“Translating Adorno: Language, Music, and Performance” (1995)

Essay in: The Musical Quarterly, 79/1 (Spring 1995)

 This essay developed out of the process of translating into English a number of essays by Theodor W. Adorno on musical subjects, one of which, "On Some Relationships between Music and Painting," follows. As the project evolved, the larger interpretive and theoretical question of the "musicality" of Adorno's prose came to play a rather important role in informing the act of translation itself. The point of departure is therefore practical in a dual sense. At the same time, both the practice and its accompanying reflections refer back to, and ultimately argue for, a certain way of thinking about translation, which may be summarized as follows. Every translation is a reading, a very close (perhaps the closest) reading. It is a reading inscribed in a new text, where it will be read by another audience. In this, a translation is like a text that is read out loud or sung. In other words, it can be viewed as a performance. The notion of translation as performance, while applicable to all stylistically self-conscious translation, seems particularly apt where Adorno is concerned. The challenge and the transport of translating his prose lie precisely in the fact that the language is so thoroughly thought through. Consciously composed, his texts make meaning inextricable from the text's dense interweaving of semantic and formal linguistic elements. Despite frequent remarks to the contrary by critics who correctly judge Adorno's writing to be difficult, it is writing that begs to be translated, much as music begs to be performed. For Adorno's prose—as will be argued—is musical in his own precise sense of "true" musicality. To borrow from Adorno's comments in "On Some Relationships," this true musicality consists not in acoustic effects but in "integral composition" that "divests itself of the familiar idiom" in order to achieve a changed form of the expressive and create a "radically emancipated music" that embodies new forms of human freedom.

Few would go so far as to term Adorno's language ‘lyrical.’[1] Yet the language of his essays (and to a somewhat lesser degree of his philosophical works) betrays many qualities obviously reminiscent of poetry and music. Take, for example, the first sentence of “On some Relationships”: Das Selbstverständliche, dass Musik Zeitkunst sei, in der Zeit verlaufe, heisst im doppelten Verstande, dass Zeit ihr nicht selbstverständlich ist, dass sie diese zum Problem hat.” The self-evident, that music is an art of time, that it unfolds in time, means, in the dual sense, that time is not self-evident for it, that it has time as its problem.[2]

This is prose that immediately announces itself as diction. It has a highly accented gait and strong rhythmic elements; it actually scans. In other words, it draws attention to, and is constructed in substantive ways around, the rhythmic values of its parts. The five "lines" between the commas, with their six to nine syllables each, echo and refer to each other like musical phrases. Variation, within these regular rhythmic units, creates tensions that play themselves out against the semantic content. The reader who declaims the sentence in Ger- man will quite naturally lengthen the syllables of the shorter second line, highlighting the central notion of the sentence-a form of emphasis profoundly characteristic of poetry and song. That Adorno's writing is musical, in some sense, is therefore evident. But despite the sometimes striking use of rhythm as a constructive principle, the nature of this musicality is not primarily acoustic. In his own comments on musicality in language, Adorno develops a distinction between what can be termed "bad" and "good" musicality. His dichotomy specifically shuns purely, or merely, acoustic effects, especially those associated with melody and harmony. In "On Some Relationships," for example, Adorno criticizes the imitation of "musical effects" in poetry, going so far as to call such imitation, in Rilke's work, the "bad, driveling" aspect of his poetry.[3] In a similar comment in "Music, Language, and Composition," Adorno praises Kafka while criticizing Rilke and Swinburne: “Not for nothing did Kafka, in several of his works, give to music a place that it had never before occupied in literature. He treated the meaningful contents of spoken, signifying language as if they were the meanings of music, broken-off parables-this in the most extreme contrast to the "musical" language of Swinburne or Rilke, which imitates musical effects and which is alien to the sources of music.[4]

Adorno's condemnation of "musical effects" that are "alien to the sources of music" is reminiscent of his castigation in the Philosophie der neuen Musik, of the "assiduous triads[5] with which second-rate composers reproduce historically created forms that have long since forfeited their ability to signal original thought. There is a parallel between versification and rhyme, the traditional forms of Victorian poesy, and the tonal system in music. Both are based on accepted forms that have become second nature. They are "merely" stylistic in their reliance on outward "effects," rather than on the structural whole, and they lull the reader or listener into a superficial, momentary appreciation that falls short of the Hegelian dictum Adorno placed at the beginning of the Philosophie der neuen Musik: "For in art we have to do not with some merely pleasing or useful game, but ... with an unfolding of the truth."

What, by contrast, are the characteristics of a language that could be described as close to the sources of music? An answer to this question is given by Adorno in his essay on the late work of Friedrich Hölderlin.[6] In this essay, written two years before "On Some Relationships," Adorno compares Hölderlin's work to "great music." Specifically, he identifies Hölderlin's use of parataxis as a "musiclike" trope. Parataxis, the placing of the elements of a sentence in series in which they are not bound to each other by conjunctions or subordinate clauses, is a grammatical trope that, like the "broken-off parables," creates a kind of disjunction and nonspecificity that undermine logical clarity and causality, leaving room for a certain vagueness, and for interpretation: "Irresistibly Hölderlin is drawn to such [paratactical] forms. Musiclike is the transformation of language into a series whose elements are conjoined otherwise than in a proposition."[7] As with the "broken-off parables" of Kafka,[8] Hölderlin's musicality is achieved by subjecting language's semantic or expressive content to a kind of contextual break, or rupture. Whereas mere musical "effects" may reside in pleasing tones, chords, or phrases, a break of the kind described here is only meaningful within the context of a structural whole- Hölderlin's poetry becomes musical as a result of the way its elements are conjoined or juxtaposed to each other within the larger structural context that creates the meaning.[9] Adorno's focus on parataxis as the key element in Hölderlin's poetry highlights his awareness of the semantic possibilities inherent in grammar and grammatical complexity. Indeed, it would not be too far-fetched (though somewhat simplified) to state that for Adorno, musicality in language is a grammatical rather than an acoustic category.

Within this grammar of musicality, a crucial role is assigned to transitions. In "The Essay as Form," first published in 1963, Adorno observes that the form of the essay is equivocal; hence it can evoke a unity or identity of words and things that ordinary discursive thinking conceals behind their differences. The differently constituted "logic" of the essay disdains deduction, as it resists paraphrase, precisely through its illogical or ambiguous "art of transition": "In this way, the essay also approaches the logic of music, the stringent and yet aconceptual art of transition, in order to provide the language of speech with something it gave up under the domination of discursive logic."[10] In place of deductive reasoning, Adorno proposes a textual structure in which all concepts are articulated in relation to a "utopian intention" that rests in the configuration of the whole. The following quote is taken again from "The Essay as Form":

It [the essay] becomes true in its progression, which drives it beyond itself, not in some treasure-seeking obsession with fundamentals. Its concepts receive their light from a terminus ad quem that remains concealed from the essay itself, not from a revealed terminus a quo, and in this its very method expresses its utopian intention. All of its concepts are to be presented in such a way that they support each other, that each one articulates itself according to its configurations with the others. In the essay, elements that are discrete and opposed to each other come together into something that can be read; it erects no scaffolding and no structure. Instead, the elements are crystallized as a configuration by their movement; each one is a force field, just as from the vantage point of the essay every intellectual creation must be transformed into a force field.[11]

Adorno's own writing is indeed among the most grammatically and conceptually articulate of all German prose. Complex, precise, and inventive in its eccentricity, it reflects his appreciation of articulation as one of the criteria by which artistic excellence is determined:

There is another criterion that determines the quality of a work of art, and that is the degree to which it is articulated. As a rule, a work is better the greater its degree of articulation, that is, where nothing amorphous or dead is left over and where figuration is ubiquitous. Articulation is the redemption of the many in the one ... Seen in this light, articulation is more than the development of distinctions for the purpose of unification; it is also the realization of what is distinctive, which for its own part is a good thing, as Hölderlin said.[12]

The highly inflected character of Adorno's German enables him to establish an idiom whose distinctiveness relies to a considerable degree on its deviation from the norm. He frequently uses unusual and inverted word order. The result is that his sentences have a choppy quality that recalls the "breaking off" he observes in Kafka. To take a couple of examples relatively at random:

Man nennt deshalb musikalische Form ihre zeitliche Ordnung …

Schrift sind Kunstwerke als aufleuchtende, und solche Plötzlichkeit hat ebenso etwas Temporales wie die dabei sich herstellende Transparenz des Phänomens etwas Optisches.[13] 

What one terms musical form is therefore its temporal order....

