Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Joseph Zitt <>]

THat makes sense to me. Directly translating a mesostic itself wouldn't be all that useful. But translating the source text or finding an appropriate one in the new language, then performing a mesostic procedure on it, would work better.

We also need to distinguish between (at least) two different kinds of mesostics. (There may be names for them that I've forgotten.) I'd been thinking of those, like "Time (Three Autokus)" or the "Writing Through" pieces, that extract texts in a non-sensical manner to create non-syntactic texts. Those like the Duchamp mesostic mentioned earlier in the thread, on which a new, meaningful text is written using the spine letters, would be a different issue.

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 5:46 PM Andrew Culver <> wrote:

Interesting topic, list.

Stefano wrote:  "the idea lying behind mesostics defies the concept of translation itself”.

I agree. More than defies, it obviates.

The mesostic process deals in letters, not meaning, is not “about ideas, but creates them”. It operates just as as well on one language as any other, provided they are alphabetical.

The way John used the method, the choice of source texts — both the mesostring and the scanned text — had meaning for him, or promised interest for him. With that in mind, it makes sense to “transfer” (not translate) that interest towards the discovery of source texts in another language. You might seek out topically relevant sources in another language, or the words of a native speaker of another tongue who shares some trait or interest with you or with John or with the topic of John’s source texts. You might for example take as a reference John’s mesostics on the words of Jasper Johns, and, setting similar constraints, make mesostics using the words of another painter with shared interests to Jasper and/or John who speaks in another language.

What you are doing there is transference. But back to the topic of translation:

With the intent removed from the resultant meaning of a mesostic (it’s created, not expressed), it’s somewhat oblique to labor over a translation of that found meaning, and even more so when you consider that much of that found meaning is found by the individual reader/listener anyway. Rather, deploy the method itself in other lingual territory, while transferring topical preferences and interests as they occur to you and occurred to John.

That’s how I would proceed.

Andrew

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Joseph Zitt :: http://www.josephzitt.com

"Write what you dream. Shoot what you can. Edit what you have." -- Unknown