Henri Meschonnic Research Articles

Autor und Subjekt im lyrischen Gedicht: Rezension und Neukonzeption einer Theorie der lyrischen Persona

Autor und Subjekt im lyrischen Gedicht: Rezension und Neukonzeption einer Theorie der lyrischen Persona

Henri Meschonnic : un maître sans école

HENRI MESCHONNIC: A MASTER WITHOUT A SCHOOL Henri Meschonnic’s international reputation in the field of the Translation Studies hasn’t been properly assessed, as we can judge by the translations of his theoretical works to English: few and late. The author of the paper above discusses the causes of this phenomenon of “non-translation” indicating, first of all, the belligerent temperament of the great French scholar, his propension to the polemic offending his opponents, including his admirers, some of which, e.g. George Steiner, could have been his translators to English. Secondly, the author shows which elements of Meschonnic’s work have been revolutionary in the 1970-ies and claims that the impact of his work was gradually eclipsed by his lack of the academical rigour, namely in defining the key notion of his work, the poetics, instead of very promising attempts in his early studies.

메쇼닉의 번역 시학에 비춰 본 한국문학 번역 고찰 - 소설 『칼의 노래』 영역본을 중심으로 -

This paper is aimed at examining the poetics of translation proposed by Henri Meschonnic and weighing on translatability based on his poetics of rhythm. To introduce Korean literature to the field of the world literature, it is important to select a good literary work. It has themes about Korean historical and cultural features connected to the common concerns of humanity, and clearly reveals the writer's stylistic uniqueness. In addition, a proper strategy should be selected to translate the uniqueness inherent in such a great work. For figuring out the translatability through poetics of rhythm, a Korean novel, Song of the Sword and its English translation are analyzed based on the prosody and syntax, the two cores of Meschonnic‘s rhythm theory in this paper. As a result of analyzing, it was confirmed that the interaction of the rhythm in the original text was fully embodied in the translation, and that the thematic network was properly implemented through the interaction of words rather than simple language conversion. It is expected that the poetics of rhythm could be a new strategy to translate Korean literature in the future.

The French Reception of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Belated Consecration

The French Reception of <i>Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i>: A Belated Consecration

A world of sound and rhythm translating Alice Oswald’s Woods etc

ABSTRACT This contribution focuses on Alice Oswald’s Woods etc. and the translation of some of the poems into French. The article first identifies the stylistic hinges on which Oswald’s poetry collection rests. Alice Oswald, who read Classics at Oxford, draws on the structures of orality found in epic poetry with an emphasis on sounds and rhythm to transcribe a powerful experiencing of the natural world. The poet-gardener fathoms a hidden, other dimension of nature. This sensory, mostly acoustic opening up to nature is what the translation process attempts to render … but how? How can the translator draw the French ‘acoustic community’ (Schafer 1977, 214) into this experience? Can the sound-and-rhythm-based translation make the natural living world resonate in the French listeners’ psyches in the same way? The article draws on the works of Henri Meschonnic, Umberto Eco, Lawrence Venuti and Clive Scott to answer these questions.

„Nur der Rhythmus interessiert“. Überlegungen zum Neuen Hörspiel

Authors working in the genre of the New Radio Play (Neues Hörspiel) in the decades since 1968 have repeatedly and explicitly placed rhythm at the center of their works. Shaped by impulses from <i>Konkrete Poesie</i>, which bear some distinct resemblances to Henri Meschonnic’s thinking about rhythm, the rhythmical forms of these works function on one hand as work on language (<i>Spracharbeit</i>), while on the other the materiality and sound quality of rhythm often take priority over language and its semantic dimension. The genre of the radio play is uniquely placed in terms of rhythm, since rhythms can both structure and be structured by virtually every element of the radio play on virtually every level: rhythm pervades and structures the deployment of voice and language, music and noise as well as audio-technical strategies such as cutting, sampling, etc. This article considers how the phenomena of rhythm(s) might be analyzed media-theoretically and literary-theoretically for acoustic texts: as organization of the movement of meaning beyond verbal semantics, as an aesthetic concept directed at changing our perception, as a means of generating <i>energeia</i> und affective effects, as a contributor to intertextual references. The analytic model developed is illustrated via a detailed analysis of Gerhard Rühm’s 2015 radio play <i>hugo wolf und drei grazien, letzter akt</i>. (BH; in German)