Works of art are writing in their flashing forth, and this suddenness has a temporal quality, as the transparency of the resulting phenomenon an optical one. [14]

At times, Adorno may be said to stretch grammar to its limits, transporting the reader or translator into regions where only the case endings stand between her and incomprehension.[15] This is language that strains against the bounds of acceptable sentence structure; its tendency is to free the individual words and phrases from their immediate context, often giving them an ironic twist through which they seem to enrich and comment upon their context. As in dissonant music, such language draws its strength at least in part from its capacity for opposition to the very structure within which it is created. It unfolds as a series of articulated moves motivated by other than logical considerations. With time and habituation, some of Adorno's own moves, his developmental shifts and transitions, become quite familiar. There are, for example, the mutually exclusive, reflexive comparisons noted by Paddison, such as the comparison of "tone color" and "picture tone" in "On some Relation- ships"; or, more characteristic yet, the move from the examination of space in music to that of time in painting, coupled with the simultaneous insistence that despite the parallelism of these comparisons music and painting converge not by similarity but "only where each follows its immanent principle in a pure way." The inquiry is developed by exploration of the antithetical shades of meaning inherent in the paradox of similarity. (Perhaps one could say that the procedure is not unlike the use of chromaticism to explore shades of dissonance inherent in a tonal structure.)

The purpose of Adorno's linguistic extremism has been variously interpreted. For example, Max Paddison has recently observed that Adorno's prose is "cryptic and paratactical ... The tendency to proceed by means of tersely constructed, mutually contradictory assertions [is] designed in part to disrupt normal reading habits and to 'shock' the reader into an active relationships with the text."[16] As indicated above, such an interpretation is fully consistent with the new music's efforts to breathe new life into musical composition by disdaining the "dead" forms of conventional compositional practice.

More is at stake here, however, than Adorno's effort to awaken the heightened attention of his readers. The intent is to provide an intimation of things that cannot be said in ordinary discursive language, especially the logical language of argument. Adorno's non-discursive language is in the service of an expansion of meaning intended, in his thinking, to take writing into a realm of nonlanguage. This is particularly well expressed in a highly significant passage in his essay on Hölderlin's late poetry: "Great music is aconceptual synthesis ... Language, however, by virtue of its signifying element, the opposite pole of the mimetic-expressive, is chained to the form of proposition[17] and statement and thus to the synthetic form of the concept. In poetry, as distinct from music, aconceptual synthesis turns against its medium: it becomes constitutive dissociation."[18] In the same essay, Adorno praises the poet's use of parataxis as "an antiprinciple" of form whose "most intimate tendency [is] dissociation."[19] This "musical" language not only pushes the boundaries of acceptable grammar; it strains at the bounds of conceptual thought, deploying its linguistic extremism in an attempt, ultimately, to transcend language. Paddison describes this phenomenon well when he remarks that "Adorno's texts ... attempt to use the power of the concept to undermine the concept and thereby enable the non-conceptual to speak"—a contradiction that he identifies as being at the heart of Adorno's whole enterprise. [20]

The notion of a nonsubjective, or intentionless language[21] exerted a lifelong fascination on Adorno and is central to his preoccupation with music as close to the "true language," or the language of God. Throughout his career, Adorno's systematic thinking about writing and language seems to have been guided by the ideas of Walter Benjamin, in particular by the essay on "The Task of the Translator,"[22] to which he habitually deferred. According to his own account, Adorno read this essay in 1925. Thirty years later, in the introduction to Benjamin's collected works, he refers to the essay in the most favorable terms, calling it a "highly significant work” and noting elsewhere that he first read it at a time when he was very responsive to his older friend's ideas and "definitely regarded myself as the receptive party."[23] Benjamin's early essay "On Language and the Language of Human Beings" also plays a key role in "On Some Relationships" (pp. 70, 71), where Adorno cites Benjamin's speculation about the existence of languages of things, "nameless, nonacoustic languages from the material," as the basis for his introduction of the concept of écriture, through which music and painting succeed in freeing themselves from the base realism of their previous "object-relatedness," becoming "schemas of a nonsubjective language." At the same time, it should be noted that Adorno's references to "aconceptual language" are generally formulated as negations, and that where he does refer to the Benjaminian notion of the language of God, as in "Music, Language, and Composition," this occurs in a form that is carefully defended philosophically. (Adorno's formulation, in this important passage, that music's idea "is the form of the name of God,"[24] is also consistent with and appears to refer to the Jewish prohibition against speaking the name of God.) To my mind, the best description of Adorno's prose style is also found in his essay on Benjamin, in which he describes his friend's writing in terms remarkably similar to the characterization of Hölderlin's late poetry cited above.[25] Again, the musical frame of reference is explicit:

