Defining the keyboard edition in his 1835Universal-Lexikon der Tonkunst, Gustav Schilling argues that
[c]ertain figures of other instruments, for example, the string orches-tra, (or the sustained tones of the winds) are partly unplayable on the piano, partly without effect, or a bit of both. Other figures must there-fore step into their place; one must achieve the same effect with other tools, just as the translator must give up fidelity to words in other languages in order to protect the sense.60
Schilling is far from the only individual to have noted the relationship between arrangement and translation. Writing in 1922, for example, Alexander Brent-Smith suggests that “[o]ne duty of the transcriber is to translate music from one language into another in which it will speak with greater force.”61 In his intro-duction to his keyboard arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies, Liszt explains that he “shall be satisfied if [he has] accomplished the task of the intelligent en-graver and conscientious translator, who capture both the spirit and the letter of a work and thus help to propagate knowledge of the masters and a feeling for beauty.”62 Jonathan Kregor has recently adapted the translation theories of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt to help understand Liszt’s transcriptions.63
The basic claim of those who argue that arrangement and translation are anal-ogous is relatively clear. Both the translation and the arrangement make an orig-inal available in a way that it would not previously have been; both are normally prepared by someone other than the creator of the original; both are often viewed with disdain; both are often closely associated with economic gain; and so on.
Perhaps the deepest similarity, however, and as Schilling argues, is that both re-quire of the translator or arranger that they take a position with regards to the apparently age-old distinction between letter and sense. In the case of transla-tion, this is the distinction between the individual words of a sentence and the general meaning of a statement; in the case of arrangement, it is (apparently) the
60“Gewisse Figuren anderer Instrumente, z.B. des Streichorchesters (oder die langaushaltenden Töne der Bläser) sind auf dem Fortepiano theils unausführbar, theils ohne Wirkung, oder doch von anderer oder geringerer. Es müssen also an ihre Stelle andere Figuren treten; man muß dieselbe Wirkung mit andern Mitteln erzielen, wie etwa auch der Uebersetzer aus fremden Sprachen die Worttreue bisweilen aufgeben muß, um den Sinn zu bewahren.” See appendix one, page 191, line 78.
61[Brent-Smith, 1922, 169].
62“Mein Ziel ist erreicht, wenn ich es dem verständigen Kupferstecher, dem gewissenhaften Ue-bersetzer gleichgethan habe, welche den Geist eines Werkes auffassen und so zur Erkenntnis der grossen Meister und zur Bildung des Sinnes für das Schöne beitragen.” Forward to Franz Liszt,Symphonies de. L van Beethoven, Partition de Piano.
63See [Kregor, 2010, 12–33].
distinction between the specific notes of a passage and the general effect that the passage has when performed. Ultimately, this distinction might have its roots in any number of discourses, from the Biblical assertion that “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life”,64through to the classical metaphysical position that essence is distinct from accident.65 Whatever its origins, the predominant discursive fea-ture of translation theory has for several centuries been an antithesis between the spirit of the text and its letter, typically interpreted as a distinction between literal or idiomatic translation. As early as 46BC, Cicero writes of one of his trans-lations that “I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I preserved the general style and force of the language.”66 In 395, Jerome defends one of his translations by arguing that “I render not word for word, but sense for sense.”67 In 1680, John Dryden supports a translation which adheres to the spirit of a text rather than its letter by quoting Sir John Denham’s paean to Sir Richard Fanshaw:
That servile path, thou nobly do’st decline, Of tracing word by word and Line by Line;
A new and nobler way thou do’st pursue, To make Translations, and Translators too:
They but preserve the Ashes, thou the Flame, True to his Sence, but truer to his Fame.68
Managing the balance of ashes and flame has long been the particular challenge facing the translator.
One of the most celebrated contributors to the theory of translation is Wal-ter Benjamin, whose 1923 piece “The Task of the Translator” has profound im-plications for the understanding of keyboard arrangement. For Benjamin, the translation is much more than the simple communication in a new language of a volume of information. Its purpose is to make both the original and the trans-lation “recognisable as fragments of a greater language.”69 Language, Benjamin believes, is a site of pain: in using it one is committed to the fact of its separation of what is meant [das Gemeinte] from the way of meaning it [der Art des Meinens].70 It is not possible to control the relationship between the two, nor to overcome the division: there is no necessary connection between the word ‘bread’ and bread itself. Benjamin believes, however, that there might be a language in which these torn halves are reunited. In this language of which Benjamin dreams—what he calls the “pure language” [reine Sprache]—the term for bread actuallyisbread it-self.71 Translation helps us realise the existence of this pure language because in the act of translating, one attempts to capture the things that are meant (das Gemeinte, the signified, concepts) by using different ways of meaning (Art des
642 Corinthians, Verse 3, Chapter 6,The Bible, English Standard Version.
65See, for instance, Aristotle [1999].
66[Venuti, 2000, 13].
67[Venuti, 2000, 23].
