It’s said that in the family of art there are Three Sisters – Music, Painting and Literature. But there are also a number of other siblings. Translation, for example, and cover versions of work by other artists, which are often as artistic as the works that inspire them. Musicians often view cover versions as homages. Elvis Presley said he released “Blue Suede Shoes,” a cover of a song released earlier that year by Carl Perkins, who had been in a car accident and was unable to promote his record. Presley’s release rescued Perkins and his work from its brush with death. Scottie Moore, the lead guitarist on Presley’s version, said that “Elvis…was doing it as more of a tribute type thing.”
In 2012, the composer Max Richter released the album Recomposed by Max Richter, subtitled Vivaldi – The Four Seasons. Richter’s version was a recomposition of Vivaldi’s masterpiece which, Richter felt, had become “banalized” by overuse in shopping malls and elevators. (As Lydia Davis notes, commuters in New York “may hear a little Vivaldi from the loudspeakers of the Port Authority Bus Terminal or Penn Station.”) Although Richter discarded three-quarters of Vivaldi’s music and overlaid the rest with his own , his recomposition brings Vivaldi’s work so clearly to the fore that at times it’s not clear which composer we’re listening to.
“Richter’s work is not an adaptation of Vivaldi,” says Daniel Hope, the solo violinist for the premier performance of Richter’s Four Seasons, “it’s a recreation. The deeper you enter Richter’s work, the closer you approach Vivaldi.”
In literature, translations can be seen as cover versions of another writer’s work. Annie McDermott, who translates Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero, notes that Kafka was an early influence on Levrero’s writing, and that Levrero claimed that his first novel, The City, “was almost an attempt to translate Kafka into Uruguayan.” The City is Kafkaesque in tone, but it is not Kafka. The narrator inhabits a city in which he is constantly becoming lost, even when he sets out for the corner grocery store; every attempt to move in a given direction results in frustration and inertia. It’s like Kafka, but not a word of the novel is from Kafka. “Everything Levrero wrote,” writes McDermott, “is instantly recognizable as his.”
In what sense, then, is The City “almost a translation” of Kafka”? In this sense: the deeper you enter The City, the closer you approach The Castle.
In her essay “An Experiment in Modernizing Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey,” Lydia Davis discusses her reason for doing what at first seems an odd exercise: “translating from English into English.” She undertook the task of modernizing A Sentimental Journey, which was published in 1768, in order to make Sterne more accessible to contemporary readers, not so much because modern readers can’t read Sterne in the original, but because hardly anyone does. She finds this odd, since many people still listen to eighteenth-century music and look at eighteenth-century paintings. She thought that if she “made Sterne easier to read, perhaps a few readers would be drawn to the original.” Which is one of the things any translator working from any source language hopes to accomplish: to direct readers to a writer they may not know or have not read, or whose popularity – like that of Carl Perkins or Antonio Vivaldi – has faded either from disuse or over-familiarity.
Of the Three Sisters in art, Literature seems the most vulnerable to the passing of time. We know only a tiny percentage of Greek and Roman literature. Of Euripedes’s 92 plays, for instance, only 19 have survived. The practice of translating an oral literature to a written text does not guarantee that the original stories continue to be told. Teju Cole, in “A Quartet for Edward Said,” writes that he first heard the Poco allegretto from Brahms’s Third Symphony in 1995, in the Tower Records shop of the World Trade Center. Many years later, he was listening to the same movement in a taxi when he found himself “passing the site where the World Trade Center had stood: a remarkable coincidence. The towers, of course, were gone. But the music – music one would have thought of as delicate and helpless – was still blooming out, and it always will.” Translating a text from one language into the same language years later may be seen as an effort to give to Literature some of the longevity of its Sisters.
In his novel Open City, Cole lifts a passage “directly” from James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” because he felt a kinship with Joyce and responded viscerally to “The Dead’ when he first read it. “In one paragraph,” Cole writes, “I substitute rain for snow, and Belgium for Ireland, but otherwise make few changes to Joyce’s original.” He says this is not plagiarism, because he had no intention not to be found out: “The lifting is obvious and unsubtle.” Nor was he simply being influenced by another writer. It’s more the case that his literary sensibility was shaped by other writers, and passages from their work flow through his imagination and have become part of his own vocabulary.
“Far from having any anxiety of influence,” he writes, “I am skeptical of an originality that does not place itself in conversation with antecedents.”
Citing lines from Joyce or Thomas Mann or W.G. Sebald, he says, constitutes an ongoing conversation with writers who have helped to shape his consciousness. That’s just what cover versions do for musicians, and translations for writers.
Thanks for this. It has opened me up a little more to the relationships that exist in the creative realm.
Great post, thanks for sharing. I've been thinking a lot about the artistic relationship between consumption and creation lately. When I'm blocked in my writing I copy out passages of work from authors I love in an attempt to allow their work to flow through me and into my writing. Coincidentally, I've also been reading about Elvis this week after watching Baz Lurhmann's film and listening to Max Ritchter while I write....so this post resonates with me on multiple levels. I'll have to look up Lydia Davis, as her work sounds very interesting.