Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Semih Firincioglu <>]

Title: Re: [silence] RE: Scorpio rising

Well, I can go endlessly discussing these linguistic matters if you poke me but I’m pretty sure that would drive many list members crazy, so I will briefly answer a few comments I got.

Structurally English and Turkish are almost at the opposite ends (true for other non-Indo-European languages as well). Many concepts are not translatable between the two, although I spent close to two years on 14 articles to be as accurate as possible -- out of great respect for John’s pickiness. This is not due to the inferiority of one language: Turkish has some incredible but extremely different tools of _expression_. Lecture on Nothing is the most unusual text I dared to translate, the rest are his “straight-forward” manifestos mostly. I tried really really hard to make the translation of the Lecture as performable as possible, following the 48-based structural divisions as closely as possible (in a language where verbs fall at the end of sentences as opposed to going next to the subject). I and the editors think it works.

I have done many translations into Turkish but I can say none has been this interesting. Since the material is mostly about fundamental existential concepts, at times I found traditional Turkish expressions more suitable to some ideas than their English counterparts (especially the Eastern philosophical concepts). Yet, the language lacks the equivalents of terms that stemmed from the Western intellectual discussions of the 20th century. Not only technicals (ex: inversion, conversion), but also derivatives (ex: redundancy, inter-, exclusive, literally). There are some officially made-up terms but they just don’t have references in people’s minds.

Re: “I have nothing to say.” As I said, this can be seen as having a double meaning in English: “I don’t have anything to say” and “I have “nothing” to say.” You just can’t do this in Turkish, so I chose the first one and said, literally, “I lack something to say,” more or less.

BTW: so far we think the title of the book is going to be “Music is Sound, And Sound is Music: John Cage: Selected Writings.” I thought a title like “One is All, And All is One” would be lot more inclusive but it is not really translatable (also has strong political references over there).

Best,

Semih


On 7/18/12 5:47 PM, "susan j." <> wrote:

> regardless of any possible misunderstanding [ mentioned below],
>  this is one of the best exchanges here in ages.
>  
> thanks;-))
>
>
> Susan
>
>  
> > Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 17:15:01 -0400
> > From: 
> > To: 
> > CC: 
> > Subject: [silence] Re: Re: Re: Scorpio rising
> > 
> > greeting
> > 
> > On 7/18/12, Semih Firincioglu <> wrote:
> > > Talking about meaning: I kind of got stuck with the translation of "I have
> > > nothing to say and I am saying it," believe it or not. In English it may
> > > mean "I don't have anything to say and that is what I am saying" or "all I
> > > have is "nothing" and that "nothing" is what I am delivering." You can go
> > > only in one direction in Turkish and I took the first route but it still
> > > bugs me. Appropriately obsessive and possibly silly, I guess.
> > 
> > not silly at all to my way of thinking. this is one of his most famous
> > quotations, and also ripe with multiple meanings, as you mention. it
> > is really true that you can go only one direction in turkish? perhaps
> > you meant only one way to go with a turkish translation of these
> > particular words.
> > 
> > while i don't know many of them by name, i know there have been many
> > turkish poets over the long history during which [imaginative and
> > literary] people have been living in that region. multiple meanings
> > are one of the poet's main tricks, so it seems odd to me that you
> > can't do anything like this in turkish.
> > 
> > perhaps i am only misunderstanding what you have said.
> > 
> > -- 
> > \js [http://or8.net/~johns/] : "complete obscure contrariness"
>