When I first saw Marko Pajević’s new edited volume, The Henri Meschonnic Reader: A Poetics of Society, I was at once thrilled and puzzled. Henri Meschonnic is a notoriously prolific writer. A French poet, linguist, and translator, he has authored over a dozen books on the theory of language and translation, including two notably extensive monographs: Critique du rythme (1982) and Poétique du traduire (1999). However, up until the publication of this anthology, only one of Meschonnic’s works had been translated into English and was thus accessible to Anglophone readers: the comparatively short Éthique et politique du traduire (2008), translated by Pier-Pascale Boulanger and published by John Benjamins in 2011 (2008/2011). Holding The Henri Meschonnic Reader in my hands felt exciting, for here was a publication aspiring to disseminate, in its intricacy, the thought of this relatively unknown thinker in the Anglophone world. At the same time, I wondered, how Meschonnic’s titanic volume of work could be successfully condensed into around 300 pages? How could his wide-ranging approach be encapsulated in fifteen rather short excerpts? Did the anthology do justice to Meschonnic’s complex thinking? Marko Pajević’s reader offers an excellent point of entry into Meschonnic’s poetics. The volume is coherently organised into six chapters showcasing English translations from some of Meschonnic’s major works (Critique du rythme [1982], Célébration de la poésie [2001], La Rime et la vie [1990], Un coup de Bible dans la philosophie [2004], Poétique du traduire [1999], Modernité modernité [1988] and Langage, histoire, une même théorie [2012]), with each chapter devoted to a specific aspect of his theory: “Critique of Rhythm,” “Poetry and Poem,” “Rhyme and Life,” “Translating,” “Modernity” and “Historicity and Society.” The book opens with four introductory sections, which give a comprehensive overview of Meschonnic’s life and thought, covering all aspects of his work, from his early poetry and his translation of the Old Testament to his concepts of rhythm and poetics—both in the context of the French intellectual scene at the time (structuralism, Derridean deconstruction) and in light of his main influences (Émile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin and Wilhem von Humboldt). The first pages of the introduction, written by John E. Joseph, focus on Meschonnic’s biography and highlight some of the most controversial aspects of his academic life, which partly explain his position as a marginal figure among French intellectuals and his relative lack of recognition in the Anglophone world. In 1969, for example, he was among the initial faculty of an Experimental University Centre at Vincennes, which would later become the Université Paris 8. A couple of years later, in his essay Le Signe et le poème (1975), he would break any remaining links with structuralist linguistics and wrestle with some of the most influential French contemporary thinkers, including Jacques Derrida. On the publishing front, he refused to pare down the size of his 736-page Critique du rythme (1982) for prominent and well-established French publisher Gallimard, choosing to publish it with the smaller publisher Verdier instead. The second section, written by Marko Pajević, explores Meschonnic’s theory of rhythm and its key concepts, starting with an overview of his critique of the sign—which, according to Meschonnic, relies on a binarism signifier-signified, wherein the signifier is perceived as secondary. This piece centres on the notion of rhythm and its distinct significance in Meschonnic’s philosophy. Going one step further than Benveniste, Meschonnic suggests that rhythm is not about regularity or measure but about form without fixed consistency—it is the process of meaning-making itself. In Meschonnic’s approach, as Marko Pajević points out, value (meaning in context) is more important than the signified (meaning itself). …