Voice Translation and the Transmission of Affect in Intermedial Musical Poetries

This chapter examines the musicality inherent in poetry reading, proposing that poetry facilitates intermedial translation of voice and transmission of affect beyond semantic meaning. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from musical rhetoric, the Baroque Doctrine of Affections, and Stanley Cavell’s concept of affective utterance, this work argues that poetry can approximate opera’s capacity for ‘perfect expression’ by musicalising the voice to convey understanding without relying on verbal meaning alone. The theoretical framework traces a historical evolution: from Baroque musical rhetoric, which encoded idealised emotional states through compositional techniques, through Mozart's 'emotional prosody' integrating paralinguistic and extralinguistic features across multimodal communication, to twentieth-century philosophy of voice. Building on Cavell's engagement with Walter Benjamin, the chapter demonstrates how musicalised voice liberates affective transmission from the constraints of verbal meaning, creating intermedial spaces between language and music.<br/>A case study of Ojārs Vācietis' 1978 lyric poem ‘Klavierkoncerts’ (‘Piano Concerto’) illustrates these theoretical insights, revealing how poetic voice achieves operatic affective resonance through simulated piano performance. This analysis advocates for a musically informed approach to poetry that privileges extralinguistic features and affective experiences, challenging conventional discourse analysis and literary interpretation rooted in semantic fields.