Rhythmus bifrons: la leçon d'André Gide

Résumé 0

“Rhythmus bifrons: la leçon d’André Gide” [“Rhythmus bifrons: the Lesson of André Gide”], Stéphane Guégan, Robert Kopp and Peter Schnyder (Eds.), Le Rythme. Hommage à Michel Serres [Rhythm. Tribute to Michel Serres], Paris, Gallimard, submitted, to be published in 2024.Gidean rhythm is fundamentally twofold: it is both the public expression of the author’s personality, and a constraint by which the author protects himself against that terrible freedom from which art is dying – hence the fact that it is sometimes on the side of the rule or the regular, sometimes on the side of the exception or the irregular. Sometimes, moreover, this tension is temporarily resolved in a moment of rhythmic synthesis: this is the case when Gide the translator succeeds (or thinks he succeeds) in doing justice to both his own rhythm and that of the author he is translating. However, while the text of the translation may be the locus of this synthesis, no text exists “in itself”, outside of its readings; and Gide emphasises that the rhythm of his translations will no doubt appear as an irregularity to those of his readers who have first become familiar with the original – the dialectical dynamic being thus re-launched, to the point where we begin to dream of a translation of Gide’s translations... In short, rhythm as conceived by Gide is at least threefold dialectical: because it is born of an ethic, lives thanks to an ethos, but would die from the triumph of this ethos; because it is the son of regularity, feeds on irregularity, but could suffer if this taste for irregularity turned to insatiability; and because, at first purely impersonal, it is worked from within by a singularity that would nonetheless become the enemy of all rhythm if it were to free itself...