Rhythm, the Political, and the Human: Poetic Thinking and the Construction of Reality

This article extends Henri Meschonnic’s (1932–2009) <i>theory of rhythm</i> to the notion of <i>Poetic Thinking</i>, demonstrating an often neglected aspect of how language shapes our perception of the world. It starts out from the tradition of <i>Sprachdenken</i>, based on Wilhelm von Humboldt and his notion of languages as <i>worldviews</i> and Meschonnic’s work on <i>rhythm</i> as <i>signifiance</i>, that is, as a meaning-making procedure, following the linguistics of Émile Benveniste. Language as our access to the world goes beyond the communication of extralingual facts: the human world is rather also the result of language processes—these are formative for our perception of things, and hence also for our world. <i>Rhythm</i> understood not as meter, but as prosody and linguistic patterns, with its aterial sound aspects, plays a role in these cognitive processes. In such processes, taking into account Martin Buber’s dialogical thinking, <i>Poetic Thinking</i> is the transforming power in the interaction of the form of life and the form of language that acts when a subject constitutes itself in a creative and dialogical way, transforming the way we perceive the world. This awareness of language as poetic, that is, creative, is explained by referring back to the ancient debate of the universals. It changes our conception of reality, of truth, of ethics, of historicity, of universalism and subjectivity. By changing our epistemological beliefs and our vision of what it means to be human, it is eminently political. (MP)

Sobre voos, sopros e vozes: a “(anti)gênesis” poética de Orides Fontela

Resumo Este trabalho tem por objetivo analisar o estatuto ontológico da linguagem poética, fundamentada por um ritmo singular, a partir da apreciação de dois poemas de Orides Fontela: “Gênesis”, publicado em Helianto, de 1973; e “Antigênesis”, em Rosácea, de 1986. Para tanto, lançaremos mão das considerações de Henri Meschonnic (2006) e de Paul Valéry (2007) no que diz respeito à formalização dos poemas enquanto objetos escriturais genuinamente críticos da linguagem, de si mesmos e do mundo.

Linguagem da Pele

Este artigo tem como objetivo estabelecer as formas de contato entre a etnografia e a tradução, além de propor uma tradução etnográfica de um relato de uma filha de imigrante. Entende-se a etnografia como a observação do outro para estranhar a si mesmo, e esta é usada como um método do traduzir, em que a alteridade e o devir são objetos de estudo do tradutor. Refuta-se a ideia de tradução enquanto passagem, para começar a pensar a tradução enquanto contato de línguas. Usaremos a teoria de François Laplantine sobre o olhar enquanto construído pela lente cultural e sua proposta de se colocar o observador (tradutor) sob a lente do microscópio para poder estranhar-se a si mesmo e sua identidade a fim de tentar alcançar a alteridade diante do contato com a identidade do outro. Ademais, este trabalho se baseia na obra de Henri Meschonnic, buscando entender o traduzir enquanto experiência a partir de uma po-ética, em que se reconhece a inseparabilidade entre linguagem, literatura e historicidade, e a partir da qual não se pode pensar a tradução senão como contato. Por fim, propõe-se colocar em prática essa análise teórica sobre tradução etnográfica ao traduzir um relato sobre imigração escrito por uma filha de uma imigrante nos Estados Unidos, procurando não apagar a alteridade.&#x0D; &#x0D; Palavras-chave: Tradução Etnográfica, Alteridade, Imigração, Relato.

Pentru O Poetică A Ritmurilor Discursive În Lirica Blagiană

Abstract Lucian Blaga’s writing merges into the boundaries of the European modernism both if we refer to the formal and the theoretical aspects of his work. His poetry shows us the deconstruction of the typical rhymed verse through the use of the white one. But as soon as poetry deconstructs the concepts of rhyme or meter as a necessity to define the formal aspects of writing, there is the resistant concept of rhythm which shows himself a plural concept. The aim of this paper is to investigate rhythm in the poetical creation of Lucian Blaga not as the asset of formal constructions, but as it was proposed by Henri Meschonnic a discursive rhythm which is in a tight relation with the subject of speech.

