The Case of the Poem in Motion: Translation, Movement and the Poetic Landscape

Abstract

Translation is a highly creative practice that can generate multimodal and intermedial translations. These experimental texts are the product of a dialogical, often multivocal, relationship between translating and translated writers, between source and target text(s), but they also reflect the contemporary multimodal context of production where different materials, textualities and media are at play. This creative (re)imagining is particularly apt for poetry, with its inherent multimodal elements in the writing, which can be explored further through processes of intersemiotic translation. This chapter discusses how poetry translation can be interartistic and intermedial, by analyzing my translations of the nineteenth-century Italian poem “Traversando la Maremma Toscana” by Giosuè Carducci, first transformed into a visual text and subsequently mediated into an English film poem.