Can the Verses of a Black and Enslaved Poet be White and Free?
Translating Phillis Wheatley
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17851/2238-3824.29.2.73-96Keywords:
Phillis Wheatley, translation, poetryAbstract
This article presents a translation of a poem by Phillis Wheatley Peters, an eighteenth-century African American poet. The translation approach takes into account the circumstances of Wheatley’s life. We first briefly recount the life story of Phillis Wheatley and present a translation of one of her most famous poems “On being brought from Africa to America”. We argue for a translation approach that does not detach itself from the sociohistorical context of the author, nor is too tied to metric or tradition. We propose a translation approach that listens (Derrida) to the spoken silences (Bakhtin) of the poem and the history of Phillis Wheatley in a loving dialogue (Carrascosa) with the author, thus, enabling us to subvert traditions and problematize fixed forms.
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