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...