ABSTRACT
The visual effects on the page created by Apollinaire and the Concrete poets appear to be reflected in the work of an important American school of anthropologist translators identified with Dell Hymes and those who set up the review Alcheringa in 1 970, namely , Jerome Rothenberg, Dennis Tedlock, Nathaniel Tam and others (Rothenberg 1985 , 1986; Tedlock 1 989). Concentrating on native American sources , these translators first of all have excelled at rescuing verse from the amor phous prose of existing transcriptions by the simple but decisive use of line (Swann 1 992). Then they have gone on to make ingenious use of typography and layout on the page, appeal ing to Gestalt and visually patterned text. None the less , their prime loyalty has always been to the medium of speech rather than script, and as translators they have been concerned to convey as much as possible of originals that are spoken and sung in perfor mance, their pace, pitch and volume. So that, rather than explore the potential of visible language in its own right, in this ethnopoetic vein they merely continue the age-old story of its subjection to the features and needs of speech.
