Ethics and Politics of Translating, Henri Meschonnic, Translated and edited by Pier-Pascale Boulanger

What if meaning were the last thing that mattered in language? In this essay, Henri Meschonnic explains what it means to translate the sense of language and how to do it. In a radical stand against a hermeneutical approach based on the dualistic view of the linguistic sign and against its separation into a meaningful signified and a meaningless signifier, Henri Meschonnic argues for a poetics of translating. Because texts generate meaning through their power of expression, to translate ethically involves listening to the various rhythms that characterize them: prosodic, consonantal or vocalic patterns, syntactical structures, sentence length and punctuation, among other discursive means. However, as the book illustrates, such an endeavour goes against the grain and, more precisely, against a 2500-year-old tradition in the case of biblical translation. The inability of translators to give ear to rhythm in language results from a culturally transmitted deafness. Henri Meschonnic decries the generalized unwillingness to remedy this cultural condition and discusses the political implications for the subject of discourse.


Ethics and Politics of Translating
Henri Meschonnic
Translated and edited by Pier-Pascale Boulanger
John Benjamins Publishing Company, Translation Library 91
expected June 2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface by Alexis Nouss
Introduction by Pier-Pascale Boulanger
Translation of Henri Meschonnic’s essay Ethics and Politics of Translating
CHAPTER I. An ethics of translating
CHAPTER II. A code of conduct will not suffice
CHAPTER III. Urgently needed: An ethics of language, an ethics of translating
CHAPTER IV. What is at stake in translating is the need to transform the whole theory of language
CHAPTER V. The sense of language, not the meaning of words
CHAPTER VI. Translating: Writing or unwriting
CHAPTER VII. Faithful, unfaithful, just more of the same, I thank thee O sign
CHAPTER VIII. Sourcerer, targeteer, the same thing
CHAPTER IX. Religious texts in translation, God or Allah
CHAPTER X. Why I am retranslating the Bible
CHAPTER XI. Rhythm-translating, voicing, staging
CHAPTER XII. Embiblicizing the voice
CHAPTER XIII. Restoring the poems inherent within the psalms
CHAPTER XIV. Why a Bible blow to philosophy
CHAPTER XV. Grammar, East of Eden
CHAPTER XVI. The Europe of translating
References
Glossary
Index of subjects
Index of names