Tremors of Translation: An Edition of Voltaire's Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756)

We look to a critical edition of a text to establish its textual being, to detail the historical context of its formation and to provide a comprehensive knowledge of its apparent motivations. But what kind of edition of a text do we need if the reader is to be expressly encouraged to translate it? The Tremors of Translation sets out to be just such a 'translational' edition of Voltaire's Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756): it focuses its approach on the interrogative, on the exploratory, on the pursuit of new expressive possibilities; it seeks, if anything, to disestablish the text, to project alternative contexts of formation and to call standard knowledge of the text into question.

Literary translation makes room for different kinds of creative participation in a text, different ways in which the text can reinvent its literary life and engage with its own expressivity. Clive Scott's edition of Voltaire's Lisbon poem seeks to empower the reader as translator by tirelessly awakening the text's latencies and ambiguities and 'invisible'.

Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, and a Fellow of the British Academy.