Activating Translation: Louise Varèse’s <i>Illuminations</i>

Against historically determined conventions that helped launch her career as a translator of French literature in the mid-twentieth century, this article reconsiders Louise Varèse's translation of Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, published with New Directions in 1946, as activating a range of cultural, historical, and critical interpretations that are not always anticipated by her source text. I read Varèse's claims about rendering the "prismatic and protean quality" of Illuminations in her Translator's Note, alongside Marjorie Perloff's theory of Rimbaud's "poetics of indeterminacy," and translation Studies scholar Matthew Reynolds's prismatic model of translation, to reframe Varèse's much-lauded "accuracy" as an approach that instead highlights the interdependent relationship between Rimbaud's French poetic text and its English translation, while also foregrounding Varèse's historical and cultural intervention. Through a close textual analysis of "Side-Show," Varèse's English translation of Rimbaud's poem "Parade," and Varèse's revision of the poem from 1957, I demonstrate the ways Varèse's translation "activates" Rimbaud's language for her English readers while thematizing the secondary nature of her translation.