Translating Mouvement, Translating Movement

Abstract

A particular problem arises for the translator when a word has no equivalent in the target language, because what it refers to is something that the speakers of that language simply do not think. The French term mouvement is a case in point. All French dictionaries give prominence to a definition of the term which relates it to impulse, sentiment and passion and characterizes it positively as a ‘sign of life’. By contrast, although the OED records that movement may refer to ‘a “moving” of the mind’, ‘an impulse of desire or aversion’, it defines this usage as now obsolete. The article begins by tracing the problem as it arose during the translation of some of Maurice Blanchot's early writings, before going on to show that, in Blanchot's use of it, the term mouvement eventually parts company with all of its received meaning in French, and refers to the movement whereby language itself becomes writing when image is allowed priority over rational thought. From having been a problem, therefore, the interruption of exchange between French and English for the translator of mouvement foregrounds translation itself as the site of an original mode of writing.