On Interpretative Theories of Rhythm

The connection between the concepts of “rhythm” and “interpretation” or “meaning” in literary (lyrical) theory can be received as a mere paradox. The concept of rhythm and metre had a very important, functional role in the theories of structuralism and structural semiotics. These paradigms of literary theory provided very precise, sometimes numerically detailed descriptions of metre, or a rhythm of a poem, however without taking into consideration the problem of interpretation. From the other side, hermeneutic approaches sometimes mention the “phenomenon” of rhythm, all the same do not realize text-analysis, so cannot connect the problem of the rhythm of a concrete text with the general questions of text-interpretation. Finally, the deconstructive strategies of text-interpretation and text-analysis rather don’t pay attention on the rhythm of a lyrical work. Nevertheless, there are some xx-th century theories which are based on the creative function of language and the semantic interpretation of rhythm, especially the rhythm in a verse or a poem. The paper examines four semantic theories of rhythm: suggestions of Juri Tinanov, I. A. Richards, Émile Benveniste and Henri Meschonnic.

“This eternal wanderer”: A non-dogmatic reading of Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) has been widelyreceived as a dogmatic text, putting forward a reductivist conception of the languagesystem. Yet there are grounds for reading it very differently, as Roman Jakobson(1969) did when writing of Saussure’s “dynamic repugnance toward the‘vanity’ of any ‘definitive thought’”. Henri Meschonnic blamed “structuralists” (alabel which, of course, gets applied to Jakobson himself) for turning Saussure’slinguistics of the continuous into a dogmatic “scientism of the discontinuous”.Meschonnic’s list of structuralist distortions of Saussure is the framework for theargument presented here in favour of a non-dogmatic reading of the Cours.

A Poetics of Society: Thinking Language with Henri Meschonnic

Throughout his oeuvre, Henri Meschonnic pursued language and literary studies as a means to better understand meaning-making processes and the functioning of society. By systematically establishing what Meschonnic called a poetics of society, this article explores the connection between a theory of language and a theory of society. Meschonnic makes use of the old debate between realism and nominalism to criticize realism as totalitarian, and situates this on the side of a language theory exclusively based on the sign, to which he opposes his theory of rhythm, which emphasizes the semantic value of the continuous dimension of language. The language of the Hebrew Bible, with its particular accent system, represents for Meschonnic an alternative model for thinking language, changing our ideas about poetics and subjectivity, with ethical and political consequences. This article sheds light on this political dimension of Meschonnic's poetics, making the case for the cultivation of language awareness, for poetic thinking as a socially and politically formative activity. It contends that a different approach to language is a different approach to society, which entails that literature is of general social importance and poetics concerns much more than a narrow conception of literature.

On Rhythm: Voice and Relation

I would like to start from a short proposition by Henri Meschonnic in his masterwork Critique du rythme – ‘La voix est relation’ 1 (‘The voice is relation’) – in order to propose a historical and relational anthropology of the voice. Such an anthropology necessarily passes through the poem, as a form of attentiveness building on the poem. Starting from the dialogism of the poem as ‘la position du sujet de l'énonciation et du sujet de la lecture’ (p. 456) (‘the position of the subject of enunciation and of the subject of reading’), and the specific continuity that the poem constructs from the individual to society, from the intimate to the political, we can constitute the voice as a medium favourable to listening to the overflows of meaning in the poem and therefore trans-subjectivations in and through language. My contribution will show the consequences of this anthropological orientation derived from Meschonnic, both in terms of traditional stylistics and postmodern semiotics.

Rhythm-Sense-Subject, or: The Dynamic Un/Enfolding of Sense

This article traces Henri Meschonnic's concerted attempts to grasp the interaction rhythm-sense-subject, and situates this with the broader concerns of his work: the critique of ‘sign-thinking’, the elaboration of rhythm as le continu, his reflection on historical subjectivity. Meschonnic's thinking of rhythm is of an exigency from which he himself often shrinks back, notably through a series of equivocations (between language and sense, between rhythm as such and an individual rhythmic figure, between discourse as activity and an individual's discourse/idiom). The article focuses on these equivocations, and argues that within them we come to see the complexity, and mutability, of the rhythm-sense-subject interaction. It ends by proposing that we think the place of rhythm in this interaction in terms not of continuity/discontinuity, as per Meschonnic, but rather as a ‘dynamic unfolding/enfolding of sense’.

