Translations

In the world of words, I recently finished--after a lengthy period of abandonment--a short essay to accompany some translations I have been doing from Russian. Translation, before it is an activity of writing, is a particular kind of close reading, where no word can be skimmed over; every word is touched and has its shape felt, including the seemingly inconsequential and unremarkable ones which never elicit any attention. (One of the translator's jobs is to render the text's silences and neutralities as well as the ways in which its style speaks out loud, to ensure that the new text does not attract attention to specific words or formulas that are thoroughly unmarked in the original.)

In the world of music, there is a new Vivaldi sonata in my sights -- No. 5 in E minor. I've tackled the first two movements so far, and have been listening to a recording of them (by Anner Bylsma, but also this one below, with orchestral arrangement). Listening with a view (or an ear) to learning the piece myself, I've realized my attention is different. In a sense, it resembles the kind of reading that proceeds translation: it was listening not just for the overall effect, but for each note and each phrase, attention falling onto every single element. Although I lack the language or the command of music theory to explain them, my sense of musical structures is definitely growing, the more I play and the more I listen with this new kind of attention. Some notes -- ones that I'll have difficulty playing smoothly for the longest -- somehow evade being heard by me -- I just can't quite hear how they fit together, how the individual notes are making the sound I hear. Most often, though, like translation, you can understand the original, hear it, but can't quite find the way of rendering it naturally and fluently. But now it's not facility with language that's the obstacle, but facility with your hands, arms, fingers -- and the way they work in mysterious connection with the inner ear. Translating internally held impression into expression -- which underlies all communicative acts, but the coincidence of these linguistic/literary and musical activities has thrown it into new relief.

In essence, I think the illumination that came anew to me with the translation analogy is this: in translation, you have to truly read every word, nothing of the whole can be omitted or glossed over. And in playing music, regardless of whether it is learning by imitating, or individual interpretation, you truly have to hear and reckon with every single note, nothing can be skimmed over, everything is integral to the whole.

I have been shown, too, new nuances in listening. There is a series of eighth notes in the first phrase of the Largo movement -- 4 repeated Es. But all eighth note Es are not equal. I was originally playing them as statically and fixed as the ticking of a clock, but when Matthew grabbed my cello to play them, now I could hear not just the motion of the growing crescendo, but a motion that articulated connection and forwards movement... How, though, to translate this understanding into a comparable expression through my own body's movements remains slightly elusive... The mystery of the mind--body connection, mediated by the ear, continues to fascinate and mystify me.

Despite that, I can play the Largo reasonably well. The Allegro is proving trickier -- how do I convey to my body that it's my wrist that should be moving the bow on the 16th-note string-crossings, and not my arm...? On the recording, though, I love the passages that are hardest of all for me -- they are ones which give me the feeling of what I would instinctively describe as the movement of biographical time. I remember the first time I felt this profoundly in music when I was a teenager -- not coincidentally, probably, at the age when one is just beginning to become aware for the first time of life's biographical movement... (There's probably something faintly Hegelian here, but that's something to muse on another time, maybe... And hazarding a guess at what, technically speaking, is happening in these moments, I think, maybe, sometimes, at least, they are movements of repeated patterns through different keys.)

Incidentally, the piece I translated -- an experimental semi-autobiographical long essay called "The Return Home" (Возвращение домой) from the 1930s, by the Russian scholar and writer Lidiia Ginzburg, itself has very much to do with the connections between physical and intellectual experience: The sensory experience of the body is revealed, again and again -- in the landscapes she describes (the waters of the Black Sea, the mountain roads of the Caucasus, the long birch-lined roads of the north, the Neva’s embankments) -- as indissoluble from the intellectual and analytical movement of thought. And, like listening to the Vivaldi recordings, in this instance translating actually involved, to some degree, translating from senses or perceptions other than purely linguistic ones: I found myself looking at the sliver of Bay visible from my window, parched grasses under foot, and clouds of fog snagging on the Berkeley hills, in order to find the words that might give expression to the experience of faintly comparable landscapes. It's by coincidence, then, that secretly and ever so slightly underwriting this particular translation from Russian into English is a translation of summer in the Crimea and the Caucasus into summer in northern California...