The inner composition of his prose is awkward even in its thought-connections; nowhere is it more necessary than here to deflate false expectations if one does not want to go astray. For the Benjaminian idea, in its strictness, excludes not only basic motives but also their unfolding, development, and the whole mechanical business of premise, hypothesis, and proof, of theses and conclusions. Just as the New Music, in its uncompromising representatives, no longer knows any "development," any distinction between the theme and its unfolding, but instead every musical thought, indeed every note in it is equidistant from the center; so Benjamin's philosophy is "athematic." Dialectics standing still is what it is, to the extent that it does not actually carry within it any developmental time, but derives its form from the constellation of the individual statements.[26]

As Carl Dahlhaus has argued in Die Idee der absoluten Musik,[27] the emergence of "absolute music—and with it, of music's claim to be a "language above languages”—owes its historical force to the assumption of metaphysical stature associated with the unsayability topos of German romanticism. Around 1800, instrumental music, liberated from the emotional and pedagogical trappings of early bourgeois practice, became the bearer of an infinite, metaphysical dimension beyond language. Dahlhaus has pointed out Adorno's debt to this tradition; it gains strength from the confluence with Jewish Gedankengut. In Adorno's works of musical criticism and aesthetic philosophy, one can observe the migration of the unsayability topos into a contemporary context in which the inadequacy of language was profoundly confirmed by fascism and commercialization. By Adorno's time the musical forms of romanticism's infinite longing had also become congealed—clichés that triggered automatic or trite emotional responses. Only by breaking these forms could the modern composer—in an act whose philosophical meaning remains inseparable from its concrete historical moment—press music into service once again in the quest for truth and originality. Of course, the musicality of his prose texts and their lack of discursive logic are present only as tendencies—something Adorno himself concedes in his consideration of the essay as form.[28] His writing remains grammatical language, even as its intention (in the full meaning Adorno imparts to this almost metaphysical notion) strives toward "true" musicality and "aconceptual synthesis."

A deeper analysis of Adorno's view of language, and of his particular debt to Benjamin on this question, would far exceed the bounds of this essay.[29] However, his own concern with musicality in language, as well as his attempts to achieve it in his own prose, suggest that the longing for language to be able to say more than it states in purely logical terms can after all find adequate expression in writing. Adorno uses language in ways that achieve new levels of eloquence and articulateness, at the same time invoking all the pathos of a great tradition of profound doubt of language's capabilities.[30] His conception of musicality in language draws on the critique of language, while suggesting the immense power of its performative aspects—aspects that he, however, never fully reflected in his philosophy in the manner of, for example, Bakhtin's theory of language acts. As a metaphor, Adorno's notion of a text (be it musical or linguistic) whose components are "equidistant from the center" ultimately falls short in spatial and temporal terms. As a figure of thought the metaphor finally makes sense only if the world is viewed either as a reflection of absolute subjectivity or as a manifestation of the mind of God.

For the reader or translator, in a more down-to-earth context, the application of Adorno's observations about the nature of musicality in language to his prose style is clear and specific. Above all, his remarks serve to underline the self-conscious differences between his prose style and that of the academy in general and school philosophers in particular. It would be neither helpful nor appropriate to try to force Adorno's writing into the flat rhythms and logical denouements of ordinary academic English. Its breaks and idiosyncrasies are constitutive. The translator therefore resolves to avoid leveling the text's unevenness or dissolving its rhythmic and grammatical tensions any more than absolutely necessary. The obsessive, slightly vertiginous quality of the text results in part from the willed lack of development, which is replaced by a kind of insistent rhythmic nervousness and an omnipresent referentiality in which each stage and element of the text looks backward and forward to other elements. The language resonates with a highly sophisticated combination of semantic, rhythmic, and formal elements. It is also unnecessary, indeed contrary to Adorno's purpose, to insist that the same word be translated the same way in every context. In this sense, the notion of the "force field," of the tendency of all the text's elements to be "equidistant from the center," points to a certain inevitable and desirable eccentricity.

Editor's Note. During the last two years, The Musical Quarterly has returned with regularity to Theodor Adorno's philosophy of music. In 77:3 we published his essay "Music, Language, and Composition" in Susan Gillespie's new English translation. That essay was followed by Murray Dineen's investigation of "Adorno and Schoenberg's Unanswered Question." Volume 78, no. 2 contained Adorno's "Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour" (which was written in English), as well as Colin Sample's review of the recent volume of Adorno's collected writings on Beethoven ("Adorno on the Musical Language of Beethoven" [Adorno's Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993)l). In this issue, we offer the last episode—for the time being—In our ongoing reconsideration of Adorno. This is Adorno's essay "On Some Relationships Between Music and Painting," again in Susan Gillespie's translation. In the last two years, Gillespie has translated a broad selection of Adorno's writings on music. They include "Richard Strauss at Sixty," in Richard Strauss and His WorId, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); "Wagner's Relevance for Today," in Grand Street 44, vol. 11, no. 4 (1993); "Late Style in Beethoven," in Raritan 18, no. 1 (summer 1993); and "Music, Language, and Composition," as mentioned above. Gillespie's hard-won perspective on Adorno's language, in his German and—with the exception of the "Music Appreciation Hours”—other people's English, makes her own essay on "Translating Adorno" of particular interest.

