Jean Jacques Thomas

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Elucidation/R ev elation Par t I With the benefit of hinds ight (after all, we are in 2026!), it seems possible to affirm that the last thirty glorious years of the 20th century were marked, in Fran ce, by three major lin es d omin atin g the th eory of p oetics. Intellectually, it is probably more economical to associate each of these th ree lines with an emblematic tutelary figure, all three c haracteri zed by the fact that they left us both a body of theoretical reflection and an abundant p oetic praxis. First, I mention the work of Yves Bonnefoy. As Prof essor of Poetics at the Collège de France, his social, professional, and commercial influence was considerable. Alth ou gh he was a discreet figure, worldly self -effacing and without a great all-consuming passion for public exhibitionism, his profound influence on the poetic and literary world of the end of the century is undeniable. Placed in the line of a conservative, traditional and literary poetics which originates in the modernity of Mallarmé, then René Char, and continues today, perh aps in the work of Dominique Fourcad e, Bonn efoy's poetics is largely b ased on systematically versified rhythm, rhetoric and all linguistic work of figuration (comparison, metaphor, metonymy, and other types of tropes’ construction). A poetics therefore based in large par t on the indirect expression of a semantic analogy; this principle, as we know, is widely pres ent as a m ode of composition in the entire French poetic tradition, starting, at least sin ce the Romantic p eriod , with an overwhelming domination . Jacques Roubaud disallo ws this literary poetics that subordinates everything to the primacy of the symbol and, in line with the linguistic works of Saussure, R oman Jakobson, Noam Chomsky, favors a poetics of the sign that rejects the paraphrase elucidation of figu res and calls for a logical and hermeneutic interpretation. Where Bonnefoy's poetry lead s to an end in an artistic universe of its own (the "intra nsitivity" of t he symbol according to T zvetan Todorov), Roubaud's poetics, widely dissemin ated both th rough h is poetic activity as a member of the Oulipo and his polemical theoretical writings in the journal Change, r esu lt in an exp ressiven ess

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of reality that does not refuse the ra tional elaboration of "scientific" observations. This "rigor" of the sign is accompanied in Roubaud by a metrical rigidity that earn ed him the nickn ame "Th e Metronome." However, his is not a roma ntic respect for the expected s pa tial versification and therefore the sim ply "composed" visual aspect of a traditional po em, but more firmly, he favors an enthusiastic respect for the fixed underlying required number of poetic "pieds " [syllables ] in the French poetic versification system. Hence his interest in any form of formal poem b ased on a tight rhythmic numeric system of syllables or other system of strict timing distribution: h aiku , sonnet, rondeau and any other form of traditional sacred liturgical poem with lines of 6 or 8 syllables) . Thir d, I must list Henri Meschonnic who is inspired by the research and fundamental considerations put forward by the F ormalism movement of the Prag ue and Moscow Schools, to which he had direct access through his practice of the Russian langu age. At th e end of th e 1960s, he began a long a nd patient work of poetic reflection popularized by a series of volumes generally collected under the name Pour la poéti que… When he became the director of my Master's thesis at the University of Lille, he indicated that his main inspira tion for his teaching of Poetics came from a daily familiarity with th e anth ropological lin guistic works of Wilhelm von Humboldt and the post -Saussurean criticism against the “tyranny” of “le signe” recently developed by Émile Benv eniste. Appointed to the position of Assistant Professor at the University of Paris-8 in June 1968, he first sha red the direction of a doctora l seminar in poetics with Tzvetan Todorov. Then in June 1969, Todorov, having accepted a f u ll-time p osition as a researcher at the CNRS, Meschonnic was given the d ir ection of the poetics semin ar at P aris-8 which, coupled with his editorial responsibilities at the publisher Gallimard, allowed h im to solidify his personal and professional reputation as an important fig ure in F rench poetic theory at the end of the 20th century. The operational concept of "rhythm" is definitively attached to Meschonnic's theoretical position on the nature of poetics considered as a social and intellectual manifestation of our contemp orary societies. During the transitional academic year 1969-1970, when the University of Paris 8 was s till designated as the Centre Universitaire Expériment al de Vincennes, at the poetics seminar co- directed by Todorov and Meschonnic, present tog ether we re the editors of the jo urna l Tel Quel:

