Visible Voices

Translating Verse into Script and Print 3000 BC - AD 2000

Barker Nicolas

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. Stephane Mallarme's typographically exploded poem Un coup de des 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.

About the Author

Nicolas Barker grew up in Cambridge, surrounded by books. The University Library taught him about their history, and the University Press taught him how to print them. He started his own press aged fourteen, but after graduating from Oxford in 1957 went into publishing, working for Rupert Hart-Davis, Macmillan's and the Oxford University Press. He also wrote for the "TLS" and "The Book Collector", of which he became editor in 1965 and remains to this day. In 1976 he became first Head of Conservation of the new British Library, retiring in 1992. Since then he has been Libraries Adviser to the National Trust, and consultant to the House of Commons, the Rosenbach, Pierpont Morgan and many other libraries. He was Visiting Professor at University of California between 1986 and '87, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1998. He has written or edited over thirty books, most recently "The Roxburghe Club: A Bicentenary History" (2012).

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