Sound / Writing: traduire-écrire entre le son et le sens: Homophonic translation – traducson – Ober!ächenü Vincent Broqua and Dirk Weissmann, Editors Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, Paris, France, 2019 356 pp. Open access: https://www.archivescontemporaines.com/books/9782813002686 (https://www.archivescontemporaines.com/books/9782813002686) ISBN: 9782813002686. Publications (/publications) / Leonardo Reviews Archive (/reviews-archive) / Sound / Writing: traduire-écrire entre le son et le sens: Homophonic translation – traducson – Oberflächenübersetzung Reviewed by Jan Baetens June 2020 We all know by heart the famous definition of the poem by Paul Valéry: “a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense.” For today’s readers, this definition, deeply rooted in post-symbolist debates on “pure poetry”, may seem somewhat outdated. Modern poetry has left in other directions, more socially committed, for instance, or more oriented towards intermediality. Yet before discarding the ideas of Valéry’s supreme classicism, we should not forget that in the same decade, that of the 1920s, the issue of purity was also on top of the very different agendas, for example that of avant-garde cinema. The current interest for “sound/writing” in contemporary theory and practice of poetry and prose can therefore also be read as a paradoxical return of Valéry’s poetics, not with a vengeance, but in a totally new context and thus with a totally new meaning. For what the editors of this fascinating collection on sound- based writing aim at is certainly not a revival of the high-brow, somewhat vague if not para-mystical thinking that finds in Valéry a perfect alibi. The ambition of their work is more disruptive. Sound / Writing takes stock of one century of extreme-avant-garde writing in order to bring about a radical shift in our literary judgments, moving the experiment from the margins to the center of the system. The book presents an interesting gap between its title and subtitle. Normally, subtitles elucidate what titles are about, but in this case the mechanism works the other way round. Granted, the subtitle refers to a precise corpus: homophonic or sound translation, that is the transposition of the sound qualities of a source text into another language without initially addressing that text’s meaning, homophonic translation. As such, this subtitle is not in need of further specification. However it is the title that really explains the larger meaning and context of homophonic translation, often reduced to either a characteristic of some of the historical avant-garde extravaganzas or a gratuitous provocation or even hoax. The ambition of this collection is less to write the complete history of these techniques and to study its various forms and functions than to foreground it as the spearhead of inventive writing in general. Sound translation, in this regard, is not a slightly bizarre or funny genre. Nor is it just a type of translation. For Broqua and Weissmann, the primary focus on sound, in the very broad sense of the word, that of embodied speech, that of bodily performed language, dramatically changes writing itself, making it into a practice of sound-writing, that is a provocative form of using language in order to question all fundamental aspects of what we call literature –meaning being one of those, but also author, text, and interpretation. Homophonic translation is then the tip of the sound-writing iceberg, and what it seeks and destroys are traditional ideas of literature and language. Half of them in English, half of them in French, the 28 essays, gathered by Broqua and Weissmann, first presented at a conference (Paris, 2016) but rewritten and carefully edited for this publication, give an impressive overview of what homophonic translation stands for in historical and technical terms, on the one hand, and how it reframes our general ideas on reading and writing, on the other hand. The book opens with a clear and illuminating (bilingual) introduction by the editors, followed by the keynote lecture by Charles Bernstein (who also coined the expression “sound-writing”). Both texts immediately set the stakes: they open the field of homophonic translation to the broader field of sound- writing, they identify the historical landmarks of this practice, while emphasizing is almost universal character (sound- Sound / Writing: traduire-écrire entre le son et le sens: Homophonic translation – traducson – Ober!ächenübersetzung Sound / Writing: traduire-écrire entre le son et le sens: Homopho... https://www.leonardo.info/review/2020/06/sound-writing-traduir... 1 sur 3 05/06/2020 à 19:27