68[Venuti, 2000, 39].
69[Benjamin, 1996, 260].
70[Benjamin, 1996, 257]. This can also be referred to as the distinction between the signifier and the signified.
71[Benjamin, 1996, 261].
Meinens, the signifier, words). The consequence of this attempt is the acknowl-edgement that the two are separate at all. This realisation has a double impact.
On the one hand, it reveals us to be in painful separation from our own language in the first place, a position where the word ‘bread’ only means bread by virtue of a series of arbitrary historical connections. On the other, it raises the Messiah-like hope that the two halves of language could one day be unified into a pure language without any such internal division. “[I]n a singularly impressive man-ner,” believes Benjamin, the translation “at least points the way to this region:
the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfilment of languages.”72
The translation, Benjamin argues, points up the promise of language’s future reconciliation with itself. It also has an impact on the original text. Paul de Man, reviewing and exploring Benjamin’s essay, argues that “[t]he translation canon-izes, freezes, an original and shows in the original a mobility, an instability, which at first one did not notice. . . put in motion, de-canonised, questioned.”73 On the one hand, de Man believes, the translation completes a text by canonising it as something worth translating. On the other, it opens up the text to a destabilisa-tion of its meaning by pointing out that all languages are simply fragments of the
“pure language”.
The point which de Man makes here is the same as the one made by some oth-ers in their discussion of arrangement. Peter Szendy, for example, and drawing specifically on Benjamin’s theory of translation, says that arrangements
follow [the original] without being subordinate to it, but also without being completely detached from it: a kind of alliance, like a shadow that, while still remaining linked to the body whose silhouette it is, has acquired a certain autonomy in its movements.74
Szendy argues that arrangement renders the original plastic; it sets it shimmer-ing, such that a full sense of the ‘meaning’ of the original can only emerge when both original and the arrangement are considered alongside one another. This is exactly the point which, as was shown above, is made by theNew Grovewhen it argues that “it is perhaps only by regarding the arrangement and the original as two different versions of the same piece that a solution to the aesthetic dilemma they so often create will be found.”75 As Benjamin concludes, the translation is a glass which focuses light onto the original. “A real translation,” he maintains,
“is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.”76 TheNew Groveand Szendy want to argue that the same is true of arrangement.
72[Benjamin, 1996, 257].
73[de Man, 1985, 35].
74[Szendy, 2007, 61].
75Malcolm Boyd. “Arrangement.” InGrove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,http://www.
oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/01332 (accessed Jan-uary 27, 2011).
76[Benjamin, 1996, 260].
Benjamin’s claim that the translation and its original must hold each other in tension if either is to be understood appears to be able to help produce a theoret-ical model for the understanding of keyboard arrangement. There are, nonethe-less, two reasons to question the validity of using Benjamin’s theory in this way.
First, applying the results of Benjamin’s analysis to arrangement is unjustified if his premises do not have an analogy in musical discourse. What motivates Benjamin is the belief in the bifurcation between the linguistic signifier and the signified. The purpose of translation is to expose this bifurcation and thus the (impossible) hope of its overcoming. What is the bifurcation in music which mir-rors the linguistic one between word and sense? An initial answer might be that it is the distinction between note and meaning: the musical ‘word’ is the tone, and musical ‘meaning’, meaning. This answer, even if accurate, does not com-pletely resolve the problem. Is musical meaning really analogous to linguistic meaning—that is, do they both ‘carry’ and ‘convey’ meaning in the same way?
What kind of meaning might that be? Does musical meaning emerge from mu-sical sound in the same way as linguistic meaning emerges from the sounds of language? A myriad of questions—none of them new—emerge as soon as the concept of musical meaning is invoked.
Ultimately, in fact—and this is the second problem—there is always the pos-sibility (absent from translation) that the arranger pays no heed to the question of musical meaning at all. The ‘translation’ of a musical original into new ‘signi-fiers’ can be (and was often) carried out purely mechanically: the arranger simply copies the original into piano score, ignoring the ‘meaning’ of the result alto-gether. The latter simply supervenes on whatever keyboard music results from the process of arrangement. How can the argument be made that both arrange-ment and translation attempt to capture old signifieds in new signifiers if it is not even clear that that is what arrangement is trying to do?
The parallel streams of word and sense in translation theory are only asymmet-rically related to the musical side of the equation. Although sound approximates word, it is hard to identify what constitutes musical sense and whether and how it is preserved in keyboard arrangement. Since Benjamin’s assumptions cannot be upheld in the musical realm, it is false to appropriate his conclusions.
Benjamin’s translation theory cannot meaningfully be transferred in its entirety into the musical context. This inability notwithstanding, however, it is the case—
and it is why those studying arrangements continue to return to it—that certain elements of translation practice seem too similar to practices of arrangement to ignore. Perhaps these similarities suggest that translation theory can provide the grounds for some kind of theory of arrangement, even if it cannot be appropri-ated in its entirety?