Pain in Sound, Shape, and Shade
Rita Bush describes her experience in this way:As far back as I can remember I have felt pain in shapes, though it seems to me anyone could do so easily. Often, but not always, I hear voices (particularly singing voices) in shapes; I have felt at times I could draw or paint a song.Her shapes are felt, rather than seen, on the skin surface. They are never intricate, but rather simple blobs, grids, cross-hatchings, and geometric forms… As her drawing illustrates, the shapes are dynamic and change over time.FIGURE:Time sequence of shaped pain following foot surgery in Rita Bush. The shape changes over time just as the experience of pain is neither constant not monotonous. Note the simple geometry. Touched By SoundCarol Crane has sound->touch synesthesia, meaning that musical instruments evoke tactical impressions of stroking, pressure, warmth, and tingling. For example, she consistently feels the sound of different instruments on different parts of her body - guitars “brushing” her ankles on up to her shins, violins “breathing” on her face, cellos and organ “vibrating” near her navel. Trombones feel like a “dull throbbing” on the back of her neck, which is why she dislikes New Orleans jazz. It appears that an instrument’s unique timbre is responsible for a distinct touch, and not all instruments induce feelings. “I love going to the symphony, but afterwards I am exhausted,” she says, as if the experience were emotionally draining. [Wednesday, 43-45]
There is a vocabulary, a grammar, possibly a semantic of colours, sounds, odours, textures, and gestures as mul- tiple as that of language, and there may be dilemmas of decipherment and translation as resistant as any we have met. Though it is poly- semic, speech cannot identify, let alone paraphrase, even a fraction of the sensory data which man, blunted in certain of his senses and language-bound as he has become, can still register. This is the prob- lem of what Jakobson labels 'transmutation', the interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs in non-verbal sign systems (the curved arrow on the road sign, the 'mantle blue' at the close of 'Lycidas' whose colour encodes 'purity' and 'hope renewed'). But we need not go immediately or entirely outside language. There is between 'translation proper' and 'transmutation' a vast terrain of 'partial transformation'. The verbal signs in the original message or statement are modified by one of a multitude of means or by a combination of means. These include paraphrase, graphic illus- tration, pastiche, imitation, thematic variation, parody, citation in a supporting or undermining context, false attribution (accidental or deliberate), plagiarism, collage, and many others. This zone of partial transformation, of derivation, of alternate restatement determines much of our sensibility and literacy. It is, quite simply, the matrix of culture. In this closing chapter, I want to apply the notion of 'alternity' and the model of translation put forward in the preceding discussion to the larger question of inherited meaning and culture. To what extent is culture the translation and rewording of previous meaning? Being intermediate and ubiquitous, the great area of 'transformations' and metamorphic repetitions is one in which verbal signs are not necessarily 'transmuted' into non-verbal sign systems. They may, on the contrary, enter into various combinations with such systems. The exemplary case is that of language and music or language in music. The composer who sets a text to music is engaged in the same sequence of intuitive and technical motions which obtain in translation proper. His initial trust in the significance of the verbal sign system is followed by interpretative appropriation, a 'transfer into' the musical matrix and, finally, the establishment of a new whole which neither devalues nor eclipses its linguistic source. The test of critical intelligence, of psychological responsiveness to which the composer submits himself when choosing and setting his lyric, is at all points concordant with that of the translator. In both cases we ask: 'has he understood the argument, the emotional tone, the formal particularities, the historical conventions, the potential ambiguities in the original? Has he found a medium in which to represent fully and to elucidate these elements?' The means at the composer's dis- posal — key, register, tempo, rhythm, instrumentation, mode — correspond to the stylistic options open to the translator. The basic tensions are closely analogous. The debate as to whether literalism or recreation should be the dominant aim of translation is exactly paralleled by the controversy, prominent throughout the nineteenth century, as to whether the word or the musical design should be uppermost in the Lied or in opera. [After Babel, 437-438]