(D’)Après Pouchkine : le jeu de la traduction dans « Omens » de Louise Glück

Abstract

Written by American contemporary poet Louise Glück and published in 2006 in the collection of poems Averno, the poem « Omens » oscillates between translation and rewriting – to use the word coined by Gérard Genette. Written after Alexander Pushkin’s poem « Приметы » (primeti), « Omens » plays with its original version by silencing while revealing it in the folds of its textual surface. The stakes of this hypertext are to be found in its intersticial margins as well as in the distance it takes from the hypotext, a distance which Glück at times deepens and at others dissolves.Through specific choices of prosody, punctuation and translation, Louise Glück brings her translation out of center vis-à-vis the original, betraying a palimpsestuous relation between « Omens » and its Russian origin. Like in many of her other poems, punctuation signs fulfill a complex function : they are signs of difference and of semantic deferment, the touchstone of a unique poetics, which this article will strive to demonstrate.

Keywords

• palimpsest
• Contemporary American Poetry
• Louise Glück
• Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
• translation
• Gérard Genette