Why does poetry appeal to music? Can music be said to communicate, as language does? What, between music and poetry, is it possible to translate? These fundamental questions have remained obstinately difficult, despite the recent burgeoning of word and music studies. Peter Dayan contends that the reasons for this difficulty were worked out with extraordinary rigour and consistency in a French literary tradition, echoed by composers such as Berlioz and Debussy, which stretches from Sand to Derrida. Their writing shows how it is both necessary and futile to look for music in poetry, or for poetry in music.

Peter Dayan is Professor of Word and Music Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK.

Contents: Foreword, with apologies; Translating the raindrop; A sermon on the violin; Baudelaire's Wagner: the indescribable, the untranslatable, the inaudible; Keeping the voice of the nightingale alive in the age of mechanical reproduction; On the evidence of Mallarmé's music; How music enables Proust to write paradise lost; 'Song must write': Roland Barthes's hallucinations; 'Sing me a song to make death tolerable': music in mourning for Derrida; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.