (I fix in thought). Then we move into looser utterance, the circumstantial,
the adverbial, almost an aside, where ‘Much longer’ encourages us to ‘subhear’ other
amphibrachic arrangements: ‘and maybe’, ‘distraction’. At the same time, spacing
encourages us to develop pausing and changes of tempo and pitch:
Our love↑
(decel.) // POkes↑ I/fix/in/thought/→
→
→

attheflames
Much LOnger →(decel.) // to disTRAction↑
→

I have here, too, tried to begin to indicate a dynamics (in the musical sense), but since
it operates within a narrow range and depends so much on qualities of the individual
voice, it is difficult to predict.
294 CLIVe SCOTT

I have also included, by way of sketchy incidental illustration, and as extra-textual

elements indicative of the activity of the reading mind, what the ear might hear
as anglicized homophones of the French (for example, docte manque > document;
tisonne > teases on), or what the eye might see of other languages (for example,
vide > see), or what the memory might recall of alternative translations (for example,
Carl Fischer’s iambic ‘verbrannte Brust antiker Amazonen’ (Mallarmé, 2011: 123)), all
as part of the associative tissue with which we ‘thicken’, substantiate, diversify and
individuate our ecological connections.
My next version is more aggressively, more uncompromisingly tabular (Fig. 1).
Tabularity is the smooth, non-striated, non-pulsed space of Deleuze and
Guattari, a space in which measure, periodicity, assigned position, pattern, no
longer obtain, in which the ear and the eye conjoin in a constant process of
redistribution, dis-covering constantly reconfigured fields of energy. This is, as a
reader, to be among the text, but the text experienced as a restless,
insubordinate dynamic of words, phrases, lines. The tabular text requires
huntings and gatherings, whose sense does not lie in encapsulation or synthesis
(crop-harvesting), but in tireless tracking and trailing, meshworking, because the
text is precisely more landscape than crop. What tabularity also helps us to
see is that language is, or can be, constantly in motion, constantly reassessing
the constitution and disposition of its own proper-ties. Linguistics, the grammar
book, the dictionary, try to tell us what those proper-ties are, how they came
about, how they function. But the tabular is likely to tell us that those properties
have by no means finished coming about and that their activ-ity is by no means
bound to known formative rules: we can, it seems, create strange morphings, or
false/folk etymologies, or unauthorized kinships. And running across this new set
of properties are the qualities (of sense, intensity, emphasis) that a reader
wants to impart to them and may make visible, in a choice of typeface, or font,
or punctuation, or other graphic or chromatic device (see the figures below). One
might like to think that this tabular account is an extension of Mallarmé’s own ‘Un
coup de dés’ (1897), and, of course, in a sense it is — ‘subdivisions prismatiques de
l’Idée’ (1998: 391). But it is also something fundamentally different, something
‘regressive’ and Artaudian, not a refinement of expressive resources, a
plotting of vocal tonalities and linguo-intellectual intensities, a score, but
language at the moment of its formulation, the medium still flirting with its
originary chaos, yield-ing to anarchies and drives, to intestinal rumblings and the
unquiet life of organs, re-exploring the desires of the tongue. Reduced to a
peculiar inarticulacy despite him/herself, the reader feels his/her way, not back to
articulacy (what would be the point of the detour and of the initial surrender), but
through to unresolved synergies and to perceptual, permutational, and
constructivist possibilities. We should remind ourselves that translation is not
merely the translation of an ecological activity (reading), it is itself an
ecologizing activity; that is to say, it not only makes visible what, otherwise,
would remain invisible, but it deepens the experience of contact by diversifying
it, by indicating the ways in which it can further diversify, by gen-erating further
invisibilities. It is in this sense that translation is a manmade tool, a prosthesis for
perception. Eco-reading, and its expression in eco-translation, intro-duces a
change in the human condition, in the reader’s sense of him/herself, which is not
to say that every instance of reading is a Damascene revelation but that it
 TRANSLATING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 295

figure 1  Clive Scott, tabular translation of Mallarmé’s ‘Mes bouquins refermés’ (2015)
Author’s original

alerts us to re-orienting our being on becoming, on a dynamic of being which never

leaves us in the same place. Meaning and identity are obsolescent prison-houses.
I chose this text, ‘Mes bouquins refermés’, partly because it is about looking up from
the text, albeit not as an interruption of reading, but after reading, a re-absorption
296 CLIVe SCOTT

of the reading self into his/her immediate environment. It is the reader’s constant
re-engagement, through interruption or distraction, with the world around the text
that I now want briefly to consider in translations of Rimbaud’s ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’:3
Au Cabaret-Vert, cinq heures du soir

