Over the summer, we released a version of seven poems by the French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé on this site as a translation case study. We posted images of hand-written manuscripts held in Special Collections at the Glasgow University Library. And we provided transcriptions of the French, alongside the simplest prose translations we could make. In the months that followed, ‘Decadence and Translation’ network member circulated this amongst the Universities of Glasgow, St Andrews, Leeds, Bristol and Oxford. And we recently posted a variety of alternative translations from that competition and from members of the public, that can still be seen on our site.

The next phase of this project was to turn this material into an exhibition for display at the University of Glasgow on a touchscreen as part of our final network event on 13 December. With generous sponsorship from the College of Arts at Glasgow, two students worked as interns in June, assembling various pieces of visual and verbal material to include. (You can see a report on their experiences here.) We’re not in a position to circulate the final exhibition online (yet). But we’re sharing with you a video, incorporated into the exhibition, that shows network member Matthew Creasy, examining some of the manuscript material in the video with Assistant Library, Robert MacLean: