Abstract
This essay considers multiple forms of transatlantic translation in the work of the contemporary French poet-translator Stéphane Bouquet (b. 1968). Because Bouquet is an established translator of poets of the US New York School (Paul Blackburn, James Schuyler), Bouquet’s appearance in English marks a new stage of the New York School’s life and history—a crossing from English to French and back by which earlier forms of social, erotic, and political awareness are refracted through a different sensibility and an expanded global consciousness. Tracing the complexities of these crossings helps reframe translation not as a single one-way trajectory from source to target language but rather as a multiple and dynamic back-and-forth and a temporal opening to new possibilities akin to the version of queerness suggested by José Esteban Muñoz as “the work of not settling for the present, of asking and looking beyond the here and now.”