Depuis huit jours, j’avais déchiré mes bottines

Aux cailloux des chemins. J’entrais à Charleroi.
– Au Cabaret–Vert: je demandai des tartines
De beurre et du jambon qui fût à moitié froid.

Bienheureux, j’allongeai les jambes sous la table

Verte: je contemplai les sujets très naïfs
De la tapisserie. — Et ce fut adorable,
Quand la fille aux tétons énormes, aux yeux vifs,

– Celle-là, ce n’est pas un baiser qui l’épeure! –

Rieuse, m’apporta des tartines de beurre,
Du jambon tiède, dans un plat colorié,

Du jambon rose et blanc parfumée d’une gousse

D’ail — et m’emplit la chope immense, avec sa mousse
Que dorait un rayon de soleil arriéré.
Octobre 1870
(Rimbaud, 1972: 32–33)
First, a non-permeable, free-verse version, unresponsive to the immediate environ-
ment, a ground-plan:
Au Cabaret-Vert, at five o’clock in the afternoon

For a week or more I’d walked

my boots to bits
on rough roads: I
Came into Charleroi: Au Cabaret–
Vert: I ordered
Buttered tartines and ham
just halfway cold.
Cloud nine: legs stretched out under the green
Table, idly scanning the tapestry, its artless
Images — and it was gilt
on my gingerbread
when the barmaid
What a pair! and eyes to curl your toes
— Not one, that girl, to miss out on a clinch —
Bubbling with merriment, brought me buttered tartines
on a gaudy plate, and warmish
Ham, ham pink and white, perfumed
with a garlic-clove — and filled my roomy
 TRANSLATING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 297

Beer-jar to the brim, its fluffy

head burnished
by the late
afternoon
sun.
October 1870

The immediate environment — that is, the circumstances, or the circumstantial,

of reading — is a factor which we recognize as significant in our response to a
text but which we have no way of taking into account other than through a prac-
tice of translation which expressly incorporates it. But even such an incorpora-
tion is likely to seem arbitrary, or, conversely, over-motivated, and run the risk
of submerging the text either in the gratuitously extra-textual or in the overly
symbolic. However, there is perhaps no reason to fall prey to either danger. The
habit of distraction, of periodically looking up from the text, of re-absorbing the
ecology of the reading act, justifies a constructed scenario. By that I mean that
translation provides the opportunity to create, expressly, a TT which is situa-
tion art, or a site-specific happening; that is to say, not an object of aesthetic
contemplation, but a taking-place, an event, in the unfolding of the day.
My argument is that translation is an act that restores the ST significantly and
positively, not to say aggressively, to time and makes it an obtrusive presence in the
here-and-now. The phrase ‘here-and-now’ is perhaps inclined to put its emphasis on
the particularity of the ‘now’, leaving the ‘here’ to accommodate itself as best it can.
But the ‘here’ is equally crucial, since it determines the terms on which translation
engages with its environment, and a translation which sees itself as a journey from
the textual to the performative is bound to anticipate the particularity of its site,
even if that site is the page we read, become performance area by virtue of spatial
disposition and typographic activity. The danger is that, in many cases, performance
may entail the erasure of its environment (set apart on a stage, in a building specially
designed for performances, before a mute and darkened auditorium). Performance
must rebel against all contemporary non-places: the theatre, yes, but also the library,
the internet site, or what Geeta Kapur calls ‘the ahistorical no-nation, no-place phe-
nomenon promoted by globalized exhibition and market circuits’ (quoted in Doherty,
2009: 175).
Elsewhere I have argued that language should resort to whatever means are need-
ful in order to ‘[extricate] itself from the business of text-making and [weave] itself
into the texture and perceptual experience of the everyday’ (Scott, 2012: 169). I sug-
gested ways in which Baudelaire’s ‘À une passante’ might be said to capture the vying
acousticities of the urban soundscape by drawing on notions developed by Augoyard
and Torgue (2005) — for example, drone, crossfade, anticipation, cut-off, desynchro-
nization, ubiquity effect — and tried to show how language has the power acousti-
cally to mould itself as a whole texture on sound-effects obtaining in the immediate
environment (not just in the isolated imitative sounds of onomatopoeia). I also tried
to show how such acoustic moulding might be caught graphically, by referring to
Sean Bonney’s Baudelaire in English (2008) and by deploying the device of overwrit-
ing (Scott, 2012: 169–81).
298 CLIVe SCOTT

