Music and Language, Becker notes, CLH

Becker, Alton L. Beyond Translation. In the Javanese shadow plays, based on old Sanscrit texts in the Indo-European culture, place and geography trump time and chronology. Coincidence is a desirable mandatory feature of the performance.

“simultaneous cycles regularly coincide, sometimes all at once, sometimes in partial coincidences” (333).

“ a few deep metaphors bind various things together, make them resonate and mutually reinforce each other, and make the world seem orderly, reasonable, and harmonious” (334-335).

“two major ways of translating poetry from a distant language: looking up words in dictionaries, and asking people for whom the poetry is transparent to explain it” (335).