Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas

This book is a celebration of a work by the late Henri Meschonnic, originally written in French and translated and edited by Pier-Pascale Boulanger. It is presented in sixteen short chapters but is billed as an essay by the editor, who writes: ‘In his essay Éthique et politique du traduire […], published in 2007, M deals concisely with the core issues he had been tackling since the 1970s […]’. He adds that ‘the present book follows up on Poétique du traduire, published in 1999, but focuses more intensely on the topic of rhythm and ethics in translation’ (11). In this regard, the title and the contents of the book do not match.

Preceding an introduction by the translator-cum-editor is a preface by Alexis Nouss, entitled ‘A life in translation’, which is essentially a eulogy. Nouss notes that M proposes no ‘new arguments on translation’, nor on ‘the dynamics of subjectivity and historicity’ (7). The all-encompassing theme is ‘poetics’, which ‘concerns the totality of human constructions’ and as such covers ‘any human relation [which] has to take place through language’ (7).

In his twenty-two–page long introduction, Pier-Pascale Boulanger begins by assessing M’s stature as an original thinker and his trail-blazing role in denouncing some grave misinterpretations of Ferdinand Saussure’s work, especially with regard to the distinction between meaning and form which, he says, Saussure never claimed was ‘the true nature of language’ (12). M was also profoundly disturbed by the way linguistics had parted company with literature, except for glorious exceptions like Roman Jakobson, who was a formative influence on M’s own thought.

Boulanger admits frankly that ‘reading M in French is trying even for native French speakers’ (29). Many English-speaking readers would readily agree. This also invites inevitable comparison with Jacques Derrida, M’s more well-known compatriot and contemporary. For Boulanger, Derrida’s style was ‘catchy’ (19) and his trademark deconstruction in tune with the dernier cri of his times. M’s work, by contrast, had no such political appeal, and it did not have ‘the seductive powers of Derrida’s writing and [the] infatuation of deconstructionists’, which M dismissed as the ‘Derrida effect’ (20).

With regard to M’s own writing, its aphoristic, and often epigrammatic, style may make it difficult for the average reader to comprehend his message, as Boulanger rightly warns. Equally challenging is his somewhat meandering way of exposing ideas. The sixteen  chapters of this book have headings like ‘Faithful, unfaithful, just more of the same, I think thee O sign’, ‘Sourcerer [sic], targeteer [sic], the same thing’, ‘Embiblicizing the voice’, and so forth, which are more enigmatic than user-friendly. Additionally, neologisms like ‘decurrentfrechify’ and ‘unthought’ may fluster a reader.

M exhorts translators to pay more attention to the materiality of their source text and its native rhythm, therein lay his ethics of translating.