ABSTRACT
Anne Carson’s work is emblematic of changing attitudes to translation, to the book as medium and artefact, and to matter more generally. In Nox she makes visible something that is rarely practised or theorized: namely that it is books and texts – outside and inside – that get translated, transformed and transmediated with every new translation and repackaged edition. This chapter explores how Carson’s bookish and media-conscious translation of Catullus contributes on the one hand to a wider understanding of the materialities of translation and, on the other hand, to an expanded notion of translation that is operative across the boundaries of the linguistic, textual, visual and medial. To this end the chapter builds on Theo Hermans’s concept of translation as manipulation and takes materially what was already implicit in this concept: it shows the extent to which manipulation, as its Latin root in manus suggests, is linked to manufacture and in the case of Nox made concretely palpable by Carson’s translatory practice.