Translating Meschonnic's Ethics and Politics of Translating

This very short text recounts my experience of translating Henri Meschonnic's essays, which combine the trials of poetry and the tribulations of texts in the humanities. I explain the reasons why I chose to translate Éthique et politique du traduire (2007) and touch on the relation between reading habits and the perception of fluency.

Language-Body Continuity in the Linguistics-Semiology-Poetics-Traductology of Henri Meschonnic

Henri Meschonnic criticized structuralist linguistics for assuming that progress lay with ever-increasing specialization, and for narrowing its scope to exclude the literary. For Meschonnic, a linguistics that does not take account of the poetic – particularly of rhythm – is closing its ears to the very heartbeat of language. Rhythm is at the core of a language-body continuity which structuralists ignored because they considered it unconnected to meaning. That, for Meschonnic, was their primordial error, and he argued tirelessly for ‘the continuous’ in language and linguistics. The programme he devised has certain problems. He never makes clear where the structuralism which he rejects starts and ends; indeed, he himself can be seen as a structuralist along the lines described by Cassirer. Both Saussure and Benveniste occupy a curious position in Meschonnic's structuralism. Meschonnic's tendency to idealize the Hebrew language and Biblical texts, contrasting them with Greek language and thought in a way that borders on, and sometimes crosses into, Orientalism, is also problematic. A comparison with Havelock's treatment of the evolution of Greek from Homer to Plato, however, suggests that the Romantic and Orientalizing aspects of Meschonnic's treatment are merely contingent, not essential, to the position he is taking.

(Non)Translation as Resistance in Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen

After a brief explanation regarding the author’s settle-scholar status in regard of interpreting Indigenous texts, Tomson Highway’s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen is examined as a ‘first translation’ in which untranslatability plays the main role. The term ‘first translation’ will be defined, and a deliberately refined definition of a hybrid text will be reviewed through the lens of several Indigenous scholars. Then, following a brief description of Highway’s novel, the paper will envisage its translatory nature from the point of view of three narrative strategies: 1) The insertion of Cree lexical elements within the text. Here, in a codified manner, Highway forces the reader to grasp the importance his mother tongue has in understanding the novel’s complexities. 2) This is followed by a section on the use of Cree mythology within the narrative. Gerald Vizenor’s use of Bakhtin becomes a useful tool in accessing the idea of two consciousnesses through the intertwining of the fantastic and mythology. 3) And finally, the linguistic challenge of cultural contact within the story itself is examined. From the foreignness of English, quite literally attached to the sound of the language, to the inability of expressing the reality of abuse endured in residential school in Cree, the protagonists push up against irreconcilable cultural/linguistic worlds. Put together, these three different narrative strategies come together to form a langue culture, to use Henri Meschonnic’s term.

Traduzir no século XXI

Traduzir no século XXI é um texto de Henri Meschonnic no qual ele retoma os eixos de seu pensamento sobre o que é traduzir. O ponto de partida de sua teoria/prática é que traduzir é uma atividade que se inscreve na teoria da linguagem. Portanto, para pensar o traduzir é preciso também pensar a linguagem e sair de uma representação desta presa ao descontínuo do signo que opõe: som e sentido, forma e conteúdo, afeto e conceito, linguagem e vida. Para Meschonnic não pode existir separação entre o vivo e a linguagem. Por isso, ele não pensa a linguagem pelo signo mas pelo ritmo. Um ritmo que ele redefine como a organização do movimento da fala, um movimento contínuo. É na prática de tradução da Bíblia hebraica que Meschonnic embasa a sua reflexão e elabora a sua teoria.

Tradução comentada de “ich sterbe”, de Nathalie Sarraute

Este artigo consiste numa tradução comentada. É apresentada uma tradução, para o espanhol, do texto “Ich sterbe”, da escritora russo-francesa Nathalie Sarraute. O comentário consiste na explicitação de uma série de critérios que nortearam o trabalho de tradução, e na apresentação de exemplos ilustrativos dos critérios, tomados da tradução. A definição dos critérios se baseia, por sua vez, na análise do texto original, considerado no contexto da obra da autora. Na análise do texto e na exposição do projeto, são desenvolvidas e utilizadas as noções teóricas de heterogeneidades enunciativas, de Jacqueline Authier-Revuz, e de ritmo, segundo Henri Meschonnic.