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FOR the last twenty or thirty years, contemporary French poetry has been turning to the translation of other poetry from different languages into French. The reasons for this are as numerous as the interconnections between translation and the circumstances of current writing in France.1
In 1983, for example, Fondation Royaumont, just outside of Paris, created a literary center (Centre Litteraire), which immediately became the site for a series of translation workshops and seminars in response to what the poet Bernard Noel, its then director, perceived as a lack of contemporary poetry in translation.2 In 1990, the center was renamed Centre de Poesie & Traduction, which has since organized over fifty-two seminars, welcomed more than ninety poets of over thirty-five different nationalities and twenty-two different languages, and published more than thirty-seven books in the collection Les Cahiers de Royaumont. A network of centers for the translation of contemporary poetry, recently underwritten by the European Commission in Brussels, now exists in Europe with centers in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Turkey, Catalonia, Spain, Sweden, Poland, and, of course, France (and soon, Germany). Similar experiments in collective translation have been conducted in Bordeaux, Marseille, and on the initiative of Emmanuel Hocquard's Un Bureau sur l'Atlantique, in New Orleans (Louisiana), and, more recently, in Japan.3
Those associated with the Centre de Poesie & Traduction at the Fondation Royaumont, including Remy Hourcade (translator and current director), believe that a translation into French is a contribution to French literature, which enriches the French literary patrimony: "la traduction fonde sa propre origine au moment ou le francais s'arrache a la langue etrangere" [the translation originates the moment that the French breaks free of the foreign language].4 From the beginning, the guiding principle for the translation seminars and workshops was simple: to invite one, or possibly two, foreign poets whose work is often not well known in France to spend ten days in France, five of them at Royaumont where they meet and work with French writers and translators on a daily basis, with the specific goal of producing a collective translation. The invited poets are to be translated only by other poets, line by line, out loud and, then, in writing. Generally, most of the French poets present do not know the language of...