From Translation to Supranational Poetry: the Polyglot Poems of Pierre Garnier and Niikuni Seiichi

Translation & Multilingual Literature, Traduction & Littérature Multilingue

Publisher : LIT

From 1967 to 1971, Pierre Garnier (born in 1928) and Niikuni Seiichi (1925-1977) wrote three collections of visual poems together, using both alphabetic letters and Japanese writing: Franco-Japanese poems (1967), Micropoems (1970) and Small simplistic mathematical poems (1971). They called them « supranational ». By « supranational poetry », Garnier and Niikuni meant a new poetic language that would go beyond national, cultural and linguistic frontiers and communicate emotions to any reader in the world, though a specific use of non-verbal elements such as space and typography. The paper discusses the way Garnier and Niikuni’s thought unfolded from the criticism of translation to the definition of supranational poetry, and focus on the relation between verbal and non-verbal elements in their polyglot poems.

Thematic axes : Avant-Gardes & Modernities

Keywords : Translation

Updated on 01/01/2011