21/2000
Studi di Estetica
III serie
anno XXVIII, fasc. I

Gli autori

 

 

Henri Meschonnic

He was born in Paris in 1932. He is a poet, a Bible translator, professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VIII; he has carried out research upon the theories of language and of translation. His main works: - Poetry: Dédicaces proverbes (Gallimard, prix Max Jacob 1972), Dans nos recommencements (Gallimard, 1976), Légendaire chaque jour (Gallimard, 1979), Voyageurs de la voix (Verdier, 1985, prix Mallarmé 1986), Nous le passage (Verdier, 1990); - Translations: Les Cinq Rouleaux (Gallimard, 1970), Jona et le signifiant errant (Gallimard, 1981); - Essays: Pour la poétique, I-V (Gallimard, 1970-1978), Le Signe et le poème (Gallimard, 1975), Critique du rythme. Anthropologie historique du langage (Verdier, 1982), Les états de la poétique (P.U.F., 1985), Modernité modernité (Verdier, 1988), Le langage Heidegger (P.U.F., 1990), La rime et la vie (Verdier, 1990), Des mots et des mondes (Hatier, 1991), Politique du rythme, politique du sujet (Verdier, 1995), De la langue française (Hachette, 1997), Traité du rythme. Des vers et des proses, in collaboration with Gérard Dessons (Dunod, 1998), Poétique du traduire (Verdier, 1999), Combien de noms, poèmes (L'Improviste, 1999).

Abstract. The essential idea which is announced by the title itself is that the critical and empirical study of the notion and the practices of rhythm in the language has led to modify the classical notion of alternation between the same and the different, which was assumed as a universal, into a notion which is relevant to the theory of language, entails criticism of the existing semiotic model and implies a total reorganization of the conception of language in accordance with a model of the continuous rather than of the discontinuous. As a consequence research will have to be addressed to finding proof of some continuity between the body and the verbal, whence a new theory of the subject and a search for a continuous including the language, poetics, ethics and politics, challenging the conception of categorial heterogeneity which inevitably involves criticism of esthetics itself. It is both an institutional and a personal programme of research which has lasted for almost thirty years now.

Gérard Dessons

He was born in 1949, he is professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII. His research fields: poetics, art theories and language theories. He has published Critique de la théorie critique: langage et histoire, (H. Meschonnic ed.), Saint-Denis, PUV, 1985; L'Odeur de la peinture, Céret, L'Aphélie, coll. "Essais", 1987; Le Travail du biographique, (G. Dessons ed.), La Licorne, Université de Poitiers, 1988; Introduction à l'analyse du poème, Paris, Bordas, 1991; Méthodes et savoirs chez Henri Michaux, (G. Dessons ed.), La Licorne, Université de Poitiers, 1993; Émile Benveniste, Paris, Bertrand-Lacoste, 1993; Introduction à la poétique. Approche des théories de la littérature, Paris, Dunod, 1995; Penser la voix, (G. Dessons ed.), La Licorne, Université de Poitiers, 1997; with Henri Meschonnic, Traité du rythme. Des vers et des proses, Paris, Dunod, 1998.

Abstract. In his Réflections et propositions sur le vers français, Paul Claudel likens poetic rhythm and heart beat. The analogy reveals one of Claudel's concerns: make rhythm a life principle, against current estheticisms which attribute to it only a subsidiary poetic role. This approach poses the more general question of modelization within the heuristic process. What shall we think of the selection of a biological model to 'read' the language, when the two domains are not symmetrical, since language is the ultimate signifier and interpreter of all the other systems constituting human experience? This a-symmetry underlies the attempt of the Greek doctor, Hérophile, who applied the names of metrical feet to the description of human pulse. Beyond the problem of metaphorization and therefore of the relevance of the descriptions contained in the adopted definitions, it is possible to see in this course the elaboration of some poetics of the human body, together with the suggestion that a poem can know more about it than biological sciences

Benoît de Cornulier

He was born in 1943; he is now professor of Linguistics and Literature at Nantes University, is a member of Centre d'Études Métriques, has published Meaning Detachment, John Benjamins, 1980, et Effets de sens, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1985 in the field of semantics; Théorie du vers, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1982 et Art poétique, Presses de l'Université de Lyon, 1995 in the field of metrics; in press Dictionnaire de métrique et Rimbaud, questions de forme, questions de sens (Champion).

Abstract. The analysis of popular sayings and occasionally chanted rhymes within the realm of child folklore may serve to clarify rhythm properties and the way rhythm is linked to words, characters which are far from evident outside this metric domain. The correspondence between words and chronological rhythms is stronger than one might commonly suppose, even though it does not depend on coincidences between syllables and notes or durations, but rather on the fact that the opening on a rhythmically pertinent vowel may represent a linguistic segment of which that vowel is the last non-post-tonic one. Thus the keystone of a metric sequence may be its last element.

Andrew Eastman

He is maître de conférences in English at the University of Strasbourg. He is the author of an essay about Pierre Reverdy and of various articles on French and English poets.

Abstract. The present study's aim is to reveal a grammar of discourse specially to be found in Pierre Reverdy's work, through the analysis of rhythm and prosody in a poem of 1916 La peau du cour. The problem is to demonstrate how a certain rhythmic practice - accent, distribution, position, vowels' and consonants' organization - organizes and determines the grammatical values of the language which are turned into discourse values.