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Philip Sollers, Julia Kristeva, etc. and those of the oth er journal Change: th e lin gu ist Mitsou Ronat, the psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco, etc., both very close to Jacques Rou bau d . Starting in May 1970, members of the Tel Quel journal stopped coming because Mesch on nic violently attacked Tel Qu el’s attachment to the celebration of C hinese ideograms, which, for Meschonnic, was nothing less than a return to the exclusive primacy of the signified: “Chines e ideograms are the direct notation of a sig nified” 1 , whereas all the effort of recent poetics has focused on taking into account a significance linked to the exp ressive p ower of th e signifier. As Meschonnic wrote at the time: “Making sense is of all language, an effect of significan ce, and not the pairing [in the Sign] of a linguistic signifier and a signified ” 2 . For Meschonnic, at the end of the 1970s, it was precisely the term "rhythm" that woul d bring together all the elements of "making sense: the effect of significance." It must first b e understood that the term "rhythm", as Meschonnic conceives it, is a holistic compound, it cannot be reduced to its meaning in traditional poetics: physiological breat hing, or any other procedure of physiologic al verbal production. Meschonnic's rhythm is not "pneumatic." Meschonnic's rhythm is not graphically spatial eit her; it certainly incorporates the blanks on the line, long or short as Apollinaire imposed, but this is on ly a secondary artifice d esigned to underline a profound sig nificance of the poem: erasure, reinforcement, waiting for meani ng… In short, "rhythm" is "the whole language" of the poem and therefore in Meschon nic's p oetic procedure, poetic interpretation cannot be based on a limited or only a partial understand in g of the verbal meaning; hence the liminal proclamation as the basis of his poe tical understanding: "not words, but phr ases." As Benveniste defi ned it, poetics deals not with “texts” that can be p arsed into a “bag of words”, but a discourse, a wh olesome su m. Given these theoretical preliminaries intended to map, in their historical c ontext, the main as pects of Meschonnic's theory of poetics, when the general principles of this MLA roundtable were formula ted, it seemed to me, at first, that the most productive approach coul d consist of taking a poem by Jacques Roubaud published in 1979 a nd tra nsl ated into English by Roubaud himself, "de force et" 3 in order to show, throu gh h is own work of translation , th e fundamental goals and responsibilities of a translator and then confront t he result with Meschonnic’s own views of transla tion as outlined in his writings about poetics.

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The analysis of this poetic sample by Roubaud hig hlights, in my opinion, two main features of the translator's work, and therefore, in this specific case, two central con cerns of the au th or: 1. As I have shown elsewhere 4 , in Roubaud's case, prose is often considered as a means of explaining what is expressed in his poetry in an obliqu e, con centrated, obtu se, rar efied form.

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This is the case of what we observe when stud yin g in p arallel th e text of the poetic volume Quelque chose noir 5 and certain passages in the “novel” Le Grand Incendie de Londres 6 ; th e translation into English of the poem “de force et” manifests the sam e objective of intelligibil ity . The choice of the title of the translated poem is formally revealin g: in French it is mostly an asemantic sequence of grammatical markers: “de force et” , while in English: “grass rectify” takes up a verbal sequence from the poem in line 2 tha t associates a noun and a verb and therefore allows a hint of semantic content t o be interp reted as in an everyday exp ression. A w ork of semantic clarification all the more astonishing for Roubaud as it is accomplished by a poet/poetician whose most publicly recognize d sl ogan is: "Poetry says what it says by saying it"; a peremptory dogmatic statement which should discourage any attempt at post -opera tive intellectual elucid ation of poetic ind ir ect significance.

2. The title of this segment in the Englis h text hig hlights the term rectify and therefore immediately connotes the activist slogan by Ezra Pound's for poetry: rectification of terms. A call to arms so dear to contemporary modernist poets: no way we a re going to be lost in the words of others, one real poet must find the right word, one must invent a si ngul ar lang uage. More specifically for this Roubaud’s poem : this is its very significance, its very rhythm : the poem begins with an excuse: "'it's my vocabulary that did th is to me'" an d end s with a final

