In his essay entitled The Task of the Translator, Walter Benjamin writes:
A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which provides words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.When applied to musical forms (in particular, cover songs), this quote becomes all the more interesting. The cover song is not an actual cover in Benjamin's eyes. It's a translation of an original and deserves to be as transparent as possible. By taking the pure language and words of the original, we can knock down the formalist musical "walls" (which function like sentences - as in, how the pure material is organized). Think of the blues singer as storyteller and how those songs spread through history in a plethora of forms.
This idea keeps coming up in outlines for my Will Oldham article. Oldham often covers himself, leaving the pure language as a template, yet changing everything from instrumental parts and textures to the overall tone of a piece. The words are left to be pure and direct elements. Everything else is rearranged and rebuilt. This actually adds to the song, though. Each time there's a new translation, the song is serialized and completed again. Then, each time any of these translations is experienced by the listener, it's completed another time. All of these completions build up into an "arcade"-like multiplicity of the song. Each one is a small step towards the pure song.
