This chapter is based on the proposition that translation is about the extension of one language by another, not about the provision of a replacement text; translation is not about interpretation but about inhabitation. The chapter critically reviews different perspectives on interpretation, particularly those supplied by the diachronic and synchronic, by universality and totality, by the signifier and the signified. Our meanings are always just beyond us, in intentions to mean. The chapter goes on to consider the status of je/I in speech and the nature of linguistic performance. It ends with a short reflection on translation’s perturbational effects on language.

This Introduction immediately poses the book’s underlying questions, which themselves lead into a distinction between the philosophy of translation, on the one hand, and the science and theory of translation, on the other. The methods and persuasions of the book are described, as is the structure of the argument, which is provided with further justifications. The Introduction ends with a brief note on the difficulties of representing rhythm.

The coda is essentially a supplementation of, rather than a conclusion to, what has gone before. It begins by considering the space of the page as a textual environment, and the ways in which its meanings are diversified by tabular layout. The argument moves on to the challenges of multi-perspectivalism and agglomerative looking as they weave a depth in our existential duration and ecological relating. Translation also triggers blind fields beyond the frame of the text by the use of collage and the cultivation of Erlebnis. The coda then addresses the nature of translational subjecthood, and ends with propositions about the real ecological reach of translation which is an integral part of its literariness.

This chapter is a declaration of the author’s translational assumptions: rhythm is a force that resists the signified; translation promotes sense-making rather than the gathering of meaning, the relational and the associative rather than the intelligible; back-translation is indispensable to translational exchange and dialecticity; translation operates most fruitfully in the ST’s invisible; the text is not the ST but the totality of its possibilities. A translation of Rilke’s sonnet to Orpheus 1, 5 exemplifies this notion of totality. And the translational involvement of the performing body is illustrated in a translation of the first stanza of Verlaine’s ’En sourdine’. In conclusion, the chapter revisits distinctions between vocative and accusative perspectives, sense and meaning.

The underlying proposition, that translation is a model or homologue of ecological action, involves the rejection of notions of preservation and conservation. For their own continuing health, ecosystems need to be conducted in the same spirit as a translational act. The chapter then turns to Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt and its apprpriateness to translational thinking; then to its legacy in biosemiotics. How, then, does translational language achieve that perlocutionary ability to re-immerse us in the environment? Through the cultivation of idiolect and alternity (Steiner), and of situatedness and presentness of the voice, particularly in articulation, paralanguage and rhythm, which envelope the verbal with the non-verbal and allow the human to slide towards the non-human. Equally language must be coaxed in the direction of the indexical, iconic and onomatopoeic, more flexibly understood; and language must be translated into forms and shapes unfamiliar to itself so that it can explore other models of psycho-perception. Arguments in the chapter are exemplified in translations of Hugo, Saint-John Perse, Heredia, Baudelaire and Hopkins.

After revisiting Bohm’s implicate and expliocate orders, the chapter looks into the kinship between the implicate order and both Bergsonian duration and the continuity of the reading consciousness. Articulation and form also particpate intimately in ongoing duration. But what is the nature of the time of reading and how do we apprehend it? The chapter goes on to examine and criticize Bergson’s cinematographic account of language perceived as movement. Bergsonian duration and the dynamic of translation are compared with Impressionist painting. The chapter then moves on to consider the part played by voice and rhythm in the realization of duration and of intuitional relationships with text. It finally sets itself the task of identifying a rhythm pecular to translational activity itself. The chapter includes, as illustrations, translations from Eluard, Laforgue and Leconte de Lisle.

After an initial inquiry into the distinction between difference and the differential, in a text’s constant divergence from itself, the chapter examines the relationship between language and anatomy: how deeply embedded in the body is language? How biological is it? And what repercussions do these questions have for translation? There follow further reflections on the written and the spoken and poetry’s part in that dichotomy. The chapter then engages with issues of speech-flow and articulation and goes on to look at connections between diversity and the subjectivation of expression.

The translator is first and foremost a reader, who fulfils the act of reading through translation. The chapter goes on to question Habermas’s assumption of a necessary distance between the literary text and the reader. The author’s own version of the literariness of text and of the reader’s part in its construction are then explored, as are the differences between writing and speech. The investigation of the reading experience is developed, to further elaborate the nature of readerly participation: ’Reading is a sympathetic supplementation of text’.

This chapter examines the operation of dialogue and reciprocal exchange between the ST and the translator. Dialogue ensures that this relationship will always be incomplete, unfinished. By translational dialogue, one art extends the expressive capacities of another. The motor of dialogue is dialectics, and the chapter goes on to evaluate different versions of dialectical progression, while itself opting for a dialectic which releases a semanticity, as opposed to a semiology, a dialectic of participatory subjecthood. The chapter closes with an assessment of David Bohm’s vision of dialogue, since its concern with implicate and explicate orders lead into the chapter following. The chapter also contains indicative translations of Lamartine and Hugo.