Embodied translation: Henri Meschonnic on translating for/through the ear and the mouth

Douglas Robinson

• Download the full document in PDF [English]

• HTML version of the abstract and keywords:

Abstract

Among translation scholars, Henri Meschonnic is best known as a radical theorist of translation, someone focused on the orality and general embodiedness of the poem, indeed someone who insisted that “we must invent discourse equivalences in the target language: prosody for prosody, metaphor for metaphor, pun for pun, rhythm for rhythm” (Boulanger, 2011, p. 71). What does that mean in practice? And what radical transformations does that practice mean for translation theory? This article does Meschonnic the honor of taking him seriously on mouthable orality, rhythm, and subjectivity by exploring the radical implications of his ”wild“ thinking.

Keywords

Mouthable orality, translating rhythm for rhythm, hearing with the mouth, speaking with the ear