ABSTRACT

This chapter concentrates on several characteristic practical and theoretical challenges that occur when livres d’artistes are translated. As publications, livres d’artistes purposefully combine texts and images to create multimodal ensembles. The discussion contextualises such works in the literary tradition and indicates how such ensembles have all too frequently been disaggregated by literary critics. The primary focus, however, falls on Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d’Orphée (1911), which arose from a collaboration involving the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the Fauvist artist Raoul Dufy. One “poem” from this text, “Le Dromadaire,” provides the starting point for a series of reflections on how translation can be viewed when it reconfigures multimodal ensembles as multimodal ensembles of a different kind. A detailed analysis of both Apollinaire’s poem text and Dufy’s associated woodcut image leads to the introduction of a quasi-mathematical formalism that reveals more clearly how the multimodal dimensionality of the source ensemble is modified as the target ensemble is created during the process of translation. Sometimes the overall dimensionality increases, sometimes it decreases, and sometimes different modes or sub-modes are prioritised as the translator orchestrates the target ensemble. The discussion considers whether all such transformations can usefully be referred to as instances of “translation,” or whether the scope of the latter term should be restricted.