I don't think that we can really appreciate literary genius outwith out own - high level - language ability. The field of "comparative literature" is, in this sense, somewhat bogus.
As an historical example; the greatness of Shakespeare was discovered by German critics of the 1700s, and the British learned from them; but I don't think the Germans were really appreciating Shakespeare, because they didn't "get" the poetry.
At any rate, the main reason the German critics appreciated Shakespeare was that they regarded him as a kind of primitive natural genius - a high level sort of idiot savant who spontaneously expressed the folk soul of his race.
This evaluation is essentially false; but it is exactly the kind of mistake made by people who go beyond their linguistic competence. It was the kind of error that made an extremely high European (and American) reputation for the Ossian writings of James Macpherson.
In essence, Comp Lit entails a type of "projection" - of reading-into the author what is wanted to be found there.
Of course this sort of misunderstanding can be valuable in various ways - it can even be fuel for the work of a genius (creative misreading is a real thing).
Yet there is an ineradicable problem when people try to discuss and rank world historical greatness across languages and cultures; and pretend to be able objectively to compare (say) Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy...
A few people may have the linguistic ability genuinely to attempt this; but it is not likely that these same individuals also have the needful literary capacity. And yet there are reams of comparative writings on these authors.
Translations are at best re-creations - especially when it comes to poetry; and that isn't the same thing as the original.
The classical tradition of music does, within limits, seem to be more naturally and spontaneously international than this.
It is, at least, possible genuinely to appreciate and validly to compare the European (and Russian) composers back into the Renaissance. So it is quite normal and effortless to appreciate and compare Monteverdi, Purcell, Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, Debussy, and Tchaikovsky.
The limit of valid comparison is more at the level of musicality and experience/ knowledge - rather than a problem with the language of music.
This is presumably why there has been no such thing as "comparative music" which is analogous to "comparative literature" - Comp Mus is too easy and obvious and valid to require an academic apparatus.
But if "the language of music" is far more international and cross-cultural, then it is also much less of a language - if indeed it is a language at all.
We cannot really express what it is about music that it says - whereas we can (to a significant extent) summarize writing by other writing, words being the major medium of communication.
But we cannot summarize music by other music (or by writing); we cannot "translate" a piece of music!
So, to the degree that music is international it seems to achieve this by its being non-propositional - by music being "an aesthetic experience" (or, at least, an emotional manipulator) rather than a meaning-carrying medium.
Therefore; Comp Lit is a kind of semi-deliberate self-delusion!
More a matter of reading-into, than of reading.
But an activity that can be personally fruitful, a source of fuel and direction for personal development; and there is plenty of genuinely interesting stuff to think and say about such comparisons, and the process and quality of translation.
However, Comp Mus is of interest only to specialized (mostly professional and paid!) musicologists and historians - most music lovers will go direct to the music, and appreciate it (or not), without any demand for an interpretative apparatus.
It is just Too Easy to be interesting!
A case of what you gain on the swings, you lose on the roundabouts?
I certainly agree with this when it comes to poetry. I don't think it's possible to appreciate poetry except in your first tongue, unless you mastered a second language simultaneously or soon after.
ReplyDeleteOf course I might be deluded, but I think I can tell when someone who is writing about poetry ACTUALLY likes that poetry or when they are going on hype or reputation or whatever. It's pretty much your German critic example. If they focus entirely on the meaning or subtext, or even focus on the language but in a way that only really addresses the meaning of the language-- not the music of it-- then I think they're not really enjoying the poetry as poetry.
@Mal - I know just what you mean.
ReplyDeleteAnother disguise for not "getting" the poetry is "close reading" or "practical criticism" - in the IA Richards, William Empson, TS Eliot tradition (and still very common when I did my English degree in the 1980s).
I suppose the reason that these were so popular in universities mid-twentieth century was exactly that they required zero ability to get the poetry; but were "techniques" that anyone who was clever and diligent could master!
There is another level (for me, anyway) when somebody genuinely appreciates the poetic qualities of language in a prose kind of way, but not what makes for "lyric" poetry - which is (for me) the rarest and most delicate of language effects. Many high reputation poetry critics seem to me to lack this sensitivity - Robert Graves, for instance; or CS Lewis. This does not invalidate their work, but I think it restricts their best insights to the intermediate (i.e. in-between full poetry and prose) form of "epic poetry" - and for those less poetic-parts of epic poetry when (as with Shakespeare in his longer works, such as plays) the real-poetry is intermittent.
That's a good point and I never thought about it like that. I've made several forays into the Fairy Queen, urged on by CS Lewis's praise of it. It never occurred to me that maybe I was looking for a different sort of poetry to him.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think you are absolutely right about close reading. I think the best answer to it is: "Couldn't you really apply this sort of reading to ANY text whatsoever? Why choose this one? What excellence is it that draws you to this one other than its reputation?". Surely it has to be on the surface in some way...
I wonder if it's really the case that the most influential geniuses actually had extreme ability as measured by an IQ test eg Newton with mathematical/spatial IQ, Shakespeare with verbal IQ. Shakespeare doesn't use very high order words but I suppose there weren't many in his time.
