Le traducteur s’enfonce dans la matière du roman, se laisse fouetter par les vents qui martyrisent la terre aride du Texas des années 1930. Le traducteur guette dans le Brighton d’aujourd’hui les reflets télévisés, tabloïdés d’un vendeur de produits cosmétiques obsédé par Avril Lavigne et Kylie Minogue. Le traducteur accepte de perdre pied, tente de façonner une version française qui sera recevable. . . voire (idéalement) élégante.

La traduction en français de deux romans – « Death of Bunny Monroe » [2009, Canongate Books / « Mort de Bunny Monroe », Flammarion, 2019,] de Nick Cave et « House of Earth » [Harper Collins, 2013 / « La Maison de terre », Flammarion, 2014] de Woody Guthrie – fait jaillir des interrogations quant à la méthode et la démarche à adopter : la connaissance des formats chantés de l’auteur-compositeur est-elle nécessaire, souhaitable, indispensable au traducteur qui tâche de mener à bien sa mission ? Autrement dit : les chansons de l’auteur-compositeur aident-elles le roman à se traduire ?

Inversement, pour l’auteur-compositeur, le roman permet-il d’aborder des champs que le format de la chanson lui aurait interdits ? La question de savoir si, en passant du songwriting au récit long, l’auteur fuit son art initial ou le transpose, est-elle un passage obligatoire pour le traducteur du roman ? En quoi cette délocalisation informe-t-elle la transmutation vers le français ? Le traducteur a-t-il mes moyens de sentir dans le roman, tel un courant sous-marin, les chansons de l’auteur, comme on entend le bruit des vagues en collant l’oreille à un coquillage du Sussex ? Le roman à traduire doit-il être perçu comme le refoulé de chansons, leur agrandissement disloqué, leur inverse, leur prolongation inattendue ? La langue du romancier est-elle encore celle du chanteur ? Comment, avec la substance de la langue française, faire goûter au lecteur cette métamorphose?

Plaçons l’objectif sur des extraits précis, voyons ce que la langue daigne révéler.

“The soul, the mind, the winds, the spirit of the upper flats, the flat upper panhandles, the winds of heavens unrolling, unfolding, and the listeners down below listening in two or three low brick buildings, wheeling chuck-a-luck, twenty-one, stud, blackjack, muley dice, racehorse mulers, fast nag tippers, coin flippers, vino fermenters, and curly hair sippers. Hair of the top plains. Soils of the dead grasses. Gravel hills, gravel hollers, doggy trots, buffalo wallows. Hens, hags, satchels, bags, the boasting, the knifing, the red-hot bragging. Brushy patch nippers, manure skippers, backhouse generals, crooked cow trailers, sheep huggers, cheap sluggers, ewes and lamb dippers, sheep sleepers, and sheepy sleepers. […]” (WG page 94)

When Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in October 2016, many literary scholars were angry about the blurring of the lines between ‘true literature’ and ‘pop culture’. A nice singer-songwriter, ok, but not a true poet! Others tried to prove them wrong by pointing at the many literary dimensions of Dylan’s lyrics or at the many literary sources that influenced his songwriting. The controversy made clear how the singer-songwriter is positioned in a complex interspace between poetry and pop music. In my presentation, I will explore this interspace by focusing on the work of Morrissey, a songwriter who has been praised as ‘the most literary singer in the history of British popular music […].’[i] What makes this case so telling is that Morrissey has also come forward as a literary writer, by publishing Autobiography (2013) and the novel List of the lost (2015). In several countries, the novel was reviewed very negatively by the literary critics, which leaves us with the fascinating case of an artist whose lyrics are praised as literature and whose novel is degraded as pulp. How to make sense of that?

[i] Gavin Hopps, Morrissey. The pageant of his bleeding heart. New York / London 2009, p. xi

What can you do on paper, that music is not able to get across? That is the question inevitably that arises whenever a musician writes a book. And Kirsten Hersh is a relevant case in point. As a singer-songwriter with a literary bent, the step toward writing might not be outlandish. And her first two books where a children’s book and a memoir; relatively common genres for popular musicians. But the two books that followed, are even more interesting.

There is a social aspect in music, especially live music (see Keunen 2015 as quoted in the academic synopsis) that is notably absent from literature, which carries its own system and institutions. And apparently, for some of the stories Hersh wants to tell, that social context is a burden.

This is plausible for her third book, Don’t Suck, Don’t Die about Vic Chesnutt, musician and kindred spirit, but mostly a troubled spirit she could never quite reach, even though they were best friends. The book is unorthodox, fragmented, and highly personal, with lots of open spaces that are difficult to interpret.

Her most recent book, Wyatt at the Coyote Palace, explores these questions implicitly:  the lyrics are augmented with dialogues and stories, and a cd is added with the songs: the comparison left to the reader/listener. (PJ Harvey did something similar with Hollow of the Hand, Beck was even more radical by not including his versions of the songs in Song Reader, which was only published as sheet music).

From an institutional point of view, it is clear the Hersh is not turning away from the musical context: she publishes at Omnibus Press (music books) and the University of Texas Press (with an extensive list of books by and about music across the whole spectrum). The differences in approach shed light on the matter raised in the introduction: what does paper have to offer that music doesn’t.

This powerpoint talk was first presented (in Dutch) at a music festival in the Netherlands in the Summer of 2018, as part of the academic outreach programme hosted on the festival site. My intent was to share with the festival crowd some thoughts on Cave’s lyrics from the perspective of literary studies, so the talk is low on hardcore academic content, though it does make some points that lend themselves to further scholarly treatment. Release the bats!

Bob Dylan’s 2016 Nobel Prize gave rise to a lot of debate, but it is Patti Smith’s performance at the ceremony that provides an extraordinary insight into the complex dynamics that shape contemporary, hegemonic literary culture. The trajectory leading to, and the distinction between, her two book-length memoirs, Just Kids (2010) and M-Train (2015), reveal the broad spectrum of memoir today, including how memoir has become a serial practice that moves across media and artistic practices, both in high and low cultural forms. Memoir also cuts through and destabilizes some of the longstanding dichotomies that still structure the conception of literature: craft versus inspiration, high literature versus popular literature, authenticity versus format, avant-garde versus experiment, and highbrow versus middle-brow tastes. Expanding the practice of ‘covering’ that runs through Smith’s oeuvre, I want to draw attention to a new literary voice that emerges in M-Train seemingly in contrast with Smith’s longstanding devotion to high literature and a ‘masculine’ artist ethos: that of an artist later in life, living alone, for whom writing and reading is a life-style in the fullest sense of the word. Both the consistency of Smith’s poetics and the importance of failure in her work reinforce an aura of authenticity and individuality in her work that counteracts the commodifying impulses driving the domains of literature and popular music, and have given a new lease on her status as ‘icon’.

C. Bamberger has described Van Vliet as an Emersonian or “ecological” artist seeing his environment as “one network, or web, interdependent, with man no more important than any other element,” a philosophy which becomes even more fully developed in Van Vliet’s paintings of landscapes and animals. This paper focuses on Don Van Vliet's poetry while considering the relationships between his writings and his works as a musician and a visual artist. Special attention will be paid to how the ecological impulse that underlies Van Vliet’s lyrics is inextricably linked with the gothic and grotesque features of his poetic imagination.