ABSTRACTS

Manifeste du monde: Tradition, Translation, and Trip

Mary Ann Caws
(CUNY)

How does the Litterature-Monde manifesto insert itself in the manifesto tradition? What can the idea of translation as trip bring to bear on the presence of this new manifesto/manifestation? And how might the idea of vagabondage (wandering from one place to another") help us conceive this particular literary voyage as a positive wandering? my own points of departure will be based in poetry, in the so moving Song Lines of Bruce Chatwin, et the writings of my friend and former colleague Nicolas Bouvier and his conception of the world. In working as the editor of a volume of Manifestos (to which I am preparing a sequel) and as the editor-in-cheif of the HarperCollins World Reader,I had the occasion to put my work as a translator of French-language literature in the context of a wider world than I might otherwise have been able to dwell in. Translating is already traversing another world of the mind, which is where the literary manifesto has always been headed, to which voyage the visual makes an intense contribution.