During Michaelmas Term, OxTalks will be moving to a new platform (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
For now, continue using the current page and event submission process (freeze period dates to be advised).
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
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.