IVladimir Jankélévitch has recently been exhumed as the latest guru of contemporary musicology, primarily as a result of Carolyn Abbate's recent work drawing on his writings (2001), in particular his Maurice Ravel (1939; 1976). Abbate's translation of La musique et l'ineffable (1961) is, I assume, intended to dust him off and reveal him to the twenty-first century as seer and progenitor of the dominant stream of musicology in recent decades. 1 Richard Taruskin's laudatory back-cover endorsement attempts to propel Jankélévitch to a nirvana beyond critique, so that even before we open the book Jankélévitch has survived the day of judgement and is already fully resurrected. The cover itself is beautiful (in Symbolist mode, all Marian blue and gold) and invites the reader to consider Jankélévitch in a state of grace. Abbate's introductory essay ('Jankélévitch's Singularity') is elegant, informative, and stimulating, and the presentation in general is superb: all this is quite heavenly.Yet forgive me if, after reading this book, I resist the power of advertising, packaging and academic cachet. Such attractions aside, Jankélévitch disappoints when he attempts to express the heavenliness of music to those with their feet on the ground. His thought is often windy or self-contradictory and his facts sometimes vague. Abbate's translation can be precious, arch, or complex when it could be direct, straightforward, or simple. Sometimes she loses her struggle with Jankélévitch's prose, which is not really as difficult as she claims (see p. xvi), and, occasionally, she misreads, dramatises, and obfuscates his meaning, usually (ironically) when she attempts to clarify an obscurity or a lapse in argument (if I may say so: both author and translator suspect this term).Julian Johnson, in an enthusiastic, considered review, says that 'it took me longer to read than many books three times its length . . . because, although written with great clarity and precision, it is correspondingly intense' (Johnson 2004, p. 644). Intense, yes; clear and precise, no: Johnson's time would be partly that expended to make some sense of Abbate's Jankélévitch. The translation is on a par with Constance Garnett's translations of Dostoïevsky, or, closer to home, Scott Moncreiff 's translation of Proust. That is to say, Abbate translates in romantic mode, as an advocate for, and, unwittingly, against the text, expanding some ideas, contracting others, and (oddly, since she insists on his oddity, see p. xvi) normalising Jankélévitch's punctuation and paragraphing, which is one measure of his singularity as a writer. The result is to make 344