Additionally, I argued that to collage pieces of text into a printed poem is not only
to bring the rough-and-tumble of the contemporary world of newsprint and magazine-
print into the sanctified space of the literary text, but also to render that text precarious:
by underlining the historicity of the paper on which a text is printed, it exacerbates our
sense of textual mutability: ‘collage is an unprincipled mechanism, which knows nothing
of tickets of entry. It is as if environment has decided to gate-crash an unguarded textual
party, threatening to introduce any element it chooses’ (Scott, 2012: 69). Equally, one can
call upon photographic collage to import/assimilate the world that presses in at the edges
of the text: ‘a photography outside the text brings us face to face with an ambient world
full of our own restiveness, our breakings off from the text, our manipulations of the
book, our fussy ordering of the site of reading, the vulnerabilities of our attention’ (Scott,
2014: 46). The extra-textual is part of the perceptual totality of the physical reading of the
text, and we need to capture its self-insinuations and its beckonings.
But one also might need the more radical resources of multilineal translation and
Marinetti’s ‘free expressive orthography’ (Scott, 2012: 72–73). This might partly
mean undermining, or dispensing with, those elements in a standard text which act
as obstructions to direct connections between language and environment, those appa-
ratuses of mediation, like syntax: ‘we must suppress this intermediary [syntax] so
that literature can directly enter into the universe and become one body with it’
(Marinetti, quoted in Rainey, 2005: 19). And correspondingly we need to develop
new styles of recitation, declamation, reading aloud, perhaps along the lines also
canvassed by Marinetti (see his manifesto on ‘Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation’
of March 1916 (1972: 142–47)); we know what we might cull from the ‘readings’ of,
say, Bernard Hiedsieck or Bob Cobbings.
In one of my versions (Fig. 2), then, I have used textual and photographic collage
to prevent Rimbaud’s poem from finding its peace; it is as if harassed by this accom-
paniment — which has even usurped textual positions — as different ambient images
and voices try to find a fitting rapport with the work and with each other, and at the
same time insist that the work be not allowed to be understood according to rules of
its own making (see the ‘header’ image).
The poem might seem to want to make these labels and images subservient to its own
designs, to requisition them for its own expressive purposes, to transport them into its own
time. But even as the chromatic doodling of the water-colour overlay tells of a reader wish-
ing to paint him/herself into the sensory-perceptual world of the poem, so the other elements
ask the text to expand its purview sufficiently to become permeable to them or at least to
recognize that they are competing sources of attention, deserve to stand in tension with it.
My other version (Fig. 3) is more site-specific still: the poem read in an easy chair in
a bookshop, with, thirty feet away, an automatic door periodically opening and shut-
ting, and therefore also with the sounds of the street entering the shop; traffic, of vari-
ous sizes and at various speeds, children shouting, the sounds of passers-by; the sound
of the machinery of the escalator; conversations in undertones, but, close by, a rather
loud discussion about household shopping and food; someone humming quietly.
Here the music paper tries to suggest, along with the humming (doodles), that a
scene is trying to find its music, that the essentially linear text is positively trying
to draw other acoustic elements, on their different trajectories, into its ambit and
compose something, a brief polyvocal cantata; the watercolour touches (blue, yellow,
 TRANSLATING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 299

figure 2 Clive Scott, collage translation of Rimbaud’s ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’ (2015)

Author’s original
300 CLIVe SCOTT

figure 3  Clive Scott, site-specific translation of Rimbaud’s ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’ (2015)

