Cultural Translations

time of Correspondence, I have focused more on academic scholarship, often at the expense ofneglecting my artistic side, 6 while van Hove has completed an MA degree in shodo (Japanese calligraphy)from Tokyo Gakugei University and a PhD in contemporary art from Tokyo Universityof Fine Arts, and given exhibitions and performances in numerous countries around the world.Dr. van Hove is perhaps most well-known as a poet and avant-garde calligrapher nowadays, withprojects that involve drawing improvised poetry in unusual modes and locations worldwide,such as in public squares, underwater, across sands in the desert, in the arctic snow, and in Africain collaboration with various wild animals, and his best known work is probably the provocativeMetragram series that entails images of calligraphy being drawn on the abdomens of an assortmentof women in around 50 locations all across the world. 7Dr. van Hove’s poetry, which I turned into song, expressed many intriguing images associatedwith the challenge of attempting to reach an understanding of an entirely different foreignculture and its language. In “Correspondence”, van Hove wrote “The seams of modern Japan arevisible, and its creators have only celestial reflection of the human condition’s infinite tragedy,daily and unnoticed as the beauty of a pool of water.” I recall that as I strove to develop music forthis intriguing line of poetry, I was struck with how difficult it is to express cross-cultural understandingsmeaningfully without essentializing differences. At the same time, van Hove’s writingswere to some extent about the reflective experience of self-discovery in a foreign context.In another line of Correspondence he wrote, “You know as I do, this discomfort that submergesyou when suddenly you hear yourself: being so far from truth at the very time when you werewalking on a serene path with it as the destination.” I was also deeply impressed by some passagesfrom Correspondence in which van Hove acknowledged the musicality of a language one isstill struggling to comprehend. “Little by little,” van Hove observed that “Japanese makes its significantinroads toward me, from a still hollow significant is birthed the full signifier that I couldonly suspect until now.” Indeed, we may have much to learn about the nature of language andprocess of translation by reflecting on parallel phenomena in music.This essay will explore various ways that intercultural analyses of musical meanings may offertheoretical insights applicable to the broader field of cultural translation. Music, like language,qualifies as a field in which “ideological horizons of homogeneity have been conceptualized,” 8and postcolonialist scholars such as Homi Bhabha and Paul Gilroy have acknowledged its criticalrole as an emblem of identity within the very sites of hybridity that particularly interest scholarsof cultural translation. 9 Nevertheless, it appears that previous studies have not explicitly acknowledgedthe role that music may play in the field of cultural translation, and there is need fortheoretical models to address its relationship to other forms of discourse in this regard.While much has already been theorized regarding how foreign musical genres may be trans-226 Sociomusicology blog (David G. Hebert), http://sociomusicology.blogspot.com7 Metragram Series website, http://cargocollective.com/metragram8 See Boris Buden and Stefan Nowotny, “Cultural translation: An introduction to the problem,” TranslationStudies, 2(2), 196-208 (2009); p.206.9 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).David G. Hebert