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Quoting Poetry, Translating Music (and Vice Versa): Mediation in Tennessee Williams’s Something Cloudy, Something Clear

  • Laura Michiels EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 4, 2015

Abstract

Tennessee Williams’s penultimate full-length play Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981) dramatises the playwright’s first homosexual love affair as well as the events leading up to his first professional theatre production. Many critics have therefore read the play in terms of its author’s life and fail to make the distinction between creator and creation. This article seeks to demonstrate the text foregrounds the mediation involved in telling a story about the past through a work of art by means of two interrelated operations: quoting and translating. Its protagonist quotes a sonnet by John Keats concerned with translation and alludes to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duineser Elegien, whose speaker seeks to mediate between different realms. Additionally, the characters listen to music by composers interested in building bridges between different styles, religions and cultures. Williams also mediates between writing and music by making use of the musical technique of repetition and variation.

Acknowledgment

I was able to conduct the research for this article thanks to a grant awarded by the Flemish Research Foundation (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen).

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Published Online: 2015-11-4
Published in Print: 2015-11-1

© 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Articles
  4. Flying Free from History and Reality: Dramatic Representations of the “Crocodile Dilemma” in the Theatre of Martin McDonagh
  5. Quoting Poetry, Translating Music (and Vice Versa): Mediation in Tennessee Williams’s Something Cloudy, Something Clear
  6. Staging Childhood Holocaust Survivor Trauma: Diane Samuels’s Kindertransport
  7. “Times long contrasts:” o e d I p u s (2014)
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