Sounds and Senses: French echoes of Desmond Graham's Clipped Lines

Desmond Graham, a poet from Newcatle-upon-Tyne, has come to use short lines without punctuation, relying on line breaks to bring out (or sometimes further confuse) what meaning his verse may have. Next to a 'sharp ear for the punctuation potential that lies in line endings', he has trained an awareness of 'the potential for ambiguity offered when sentences in English have no punctuation until the end'. He also stresses how sounds – alliterations, assonances – contribute to weaving words together. The apparently conversational register and the attention paid to sounds are fully relevant to the topic of the conference; ambiguity is not but it is intrincably part of Graham's mode of writing. The task of the translator is predictably challenging.