ReplyDeleteMaybe there's an eternal intelligence of the soul that's more like an unformed conceptual intelligence and this intelligence is channeled into development of practical IQ-type abilities by brain development to different degrees in different people, and this raw intelligence must be relatively unencumbered or unformed by practical ability for genius to be possible? This would explain why most high IQ people aren't creative.
(I believe that all the extremely creative scientists with measured IQs had not very high IQs eg James Watson and Richard Feynman with IQs in the 120s).
(This true soul-intelligence would be what computers are lacking; a computer could do better on an IQ test than any author but couldn't create something like the Legendarium or the Wizarding World).
"we cannot "translate" a piece of music!"
ReplyDeletethis is an interesting observation, and i had never thought in those terms, but it feels intuitively wrong. both classical and jazz tradition relies heavily on a form of 'translation'. national folk songs and popular tunes transformed and amplified. even beyond this, reorchestrations, reharmonizations, and even simply different arrangements constitute a sort of retelling of the same musical story.
i suppose one could alos compare it to 'fan fiction', but i think translation is more apt, because fan fiction tells a new story with the same background (the same orchestration, if you will), but translation is telling the same story with different instruments and thus a different sound. and that does very much change the whole thing into a new thing, just like a literary translation to a new language does.
(incidentally, there is more than one case where i think the musical translation is better than the original, somehow closer to the ideal of the tune, and i wonder if that is possible with literature. not sure).
anyway, i agree with the general point of the post. i am only fluent in two languages, but there is no symmetry whatsoever. it really is like having two minds or two souls, as someone said (can't remember who). and the comparison with music is thus limited, because as you say, music is not really a language (music theory might be, and how much you know of it does constrain the way you hear).
@ben - I tend to think that the most influential geniuses did have a very high general intelligence. But that is not the same as the result of IQ testing, which is a highly indirect and purely comparative measure; with each test having all sorts of biases and limitations. Therefore, individual scores can only be very approximate and may be highly misleading.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, the creative aspect is crucially important to genius (since a large majority of the most intelligent people are not especially (or even averagely) creative, and not geniuses); and there is no way of "measuring" creativity ananlogous to intelligence testing.
If we are being rigorous, which is necessary, computers have no intelligence at all - as well as no creativity; so that is a red herring.
The ability of a computer to score highly on IQ tests essentially involves them already knowing the answers, and matching them - i.e. "cheating". Whereas a real test of intelligence is supposed to be worked-out in real time, rather than being already-known.
Insofar as test answers are already known, this diminishes the precision of IQ testing (i.e. IQ becomes less correlated with underlying true intelligence or "g") , and teaching the test is probably one major reason why IQ tests perform so much less well predictively now, than they did 100 years ago. (As well as being a cause of the Lynn-Flynn effect.)
Of course, increased ability to learn and memorize (as seen in increased General Knowledge) is an *attribute* of higher intelligence in humans, which confuses the issue somewhat!
@Laeth - I don't regard the things you describe as a "translation" of music.
ReplyDeleteBut any discussion of this kind involves drawing lines through a gradation - so as to make a simple point; so I can see the other argument.
One pretty clear difference is that you don't *need* to translate music for it to "work" as a communication, whereas when writing is not translated, it is incomprehensible, and just not a communication!
@ben - A previous post concerning the supposed IQ of "AI":
ReplyDeletehttps://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2025/11/what-is-iq-of-ai-answer-none-at-all.html
This is an interesting question; I had not considered music as translation.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of literature, I think it is right that poetry can only be truly appreciated in the original language. For prose, it is a little different because a story or essay is both the story or the topic and the language. It is not the same, but it can be appreciated. C.S. Lewis didn't know Russian, but I think I remember reading that he wrote to his brother saying War and Peace was a great book.
Also, I think I lot depends on the closeness of the languages. Some years back, I tried to translate 19th century French just as a literal rendering. I did not get all that far, my French was too rusty, but 19th century English came out without any special effort on my part. I think would guess that most of the Western European languages, at least in the last several hundred years are similar enough that translations can work well. And even Russian aristocrats in the 1800's taught their children to speak and read French, so those languages couldn't have been too far apart.
Even scholarly Latin, in my small experience to it, pretty much comes out as understandable English if you try to translate it. But classical Latin is different. And from what I have read, when you get into classical Chinese or ancient Sumerian, a literal world for word translation into modern English is pretty much unreadable, so the translator has to do a lot more.
Of course this is just the opinion of a largely uninformed person in translation. So, yes, I agree that the idea that literary works can be compared and ranked across different cultures is exaggerated, but there is a lot that can be appreciated even in translation, especially a story or ideas.
@NLR - I have read a great deal of literature in translation, yet I remain very unsure about whether I have really read it!
ReplyDeleteFor example, Nietzsche is reckoned by many to be the greatest prose writer in German; yet that simply doesn't come across in any of the several translations I've read. Indeed, none of the Great German authors come across well in terms of prose quality - not Goethe, Mann, or Hesse for instance. I am often very interested by what they say - but maybe I am actually just getting something more like a Wikipedia plot summary, or "study notes" - and missing what, for a native speaker, is probably the main thing.