ABSTRACT
As a Jamaican poetess born in 1905, Una Marson remains almost unheard of, even though a new collection of her poems, Selected Poems, was edited by Alison Donnell in 2011 at Peepal Tree Press. The BBC remembers her as their first Black broadcaster, who promoted Caribbean authors and intellectuals during WW2. The biographical documentary, which the BBC broadcast for the first time in October 2022 (Una Marson: Our Lost Caribbean Voice) gives an account of her political life and the role she played in England at the time. Her poetry probably deserves more attention today. One of Marson’s main talents lies in her ability to play with the English language and the English canon. In the early days of her poetic production, she was criticized for her romantic vision and her classic writing. But her mastery of the English language only revealed her will to exceed her colonized status as a Jamaican author and her subordinate position as a woman.
Her poem ‘The Stone Breakers’, written in Patois, stands as an excellent example of poetic material that is both aesthetically and ethically extremely difficult to translate. This chapter presents my attempt to translate it into a creative French appropriation.
