An original autograph signed letter from avant garde composer John Cage (1912-1992) to the scholar and translator Takahashi Yasunari (1932-2002), giving guidance for their collaboration.
Though he had long admired their work, from around the 1970s John Cage took a more active interest in James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Cage was fascinated by experimental style of the Modernists and the way they played with the rules of language. Cage wanted to add another layer to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (a famously complex text) and used his compositional mind to reinterpret Joyce’s writing.
He did so by creating new rules, which applied to the original text, would form a new and even more abstracted narrative. Cage said of this exercise, ‘I am devoted to freeing my writing from my intentions, and so, in those cases like the writings through Joyce’s Finnegans Wake … in which chance plays no part, I merely follow the rolling of a metal ball (the name of the author through his work) which serves to free me and the reader not only of my intentions but also of those of Joyce…’ (ix). In the same collection of writings, Cage admits that he does not understand Joyce’s text but found a profound beauty in it, comparing this feeling to the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho’s poems about the mystique of the moon (p.54).
The result was five re-workings of Finnegans Wake, each time adopting a new compositional rule (e.g. no repeated syllables). Together he named the piece Roaratorio, an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake and performed it as a collage of the reading of his poem, sound recordings and Irish folk music.
Considering the complexity of this piece and its highly conceptual nature, it is amazing to think that it was translated into Japanese. Takahashi was one of the brilliant scholars of the 20th century and held the prestigious position of professor of English Literature at Tokyo University. He translated and wrote about wide range of authors, including the Romantic poets and more modern writers such as Samuel Beckett, with whom he developed a collaborative relationship. He was particularly fascinated by the challenges offered by James Joyce’s writing which led to the present collaboration with John Cage.
In the letter to Takahashi, Cage offers some guidance on how to read the photocopied typescript of his fifth adaptation of Finnegans Wake, and who to contact regarding copyright. Following Cage’s guidance for the second page, Takahashi has made a pencil annotation where the words should be in Greek. This is a beautiful record of a great artistic and scholarly collaboration.
Ref: Cage, J. X Writings ’79-82. (Weslyan University Press, 1983).
