It is tempting, moreover, to see Fox Strangways’s whole project in terms of his passions for translation. Musical sound is, of course, untranslatable: a musical transcription is essentially a graphic representation of a temporal, sonic form, whereas a text transcription, however unsatisfactory, attains the status of a linguistic text in its own right. It is often argued, of course, that much literature is also “untranslatable” and can in fact only be transformed into essentially new literary products. The difficulties of literary translation are, however, of a different order from those of musical translation: since musical meaning is so ephemeral and, largely, non-referential, it is surely impossible to conceive of expressing the meaning of one piece of music in another musical language.

quasi-translation: the original unwritten music is committed to the written page and assigned a fictional metre, so that (like a translation perhaps) it becomes more familiar, while also becoming something different in kind from the source document. One can imagine a musically literate Western reader humming some version of the tune, derived from and yet quite different from the original. The transcription is, in a sense, an authentic cultural document of a particular kind—a product of the interaction between individuals of different cultural backgrounds within a particular (colonial, Edwardian …) context. Its relationship to the music may be tenuous, but it could be argued that as long as we see it for what it is, it remains a valuable document.