Translating Adorno: Language, Music, and Performance

Author(s): Susan Gillespie

Source: The Musical Quarterly , Spring, 1995, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 55-65
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/742516

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Translating Adorno: Language,
Music, and Performance

Susan Gillespie

This essay developed out of the process of translating into English a

number of essays by Theodor W. Adomo on musical subjects, one of
which, "On Some Relationships between Music and Painting," fol-
lows. As the project evolved, the larger interptetive and theoretical
question of the "musicality" of Adomo'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
Adomo 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 Adomo's writing to be difficult, it is writing that begs to be
translated, much as music begs to be performed. For Adomo's prose
-as will be argued--is musical in his own precise sense of "true"
musicality. To borrow from Adomo's comments in "On Some Rela-
tionships," 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 "radi-
cally emancipated music" that embodies new forms of human freedom.

55

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56 The Musical Quarterly

Few would go so far as to term Adomo's language lyrical.' Yet the

language of his essays (and to a somewhat lesser degree of his philo-
sophical works) betrays many qualities obviously reminiscent of poetry
and music. Take, for example, the first sentence of "On some Rela-
tionships":

Das Selbstverstatndliche, daB Musik Zeitkunst sei, in der Zeit verlaufe,

heiBt im doppelten Verstande, daB Zeit ihr nicht selbstverstandlich ist,
daB 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 regu-
lar 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 Adomo's writing is musical, in some sense, is therefore
evident. But despite the sometimes striking use of rhythm as a con-
structive principle, the nature of this musicality is not primarily acous-
tic. In his own comments on musicality in language, Adomo develops
a distinction between what can be termed "bad" and "good" musical-
ity. His dichotomy specifically shuns purely, or merely, acoustic
effects, especially those associated with melody and harmony. In "On
Some Relationships," for example, Adomo 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," Adomo praises
Kafka while criticizing Rilke and Swinbume:

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 con-
trast to the "musical" language of Swinbume or Rilke, which imitates
musical effects and which is alien to the sources of music.4

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 Translating Adorno 57

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 com-
posers reproduce historically created forms that have long since for-
feited 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, momen-
tary 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
H6lderlin.6 In this essay, written two years before "On Some Rela-
tionships," Adorno compares H61derlin's work to "great music." Spe-
cifically, he identifies H61lderlin'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 subordi-
nate clauses, is a grammatical trope that, like the "broken-off para-
bles," creates a kind of disjunction and nonspecificity that undermine
logical clarity and causality, leaving room for a certain vagueness, and
for interpretation: "Irresistibly Holderlin 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," Hl1derlin's musicality is achieved by
subjecting language's semantic or expressive content to a kind of con-
textual 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--
H6lderlin'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
Adomo's focus on parataxis as the key element in H61lderlin'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.

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58 The Musical Quarterly

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 acon-
ceptual 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, Adomo proposes a textual structure
in which all concepts are articulated in relation to a "utopian inten-
tion" 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 con-
cealed 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 oth-
ers. 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 configura-
tion by their movement; each one is a force field, just as from the van-
tage point of the essay every intellectual creation must be transformed
into a force field."

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 Holderlin said.12

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 Translating Adomo 59

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 Pl6tzlichkeit hat

ebenso etwas Temporales wie die dabei sich herstellende Transparenz
des Pha"nomens 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, trans-

porting the reader or translator into regions where only the case end-
ings stand between her and incomprehension. 15 This is language that
strains against the bounds of acceptable sentence structure; its ten-
dency 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 moti-
vated by other than logical considerations. With time and habitua-
tion, some of Adorno's own moves, his developmental shifts and
transitions, become quite familiar. There are, for example, the mutu-
ally 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 simulta-
neous 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 devel-
oped 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.)