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limiting injunction: "nothing else"; between the first line which introdu ces th e term "vocabulary", there is no other direct reference to the abstract act of writi ng except through the connotative p resen ce of thematic syllepsis: page [leaves = feuille], line [ligne], volume. However, as in tra ditional poetics, these concrete terms function as figurative shifters. Therefore, the main poetic theme instructing the poet to rectify the banal common use of lan gu age by installing a sing ular unaffected discourse is advocated through the traditional means of metaphoric analogies: straightening the lawn to erase the repeated passag e of feet, reddening of the leaves to put an end to the uniformity of silence, etc. The "effect of significance" of the poem is only “elucidated” by the paraphrase of the figu rative. The con ceptu al sign ifican ce of the text which should apply to the real world (finding one's voice in the face of a world marked by the uniformity or silence of the purpose) can only be understood by the r ead er in an in direct way , and only by these readers who allow themselves to go beyond the literal meaning con veyed by the concreteness of the elements put forward: leaves, wind, bricks, bump, snow... This study, based on a close reading of a text, was to l ead to a com parativ e consideration in order to show, through the work of a self -edited translation, how, despite fairly close theoretical origins, the poetic theories of Jacques Roubaud and Henri Mes chonnic became irreconcilable and how their common poetic work at the University of Pari s-8 resulted, throug h time, in a polemical debate marked, often, by a mutually destructive violence unju stifiably exacerbated by the social netw orks of the time. To offer a sign ificant marker of th is op en pu blic p olemic 7 :

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As I had proposed in my article "The Image and the For mula" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1772564?origin=cr ossref) to disting uish the differences between Meschonnic and Bonnefoy, direct comparisons of texts between two poetic practices often reveal extremely productive and significant differ en ces. Nevertheless, it quickly became manif est to me that the standard format of an MLA round table woul d surely not be enough to exha ust the s ubject. I therefore decided to stick to a o ne- dimensional work focused on th e issu es of the tran slation of a poetic text by Meschonnic in order highlight some of his main poetic dir ectives an d t o satisfy the set of specific question s linked to the guidelines of this session.

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Par t II My choice fell on the translation of an important poem jud iciously offer ed for En glish translation by the two organizers of this roundtable. A simple poem found p age 15 of th e volume Dans nos recommencements, publis hed in Paris by Gallimard in the collection “Le Chemin” (1976).

Chez nous l’arbre choisit aussi l’ois eau l’eau ressemble au poisson je déborde tous les comme. An earlier translation proposed by Gaby Bedetti and Don Boes rea ds as foll ows: At our house, the tree also chooses the bird the water resembles the fish I spill over with comparison s. If, taking advantage of the AI systems commonly a vailable on the internet, we propose the text of the origi nal poem for English translation, we obtain: In our country, the tree a lso chooses the bird. the water resembles the fish

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I overflow all t he likes. Microsoft Copilot did not like the wording of the first line and proposed: In our country, the tree s elects the birds With this added note: “AI-generated content may be i ncorrect.” In this instance, “Artificial Intelligence” means tha t the data based on a considerable previous accumulation of similar linguistic structures available through th e collection of samp les dictates to this v erbal system makes it more likely that a plural form be reestablished here, "birds", rather than the singular "bird.” It means that somehow the lin gu istic p arsin g involved perceives the presence of an extralinguistic incons istency . Probably some s emantic improbability (the substantive “tree” does not syntactically prohibit a subst antive complement that can be in the plural form), th at can be bland ly glossed over in terms of “world knowled ge” by the fact that everyone knows that a tree is the refuge of a myriad of birds, not j ust one bird. What this morphological correction from the singular form to the plural, s uggested by an AI corrector reveals, is, however, the signal of a deeper stylistical disrup tion: the underlying presence of the figurative stylistic con stru ction of a "synecdoch e", the part for th e wh ole. Belonging to the category of trope defi ned as metonymy, this figure of displacement, conditioned by syntax and morphology, ensures a particulariz in g semantic role. It allows for a sort of shortcut in thought and for realities to be accounted for in a more striking an d precise way. From th is point of view, th e choice of th e followin g verb, "selects", appears as a mor e specific d en otative reinforcement than th e verb "ch ooses". "Chez nous" is translated as "at our house" in the Bedetti and Boes translation and as "in our country" in the digital translation. Dependi ng on the context, "chez nous" can i ndeed have this meaning: "Venez diner chez nou s jeudi soir" implies "at ou r h ome," but "Ch ez nou s on n’accepte pas les dollars " refers to the entire country. But the expression "chez nous" can also have a synecdoche value, and therefore a particul arizing effect, which can be clearly interpreted in the translation to avoid, precisely, an overly reductive meaning. Theref ore, we must seek to

