Sens — dessus, dessous

This paper begins by looking at comments made on the translation of meaning in various works about translation across centuries, and shows that there is a high degree of uncertainty concerning what meaning is and the nature of its relationships with form. The second part of the article examines a few extracts from poems by Dickinson, Moby-Dick and Carpenter’s Gothic, studying how meaning is created in the original texts and how it fares in translation. The selected texts do not offer straightforward meaning but on the contrary question the notion itself, its stability and the capacity of language to express the complexities of meaning. The “informative” content, its superficial meaning is only a small part of it, an “inessential” one to quote Walter Benjamin. The deeper meaning lies not in what the words say but in how they say it, in their sounds and rhythms, in the silences they leave or in the profusion and confusion they create requiring the translator to go beyond the superficial meaning and plunge deep into the texture of the text.