Skip to Content
Geneviève Robichaud

Geneviève Robichaud

Social Media
Geneviève Robichaud's research and writing focus on translation as a poetic practice. With Erin Wunker and Sina Queyras, she is co-editor of Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader (Coach House Books) and author of a chapbook entitled Exit Text (Anstruther Press) and the book The Poetics of Translation: A Thinking Structure (McGill-Queen's University Press). With Danielle Leblanc, she is the co-translator of Aimee Wall's novel, Nous, Jane. Photo credit : Annie-France Noël

Poetics of Translation: A Thinking Structure (The)

Translation is a vital method of not just reading but writing and forms the basis of an exciting range of critical, artistic, and literary opportunities. Combining close readings of literary texts alongside astute critical observations from works by Avital Ronell and Walter Benjamin, amongst others, The Poetics of Translation re-examines key translation studies concepts, challenging our sometimes pragmatic understanding of translation and asking what it is that the discipline can make visible. By highlighting the possibilities of translation as an art form in contemporary innovative writing practices, Geneviève Robichaud reveals translation’s creative and critical potential, arguing that even those literary works that are not exactly translations gain in being apprehended as such. The Poetics of Translation values oblique, even unfinished sources of meaning, dwelling in the speculative spaces of texts and drawing attention to translation as poiesis, as creating that which is tangible and valuable. Situated at the juncture of translation poetics and literary studies, the book celebrates the uncertainty of translation, the plasticity of language and ideas, and the desire to interpret rather than reiterate.