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reestablish the collective meaning of "nous" in the original text: "for us," or, to respect the connotative value of location, "in our world." Final ly, it is worth noting that the Microsoft Copilo t version chooses to completely ignore the adverb "also." Given th e immobility of th e tree and the mobility of the bird, Meschonnic's introduction of "also" likely rei nforced the idea that the encounter is the result of mutual will and not simply the initiative of the bird, which has th e mobility. Without accentuating this dimension of eq u ality in ch oice in th e En glish version , the p resence of "also" seems effectively u nnecessary. These considerations about reciprocity lead me to prop ose the followin g translation of th e first lin e: In our world, it is also for the tree to select the bir d. The second line appears to present no ambiguity or di fficulty in tra nslation: the water resembles the fish. What is immediately striking in the translation of th e th ird line is the fact that th e original French puts the l ast word "comme" in the singular while the two English translations install terms in the plural: "comparisons", "likes". Obviously, it is possible th at Mesch on n ic simply respected the morphological nature of "comme": as a conjun ction, the term is invariable, so he could not add an "s" t o "comme". On th e other h and , in English the word "like" can function as a conjunction, a verb, an adjective, a noun, etc. and it is therefore not surprising to see it end with a plural marker in the d igital translation: "likes". By simply takin g th e eq uivalent of the French "comm e", the digital tra nslation is more literal tha n the version put forward by Bedetti and Boes. Furthermore, the use of the term "comp arison " in the Bed etti an d Boes translation already constitutes a complete restitution of the "effect of significan ce" of this sh ort poem by Meschonnic. The purpose of this poem is not to introdu ce th e reader to a clich éic "paysage choisi" of the surrounding countryside, with tree, bird, river, fish, but, more fundamentally, its purpose is to assert a central poetic prin ciple at the heart of Mesch onn ic's

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practice: avoiding metaphor, an analogical trope which, with a semantic disp lacement, establishes a false similitude between two elements subjectively chosen by the author; b ecause of this arbitrary rapprochement they impose themselves as related in this p airin g. But, for Meschonnic the relevanc y of this analogy is only a manufactured effect of reality whose validity remains exclusively in the make-believe domain of literary aesthetic impression ism. Because this literary relationship can only function in the l imited context of esthetic value, it is unabl e to allow a text to acquire any political value, in the sense that Meschonnic understands it, that is to say, to impose an effect of signi ficance in di rect contact with everyday life reality. However, on this third line, in the English translations, the use of the plural terms "comparisons", "likes" r esu lt in th e erasu re of the figurative structur e of the synecdoche present in the original French poem: "les comme". In the English versions it is no lon ger "the part for th e whole" which is put forward, but directly the whole. For the first line the AI search engi ne directly posed the question of the possible necess ity of the plural ("birds" instead of the singular "bird"). Here, because Meschonnic choos es, as is often the case with him, to substitute to a term marked by semantic concreteness an unmarked grammatical word, he imp oses at the same time the syntactic use of a figure of synecdoch e. Stylistically, or in his critical vocabu lary, “rhythmically ”, this figure has the advantage of imposing a shortcut of thou ght and of accounting for a reality in a more striking or assertive way since synec doc he is always a syntactic or morphological phenomenon involving a reduction of terms. "I drink an excellent Bordeaux" is a linguistic economy for what should be: "I drink an excellent wine produced in the Bord eau x region." In our present case, we could therefore restore a comp lete exp ression of the typ e "I outstrip all the constructions of comparison built on the use of the con junction 'like'." The direct restitution of the erased term "comparison" in Bedetti and Boes' s translation directly relaunc hes the question of translation tha t I was about to address when, in my first project, I chose Roubaud's poem translated by its author. As I have poi nted out, one of the characteristics of these translations is a desire to clarify an original text which , by the very nature of poetic work, requires syntactic densification and semantic blurring. Roubaud, without shame, often, in his own translations, clearly deliv ers to us what cons titutes a formal illumination of the mysteries of his original French text. Certainly, the work of transla tion

