Anna Zemánková would listen to the music of Leoš Janáček while drawing, Jennifer Higgie tells us in a piece to be published this month. After Janáček’s daughter died, he had transformed her last words into melodies. By “giving shape” to these notes, Zemánková not only translated the music into another medium but found a way to process the death by cancer of her own son. It’s a remarkable example of how even art as wild and idiosyncratic as Zemánková’s dreamlike drawings, which seem so much the products of private imaginative speculation, can also be understood as (in part) the creative interpretation of existing forms.
It also illustrates how art acts upon us and is kept alive: Janáček’s music means something to Zemánková, who articulates in pictures that otherwise inexpressible meaning. Someone encountering those drawings today might in turn respond by producing a song, a dance, a piece of writing. This extends for as long as anyone sings, or draws, or dances, or speaks on their deathbed, and it produces a model for the transmission of ideas and feelings that allows for their mutation by iteration. This evolutionary model for artistic progress is founded upon sympathy, rather than the antagonistic template that has held since modernity, according to which each generation must effect a “clean break” from the last to establish its own identity. It also depends, like evolution, on divergences from orthodoxy and “mistakes.”
The pattern has been much in evidence in our recent program. A new film installation by Carrie Schneider abstracts a scene from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), Elizabeth Wiet recently wrote, in order to reframe this archetypal story of the doomed male artist—which itself draws on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice—as one of female identification, creation, and obsession. It’s not only the material of others that artists can adapt and reimagine. While Lisa Robertson’s new novel Riverwork extends the “eccentric dandy” lineage of bohemian artists in Paris, John Douglas Millar suggests that it might also be understood as a “variation” on her previous work: a shift in perspective, a change in the code.
All of this came to mind during a panel discussion in Berlin last week. Speaking on the changing (and always reciprocal) relationship of artistic practice to theory, Sung Tieu spoke in defense of an artist’s right to “mistranslate” the ideas on which they draw for inspiration. In doing so, she drew a distinction between what might otherwise be called “misunderstanding” or “misrepresenting” an idea. Presumably because the act of translation is, after all, by definition imprecise and imaginative. There is always a gap between one language and another, and it falls to the translator to bridge it through their own interpretation and expression. The above examples illustrate that this need not entail the corruption of the original. The act of translation is not merely an extractive process, but enlivens the material on which it draws. So Zemánková’s drawings help to keep Janáček’s music alive, much as art can invigorate the practice of philosophy by illuminating those realms of experience that cannot be recuperated into an existing system.
Every translation and interpretation is at once a mistranslation and misinterpretation. Criticism, of course, is just such an act, and so this letter returns to its own longstanding theme: that a healthy discourse depends on critics’ willingness to deviate not only from the prescribed meaning of a work of art (as expressed in a press release, or stated by the artist) but from empty abstractions and monolithic ways of thinking. The critic should “walk around,” to borrow Edward Said’s resonant phrase, drawing on diverse sources to formulate opinions that might not—indeed must not—correspond with any fixed position, however tempting it is to solicit the approval of the group that occupies it. Better to get it wrong, on your own terms.