[1] There are, however, those who consider it "poetic," for example Max Paddison in Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 13.

[2] All translations are my own, except as otherwise noted.

[3] ". . . das Schlechte, Schwafelnde an dessen Lyrik," 629.

[4] "Music, Language and Composition," Musical Quarterly 77, no. 3 (1993): 402-3.

[5] "Beflissene Dreiklänge," he calls them in Philosophie der neuen Musik, 6th ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 16.

[6] "Parataxis: Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins," in Gesammelte Schriften, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984). There is an English translation by Shierry Weber Nicholsen in Notes to Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

[7] Adorno, "Parataxis," 471.

[8] " Similarly, in his essay "Notes on Kafka," Adorno describes Kafka's writing as a parable "that expresses itself not through expression but by its repudiation, by breaking off." In Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 246.

[9] "Der musikalische Zusammenhang, der den Sinn stiftet." Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, 18.

[10] "Der Essay als Form," in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, 31. This essay was written in 1954-58 and remained unpublshed during Adorno's lifetime; it appeared posthumously in the collection Noten Zur Literatur (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), vol. 2, 109-49. The collection has been translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen in Notes to Literature.

[11] Adorno, "Der Essay als Form," 21-22.

[12] Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 272-73.

[13] Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 16, 628, 640.

[14] See my translation of Adorno, "On Some Relationships," in this issue, 66, 77. Here and elsewhere in the late essays one senses that Adorno's exposure to English has also had an effect on his German sentence structure.

[15] Since English does not allow all of these possibilities, it is sometimes necessary to close Adorno's ellipses or insert clarifying prepositions or conjunctions.

[16] Paddison, p. 18.

[17] The German word is Urteil, philosophically defined as a statement that combines a subject and a predicate. It was a common observation of nineteenth-century German philosophy that this term preserved traces of the original separation of human intelligence from nature; so, for example, in Hölderlin's fragment "Urteil und Sein," in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 5th ed. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1970), vol. 1, 840-4 1.

[18] "Parataxis," 471. I am indebted to Shierry Weber Nicholsen for the term "aconceptual synthesis."

[19] "Parataxis," 481.

[20] Paddison, 15.

[21] "Music, Language, and Composition," 403.

[22] Walter Benjamin, "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers." Two English translations are available, the better-known one by Harry Zohn (in Illuminations [New York: Schocken, 1969]), and that by James Hynd and E. M. Valk (Delos 2 [1968]: 76-l00), which is preferable.

[23] Rolf Tiedemann, ed., Theodor W. Adorno über Walter Benjamin, rev. ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), 46, 79.

[24] "Music, Language, and Composition," 402.

[25] According to Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, this honor belongs to Hölderlin. In the editors' epilogue to the Aesthetic Theory, they quote a letter citing Adorno's statement that the Hölderlin of his late essays was "more akin than anyone else to his own method." Tiedemann, 497.

[26] "Einleitung zu Benjamins Schriften," in Tiedemann, 45-46. The observation that in Benjamin's writings all concepts are "equidistant from the center" also appears in "Der Essay als Form," 28. Adorno also sought to apply this concept specifically to his last, uncompleted work, Aesthetic Theory, writing in a letter, "This book [Aesthetic Theory] must be written concentrically such that the paratactical parts have the same weight and are arranged around a center of gravity which they express through their constellation." Quoted in the editors' epilogue, 496.

[27] Carl Dahlhaus, Die Idee der absoluten Musik (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1978); in English in the translation of Roger Lustig (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

[28] P. 31, the sentences immediately following those cited above, p. 58.

[29] On this subject see Andrew Bowie, "Music, Language, and Modernity," in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), and Michael Steinberg, "The Musical Absolute," in New German Critique 56 (spring-summer 1992): 17-42.

[30] For further thoughts on the relationship of the critique of language to the Jewish tradition and experience of modernity, see Leon Botstein, Judentum und Modernität and Adorno, Essays on Music (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002)