Expérimenter en langues, 2. L’intraduction : défiguration et valeur politique du langage

Abstract

In this paper I suggest an historical approach of the poetical untranslatable. I am focusing on disfigurating poetics and translations as offered in the works of Ernst Jandl, Oskar Pastior and Edward E. Cummings. I suggest that “untranslating” bears a political conception of writing and literature, based on the risk of being illegible. By inventing tongues anew, untranslating is remaking the space and the borders of meaning and signification that tongues are setting for us. Untranslating suggests a new distribution of the sensible which prelude to a renewed relationship with the commons. Untranslatable as a matter of poetics is thus deeply bound to the avant-garde’s poetical adventure.

Keywords

• translation
• disfiguration
• avant-garde
• untranslatable
• translatability
• illegibility