Alexander Dickow is the author of Caramboles, a collection of poems in French and English. He lived in France as a Fulbright scholar in 2003-2004, and subsequently completed his cotutelle dissertation on French modernism in 2011 (Rutgers/Paris 8). He has published scholarship, poetry and translations in many journals abroad and in the US, and teaches the language, literature and culture of France and Francophone countries at Virginia Tech. Other works or poetry and poetic prose include Appetites, Rhapsodie curieuse, and Trial Balloons.
Dickow’s poetic work salvages and manipulates solecism, discovering in grammatical error a storehouse of crooked rhythms and delightful ambiguities. As a bilingual poet, his work involves and reflects on the act of translation, and the possibilities of mistranslation. I am also a passionate practitioner of translation in the strict sense. As a translator, I value form and seek its equivalent in the target language. His research has consistently investigated cases of literary misrecognition or misrecuperation. He contends that these misrecognitions, like Freudian slips or actes manqués, lay bare the implicit ideological roles that literary works are made to play.
June 16, 2020 2:00 pm