His parents immigrated from Bessarabia in France. Meschonnic is a key f1- gure of French "new poetics", best known worldwide for his translations from the Old Testament and the 710-page Critique du rhythme. During his long career, Meschonnic generated controversy in the literary com- munity. As a poet and as a translator of the Hebrew verse of the Bible, Meschonnic contends that rhythm rules over meaning, flowing from the bottom up. For him, the revolution in the idea of language is the basis of a continuing change, not only in the poem but also in the idea of history and social life itself. His poems appear in more than a dozen languages; however, even now, almost none of Meschonnic's poems have been translated into English. His poetry has re- ceived prestigious awards, including the Max Jacob International Poetry Prize, the Mallarmé Prize, the Jean Arp Francophone Literature Prize, and the Guillevic-Ville de Saint-Malo Grand Prize for Poetry. As a theoretician of translation, Meschonnic put forward the historicity of trans- lation. He synthesized his views as early as 1973 in Pour la poétique II, Epistémologie de l'Ewriting, Poétique de la traduction and above all, in 1999, in Poetics of translating but translation is a permanent concern in the research of Henri Meschonnic, who presents the translation as a critical act.