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requires a significant effort of interpretation of the origi nal text in order to render as authentically as possi ble the holis tic significance, the “rhythm” . But where should the clarification of terms stop? We know Saussure's "madness" when he imposed th e translation of Latin texts: ignoring the s urface meaning of the poem and only restoring w hat he concluded was the deep, underlying, h idden text. In the case of translating Meschonnic’s poetry, I consider that the process shoul d respond to a double concern: 1. to make Meschonnic's textual production accessible to a foreign audience, and 2. to familiarize this foreig n audi ence with the fundamental principles of Meschonnic's poetics. Now, as I have indicated, it turns out that, for me, th is poetic tercet condens es in a lapidary way one of the fundamental pri nciples of Meschonnic's poetics: poetics is not a s ubset of literature or philosoph y , poetics is not a s ub-bra nch of these great a esthetic categories, poetics must be political, it m ust spea k of reality as it is experi enced; it must not abandon itself to the trap of metaphorical assertion, it mu st car efu lly maintain the rhythm of human understanding of reality. It seems to me that these three lines should be considered as a short slogan, that the economy of the original synecdoche reinforces th e rhyth mic economy of the poem a nd therefore that the third line shoul d be considered as the conclusion of the d emonstration or the final exh ortation of a conviction . To reinforce th is con clu sive sen se of th e poem, we can borrow from Meschonnic the principle of spatial placements that he himself uses in his translation wor ks to reinforce the cadences of “r hythm” with bla nk spaces. From this perspective, in b oth English translations, I am not convinced by the ch oice of the verbs "spill over" and "overflow." Both contain a seme r elated to the liquid element, and I suspect that the presence of the word "water" in the preceding line p lays a role in maintain in g the isotopy of this semantic field. Nevertheless, since this is the imperative con clud in g sequence, I propose that the French verb "déborde" should be understood in its imperativ e use in Fren ch , as wh en ever on e wants to overcome a trou blesome obstacle, such as wh en it comes to car rage: "We're dragging!!! We're dragging! Ov erflow/overtake this car..." To support my argument, I suggest cons idering the s pecific use of the concept of “déborder” / “débordement” in Meschonnic’s poetic t exts. Dédicaces proverbes, p. 7, line 15 : “J’ ai un dé bordement du langage par… ”

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Légendaires chaque jour , p. 14, line 3 : “ par -dessus notre ombre nous débordons notre livre nous…” p . 47, li ne 3 : “ nos contours débordés par le poèm e…” p . 55, line 4 : “ i ls nous débordent ils rentrent…” Voyageurs de la voix, p. 69, li ne 5 : “ ce que je cherche mais dans ce qui déborde je trouve mes or igines… ” Et c, In add ition, this cryptic dimen sion of the line as a con clusive imperative wou ld lead, for th e third line, to a solution such as: I bypass [or in common p arlan ce] I overtake every comp arison The i nclusion of the pronoun “I” on this last line i mmediately suggests, retroactively, that, here, Meschonnic is committing a stylistic mistake that is usually heavily san ctioned in elementary “Expression Orale 101” F renc h cours es. Students are informed that in an autobiogra phical text it is clumsy to absentmindedly alternate between the pronouns “nous [we],” “on [one],” and “je [I].” However, in these three lines, the poem begins with “Ch ez nous,” originally translated as “In our world.” Since it is now understood that this is a poe tic ensemble with doctrinal val ue, rein forcing Meschonnic’s own poetic orthodoxy, I see no maj or drawback in simply accepting the fact that the entire ensemble is marked by the a ffirmation of a personal doxa and therefore I am in favor of understandi ng the “our” of the first li ne into “my” to res tore to the whole poetic ensemble the masterful and s ingular tone of selective doctrinal exigency that permeates the entire rhythm of this s hort poem: In my w orld it is also for th e tr ee to select the bird the water resembles the fish I bypass every c omparison.

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NOT ES 1 . SubStance 15, 1976, “ Entretien avec Henri Meschonnic,” Jean Jacques T homas, pp. 117-121. The quote is on page 118 . 2 . I b id . , p. 120 . 3 . SubStance 23/24, 1979, “Poèmes/Poems,” Jac ques Rouba ud, pp. 37-45. The text of this poem and its translation are on p . 43. 4 . Poetics Today, Vol. 8 3-4 (1987), “Metaphor: The Image and the Formula,” Jean Jacques Thomas, pp. 479-504. 5 . Jacques Roubaud, Que lque chose noir, Paris: Ga llimard, 2001. 6 . Jacques Roubaud, Le Grand Incendie de Londres , Paris: Seuil, 1989. 7 . Po&sie 99, 2002. “Henri Meschonnic s’auto-célèbre,” Jacques Rouba ud, pp. 90-100. 8 . Four   poems   b y   H enr  i   Mesc honn  ic,   translated   from   the   F ren  ch   (France)   b y   Gaby   Bede tti   a nd Don   Boes   –   Another   Chicago   Magazine . Consulted April 10 , 2025. A noth er Chicago Ma gaz ine , November 28 , 2023.