Through a creative-critical rendition of Cécile Sauvage’s poetry, this book advocates for translation and criticism as a subjective, participatory practice.

This book offers a creative, critical approach to translating the poetry of French writer Cécile Sauvage (1883–1927). Sauvage was a remarkable poet who wrote of pregnancy, maternity, the self, sex, and death, yet the story of her reception across the last century is a sequence of disparate versions as different readers and editors reworked Sauvage’s corpus to create new images of the poet. This book presents itself as the latest versioning of Sauvage, using the creative-critical framework to challenge the traditionally strict separation between translation and commentary, and between practice and theory. Figuring the literary translator as a fan, this approach makes the case for understanding translation as a participatory, possessive practice, and argues for Sauvage’s importance from the starting point of the personal. Cécile Sauvage: Translation as Desiring Practice makes a wide-ranging selection of Sauvage’s poetry available in English for the first time and draws upon the poet’s recently discovered manuscripts and correspondence. It brings translation into interdisciplinary conversation with topics such as fan studies, genetic criticism, and literary genre. Ultimately, it advocates for creativity in translation and a reappraisal of scholarly modes of working, arguing on behalf of rigorous scholarship that is unafraid to confess the desiring and subjective position from which it operates.