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Paris, Norway, Scotland, Honolulu, Ireland – such are some of the glamorous origins that have been attributed to Renée Vivien (1877-1909), one of the first unapologetically lesbian voices in French poetry. In reality, Vivien was born in dreary, foggy London. However, the far-fetched rumours about her place of birth and family ties shed light on her extremely cosmopolitan self-fashioning as a writer. Her volumes of poetry, all in French, include poems with English titles, Italian titles, ‘translations of Norwegian poems,’ and ‘translations of Polish songs’; she also published translations of Sappho and other Greek poetesses, and short stories set in the Indian jungle, the North American prairie, and the Scottish highlands. Through a discussion of some of these texts, as well as a lesser-known posthumous anthology of prose poems in English, this paper argues that Vivien’s playful redefinitions of translation as a literary practice enable her to formulate a subversive, queer sense of selfhood – while also recognising the colonialist overtones of such an undertaking.
