Translating Light

My Ph.D. dissertation in Comparative Literature from the University of British Columbia.

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This dissertation gives a reading of the Canadian poet P. K. Page. What especially interests me is how Page engages with being in the world through language. I inquire into how she articulates the body and its qualities in words; her different relationships with the embodied life and her reflections on sensuality. From selected literary works, I argue that she approaches lived experience primarily through visualization, an approach which creates a sense that something is missing, due to the transformation of sensuality into visual representations. My argument is that the writer, despite her successful strategy of translating the world into images of light and colour, also searches for the additional participation of her other senses. I explore her difficulty in finding ways to express other senses than the visual, her struggle to relate embodied sensations to one’s ownership of a physical body. To support my argument I focus on Page’s books Brazilian Journal and Hologram: A Book of Glosas.