Special Issue of Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry Dedicated to the Work of Peter Manson

If you aren't familiar with Scottish poet and Mallarmé translator Peter Manson, get ready. In a special issue of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, a folio on Manson's work has been curated by Ellen Dillon and Tom Betteridge. It includes seven papers, originally given at a 2017 University of Glasgow symposium dedicated to his work a personal introduction from Dillon and a reading from Betteridge of the poem, "Gray Squirrel," from Manson's early pamphlet Birth Windows. These are followed by an introduction to each essay.

Contributors include Robin Purves, Stewart Sanderson, Samantha Walton, Rebecca Varley-Winter, Greg Thomas, Rob Kiely, and Callie Gardner. We're checking out Varley-Winter's ‘Colouring écriture féminine in Peter Manson’s translations of Mallarmé,’ which "begins by drawing on feminist colour theory, where connections are proposed between colour and the erotic in the writing of Audre Lorde, Pipilotti Rist and Meiling Cheng." More:

...She offers a parallel between the translator’s relationship with the sensual dimension of the source text and these writers’ erotics of colour. She reminds the reader that Kristeva proposed Mallarmé’s poetry, centred on multiple possible meanings, as the exemplar of écriture feminine, and goes on to suggest that translation, by keeping the source text’s multiplicity of meanings in play, occupies a space that is feminine. Varley-Winter then excavates the origins of Mallarmé’s signature colour, l’azur, before proposing that Manson’s translation choices work towards maintaining a tension between embodiment and disembodiment that is often smoothed out in overly-abstract renderings of Mallarmé in English. She traces this tension through Manson’s colour choices, especially ‘self-coloured cinders’ for what could be more prosaically rendered ‘monotonous ash,’ naming this fruitful drift between source and translation, after Manson, a ‘kinship in across’.

Happy reading at the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.