In
Visible Voices
Nicolas Barker traces the history of the "translation" of poetry from a spoken medium to a written, or printed, medium. The book moves from the pictograms of the Ancient Near East through the development of alphabetic scripts, the traditions of Medieval European manuscripts, the shift from script to print, all the way to the innovations and experiments of the modernist period. Stéphane Mallarmé’s typographically exploded poem
Un coup de dés n’abolira pas le hasard
, Barker writes, "takes the problem that has haunted poets and their audiences over 4000 years to a logical conclusion: that is, how the evanescent iridescent idea in the poet’s mind is to be registered in graphic form – what, in short, is the art of poetry?" Illustrated throughout with photographs of the texts, this book provides a fascinating account of the history of this art.