Author’s original
 TRANSLATING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 301

green), notes of different values, are as if themselves in motion, looking for somewhere
on the stave to settle. These coexistent effects might have been presented multilineally;
but such multitracking would be to suggest that all linguistic and acoustic lines move
forward in the same time and as discrete elements in space. My concern, however, is
to capture the sensory dynamic of a space, the tangents and angles of different acous-
tic pathways, the very texturing of the atmosphere (hence the vibratory overprinting
of Rimbaud’s text, to give that sense of a reverberative environment). And to include
an upside-down printing of the text is precisely to imply both a multiplicity of points
of view and the rotatability of the paginal space. Finally, the use of handwriting is
designed to express not only the immediacy of human intervention, to evoke the tones
of the human voice, but also the malleability, the volatility, of the ambient soundscape.
Translating the nineteenth century is thus a question neither of updating it linguistically
and experientially, nor of promoting its survival in the form it already has — this latter
is simply not necessary if one translates for a polyglot reader. It is, rather, a question of
generating a dynamic by which the reader/translator undergoes and begets — a reciprocal
exchange — transformations in relation to a mobile or mobilized textual environment, in
the senses we have investigated, so that an intimate psycho-physiological investment in
text results, so that the anxieties of comprehension are superseded by existential empa-
thies, so that the text ceases to be an object and becomes an evolving and encompass-
ing ecological event. Translation is that instrument by which we draw the nineteenth
century into a new inhabitability, and by which we transform text into our Umwelt and
Lebensraum. Translation is not primarily about the text, it is about reading-the-text; the
TT does not stand in for the ST, it quite simply extends it, makes it other itself, in a
mechanism of ecological metamorphosis, or ecomorphosis. The nineteenth-century text,
therefore, under the influence of translation, neither stays where it is, nor jumps, bodily
as it were, into the twenty-first century; instead, by the very process of its being read and
translated, it is adjusted into the reader’s consciousness as a living, changing, variable
environment in itself, and as an integral part of the larger environmental envelope.4

Notes
1
Representative of this view of the representational
function of ecocriticism are literary handbooks, for
example: ‘what ecocritics do: 1. They re-read major
4
literary works from an ecocentric perspective, with
particular attention to the representation of the
natural world’ (Barry, 2009: 254); ‘ecocriticism, es-
sentially, is the study of the relation between litera-
ture and nature: in particular, the literary represen-
tation of nature and, just as importantly, the power
of literature to inspire its readers to act in defence
of nature’ (Coupe, 2013: 154).
2
For a fuller assessment of the expressive capacities
of tabular as against linear lay-out, see my Translat-
ing Apollinaire (Scott, 2014: 249–57).
3
What I provide here is only a brief snapshot of the
eco-translation of the immediate environment; any
such investigation, in an extended form, needs to
take into account the anthropology of the everyday.
See, for example, Certeau’s The Practice of Every-
day Life (1984); Sheringham’s Everyday Life (2006);
Chauvier’s Anthropologie de l’ordinaire (2011).
Chris Baldick is of the view that ‘ecocriticism is not
a method of analysis or interpretation but a rede-
fined area of research and rediscovery’ (2008: 101).
Bennett and Royle are of much the same mind: ‘de-
spite the “ism” in its name, ecocriticism is not in fact
constituted as yet another “ism”: it does not offer a
distinctive methodology of reading, but draws on
feminist or Marxist or historical or postcolonial or
psychoanalytic or deconstructive approaches, in or-
der to attend to a world of environmental questions’
(2014: 141). I would not wish to use either the term
‘interpretation’ or the term ‘methodology’, but I
hope that this article has shown that eco-translation
can indeed be a method of analysis and that it does
suggest a well-defined mode of reading.
302 CLIVe SCOTT

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–––. 2011. Sämtliche Dichtungen, trans. by Carl Fischer. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch.
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Notes on contributor
Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East
Anglia. His principal research interests lie in French and comparative poetics (Channel
Crossings: French and English Poetry in Dialogue 1550–2000, 2002); in literary trans-
lation (Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading, 2012; Translating the
Perception of Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology, 2012); and in photog-
raphy’s relationship with writing (Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson,
2007). Translation and photography combine in his recently published Translating
Apollinaire (2014).
Correspondence to: Clive Scott, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing,
University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK. Email: clive.scott@uea.ac.uk
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