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60 The Musical Quarterly

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 pro-
ceed 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 lan-
guage, 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 nonlan-
guage. This is particularly well expressed in a highly significant passage
in his essay on Holderlin'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
proposition17 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] dissocia-
tion."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 tran-
scend 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 language21
exerted a lifelong fascination on Adorno and is central to his preoccu-
pation with music as close to the "true language," or the language of
God. Throughout his career, Adorno's systematic thinking about writ-
ing and language seems to have been guided by the ideas of Walter
Benjamin, in particular by the essay on "The Task of the Transla-
tor,"22 to which he habitually deferred. According to his own
account, Adomo 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

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 Translating Adorno 61

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 exist-
ence of languages of things, "nameless, nonacoustic languages from
the material," as the basis for his introduction of the concept of ecri-
ture, 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 gen-
erally 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 Holder-
lin'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 constel-
lation 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 language"-owes its historical force to the
assumption of metaphysical stature associated with the unsayability

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62 The Musical Quarterly

topos of German romanticism. Around 1800, instrumental music,

liberated from the emotional and pedagogical trappings of early bour-
geois practice, became the bearer of an infinite, metaphysical dimen-
sion beyond language. Dahlhaus has pointed out Adomo's debt to this
tradition; it gains strength from the confluence with Jewish Gedanken-
gut. In Adomo's works of musical criticism and aesthetic philosophy,
one can observe the migration of the unsayability topos into a con-
temporary context in which the inadequacy of language was pro-
foundly confirmed by fascism and commercialization. By Adomo's
time the musical forms of romanticism's infinite longing had also
become congealed--cliches that triggered automatic or trite emotional
responses. Only by breaking these forms could the modem 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 Adomo
himself concedes in his consideration of the essay as form.28 His writ-
ing remains grammatical language, even as its intention (in the full
meaning Adomo imparts to this almost metaphysical notion) strives
toward "true" musicality and "aconceptual synthesis."
A deeper analysis of Adomo's view of language, and of his par-
ticular 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, sug-
gest 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 writ-
ing. Adomo uses language in ways that achieve new levels of elo-
quence 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 lan-
guage, while suggesting the immense power of its performative
aspects-aspects that he, however, never fully reflected in his philoso-
phy in the manner of, for example, Bakhtin's theory of language acts.
As a metaphor, Adomo's notion of a text (be it musical or lin-
guistic) whose components are "equidistant from the center" ulti-
mately 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 Adomo's observations about the nature of musicality in

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 Translating Adorno 63

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
Adomo's writing into the flat rhythms and logical denouements of
ordinary academic English. Its breaks and idiosyncrasies are constitu-
tive. 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 cen-
ter," points to a certain inevitable and desirable eccentricity.

Notes

Editor's Note

During the last two years, The Musical Quarterly has returned with regularity to The-
odor 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 fol-
lowed 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)]). In this issue, we offer the last episode-for the
time being-in our ongoing reconsideration of Adorno. This is Adomo's essay "On
Some Relationships Between Music and Painting," again in Susan Gillespie's transla-
tion. In the last two years, Gillespie has translated a broad selection of Adorno's writ-
ings on music. They include "Richard Strauss at Sixty," in Richard Strauss and His
World, 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 Compo-
sition," as mentioned above. Gillespie's hard-won perspective on Adorno's language,
in his German and-with the exception of the "Music Appreciation Hour"-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.

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64 The Musical Quarterly

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

4. "Music, Language and Composition," Musical Quarterly 77, no. 3 (1993): 402-3.
5. "Beflissene Dreiklmnge," he calls them in Philosophie der neuen Musik, 6th ed.
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 16.

6. "Parataxis: Zur spiten Lyrik H61lderlins," 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 break-
ing off." In Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman,
1967), 246.

9. "Der musikalische Zusammenhang, der den Sinn stiftet." Adomo, 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 unpublished during Adorno's lifetime; it appeared posthu-
mously 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. Adomo, "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 Ger-
man philosophy that this term preserved traces of the original separation of human
intelligence from nature; so, for example, in H61lderlin's fragment "Urteil und Sein,"
in Sdimtliche Werke und Briefe, 5th ed. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1970), vol. 1,
840-41.

18. "Parataxis," 471. I am indebted to Shierry Weber Nicholsen for the term "acon-
ceptual synthesis."

19. "Parataxis," 481.

20. Paddison, 15.

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

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 Translating Adomo 65

22. Walter Benjamin, "Die Aufgabe des Obersetzers." 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]: 76-100),
which is preferable.

23. Rolf Tiedemann, ed., Theodor W. Adorno iber Walter Benjamin, rev. ed. (Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp, 1990), 46, 79.

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

25. According to Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, this honor belongs to H61-
derlin. In the editors' epilogue to the Aesthetic Theory, they quote a letter citing
Adorno's statement that the H61derlin 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: Barenreiter, 1978); in
English in the translation of Roger Lustig (Chicago and London: University of Chi-
cago 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 Modemitit
(Vienna: B&hlau, 1992).

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