| This study of contemporary American practices of the translation of poetry argues that during the last fifty years, translation has not only reflected major American poetic practice but in fact has significantly shaped that practice. Translation has often been viewed in the Anglo-American context as a secondary and derivative literary mode, but "American Imitations" asserts that translation is a generative literary mode for American poets. Translation practices fundamentally affect several poetic styles that define later twentieth-century American poetry---confessionalism, deep image poetry, and the short meditative lyric. I trace a translational lineage for American poetry by examining several canonical poets' methods and motives for translation and by examining the translations of other, more recent poets, who enlarge the American poetic tradition with their translingual and transnational subject matter and formal experiments.;In the past two decades, translation theory has been heavily influenced by postcolonial theory and cultural studies, fields that elevate translation's status by considering its global context. These recent theoretical approaches often illuminate fiction but skim over poetry. My work shows that it is especially in poetry, with its internal tensions of formal particularity and metaphoric complexity, where cross-cultural writing in and about translation finds rich and rewarding expression. By applying translation theory to readings of the poetry of Robert Lowell, Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin, Agha Shahid Ali, and others, my dissertation adds an important dimension to the growing fields of translation studies and cross-cultural poetics. Translated material and borrowed poetic forms are everywhere present in the poetry that seems most characteristically "American" to us, and a number of international poetries and poetics are central to what we conceive of as "American" poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reconsidering translation alongside American poetry of the second half of the twentieth century---reconsidering translation as an innovative creative activity with specific historical, cultural, and formal consequences on the ensuing American poetry of the period---forces an acknowledgement of the multilingual and transnational influences that have always generated "American" literature. |
