ABSTRACT
The dominance of transparent discourse in English-language translation was decisively challenged at the start of the twentieth century, when modernism emerged in British and American literary cultures. The experimentation that characterized the literature of this period brought with it innovative forms of translation that avoided any notion of fl uency tied to the current standard dialect by cultivating extremely heterogeneous discourses, principally in poetry translations, but also more widely in poetic composition. Translation now became a key practice in modernist poetics, motivating appropriations of various archaic and foreign poetries to serve modernist cultural agendas in English (see Hooley 1988; Yao 2002). At the same time, English-language translation theory attained a new level of critical sophistication, summoned as it was to rationalize specifi c modernist texts, poems that were translations as well as translations of poems.