The analysis is successively addressed to the construction of time and subject, negation markers, the syntax of relative pronouns in order to show how the semantics which characterizes La peau du cour is built in its grammatical values as a subjective sense of time and as a grammar of fate and solitude. The grammatical forms of the poem fit into the rhythmic and prosodical marks and so they become what Reverdy called "personal means", that is to say the components of a subjective grammar.

Kim Ok Ryon

She has gained his PhD in French literature at the University of Paris VIII with a dissertation on Charles Baudelaire.

She is a professor at the University Chugye Pour des Arts in South Corea and she is also a novelist: Au pays qui vous resemble (prix KukMin 1996), Une fille dans le cahier bleu (1997), Love Bug (1999), Les tableaux non invités (1999).

She is a translator from French into Corean: Modernité Modernité by Meschonnic (1999).

Abstract. Talking about Baudelaire as a translator according to the traditional point of view is equivalent to saying that there exist two Baudelaire: the poet and the translator. It follows that the theory of translation based upon the theory of the sign opposes the original text and the translation. The theory recognizes first the workings of the text and together with them the ties of intertextuality which affect the specific character of the text. My object in this paper is to try and displace the theory of translation from the world of the sign to the world of discourse. The issue is how to bring translation to the centre of the theory of writing.

In order to prove how translation can cancel the distinction, or rather the opposition, between original text and translation, translator and creator, we are going to analyse some fragments of Un mangeur d'opium by Baudelaire, translation of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, comparing the original text with its translation.

James William Underhill

He teaches Literature and Translation at the University of Vincennes-Saint-Denis (Paris VIII). He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1967 and has worked as a translator of both French, in Paris, and Czech, in Prague, The Czech Republic (1990-1993) where he taught at Karlova Filozoficka Fakulta.

He is the author of a doctoral thesis entitled: Voix, Versification et Traduction: Une analyse des poèmes de T.S. Eliot et Ezra Pound et leurs traductions en français, a work which makes a synthesis of ideas on poetry translation and theories of voice, metre and rhythm. The aim of this thesis is to establish the "forms" of free verse and the "formal constraints" that come into play in its translation. He has published articles on translation theory, Pound and Saint-John Perse.

Abstract. This article considers the difficulties involved in the transposition of rhythm and versification in the translation of poetry. Starting with a redefinition of the terms rhythm and form, it questions what role is played by the movement and the organisation of the "free verse" poem. It then goes on to scrutinise the problems involved in dismantling and rebuilding that versification in another language, and the consequences of this technical operation for the "voice" of the poem. The French translation of Ezra Pound's "Ione, dead the long year" is used to show that the voice and the versification of the poem can survive intact in the translation, despite the difficulties involved in the transposition of many formal elements.

Véronique Fabbri

She is Professeur de philosophie en lettres supérieures; in 1998-99 she directed a seminar on "Figures du rythme, vers une esthétique de la danse" at the Collège International de Philosophie. She is docteur en philosophie and has published: La valeur de l'ouvre d'art, Paris, L'Harmattan, 1997 and Esthétique de Hegel, edited with Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron, Paris, L'Harmattan, 1997. She contributed to Rythme et philosophie, edited by Pierre Sauvanet et Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Kimé, 1996; Le Jeu de l'exposition, edited by Jean-Louis Déotte et Pierre-Damien Huyghe, Paris, L'Harmattan, 1998 and Philosophie de l'art, edited by Roland Quilliot, Ellipses, 1998.

Abstract. The paper highlights how, for Gilles Deleuze, dance is a figure of duration intended as rhythm. Besides, dance brings about the disarticulation and criticism of senso-motorial schemes, then the rearticulation of their component elements in a rhythmic totality. On this basis it is possible to define "time-image" in film, an essential image in musical comedy as well as in other filmic genres, such as the ones in Grémillon's cinema, for instance.The analysis of this paradigm leads us to highlight the cosmic character of duration and movement in Deleuze's thought and his lack of consideration for the historical character of subject and work. To the contrary, subjectivity and rhythm take shape starting from a natural impulsional rhythmicity presupposing an original regularity and periodicity. The paper shows then how the rhizomatic figures of rhythm in Mille Plateaux, calls into question the radical seriality of certain passages of Différence et répétition and allegedly starts off criticism of certain figures of modernity ranging Chabrier as more significant than Shoenberg. Against the idea of a serial construction of works, it is the rhythmical enactment of refrains and farandoles which constitutes the structure of works as time-space crystals.

Violaine Anger

She studied at École Normale Supérieure, and is now associated professor of humanities, docteur en lettres, and teacher of music history at Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris. Her PhD dissertation dealt with "poetic and musical rhytmm in France between 1830 and 1890". Among her publication we recall Quelques a priori épistémologiques sur la notation musicale, in "Marsyas", june 1996; Tchaïkovski, Paris, Éditions Gisserot, 1998; the headwords "accent" and "prosodie" in the Dictionnaire du XIXe siècle to be published by Fayard, Editor Joël-Marie Fauquet. At present she is working on a historical anthology of texts dealing with the concept of 'expression' in music (in collaboration with Cécile Reynaud) for Les Presses de la rue d'Ulm.

Abstract. In his melodies Olivier Messiaen tries to put together autobiographical poetry and his own metric research where his deep concern is the construction of a non directional musical time. These melodies were written in the composer's youth, but he later abandoned this genre.Their careful analysis allows us to advance the hypothesis that the combination of this particular music with those texts may be motivated by the special tension (which sets in) between two opposite conceptions of rhythm.

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