Next week, the great American composer Elliott Carter (above) celebrates his 100th birthday, and a chance encounter this week with an interview with Carter on Radio 4 sent me searching through stacks of dusty CDs stored in attic boxes to unearth a forgotten gem -  Carter's 'A Mirror on Which To Dwell'.

In this piece Carter set 6 poems by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop for soprano and small ensemble and this re-encounter provided a timely reminder to me of how much great poetry I've found through listening to the works of some incredibly literary twentieth-century composers. 

If I'm honest, until I heard Carter's settings I had never heard of Elizabeth Bishop, and since then I've become something of a devotee of Bishop's writing. Like Carter, Bishop's writing owes something to the quiet radicalism of post-war American culture - of course much vaunted in painting with such luminaries as Mark Rothko, but less well-known in literature, and almost certainly (perhaps rightly) overshadowed by the music of Black America in the same period.

I feel the same about the manner in which Anton Webern set  Georg Trakl. I knew nothing of Trakl until the musical encounter, and there's many more besides - I prefer listening to Britten settings of Wilfred Owen than reading the originals. The same is true of that composer and Auden, Blake and a host of others. I grew tired of Mann's Death In Venice, but like Britten's opera. The list is endless.

But what is really going on here?

I have just returned from a performance in the Czech town of Olomouc with the poets Ian Stephen (Lewis) and Robert Allan Jameson (Shetland). A central part of the event was the translation of poems from English and Shetlandic into the Czech tongue, other performances worked the other way around. Both Ian Stephen and Allan Jameson are true ambassadors of  the language and island cultures their work does so much to invigorate, but it was truly profound seeing, amidst the highly energetic and accomplished walls of the University dept. in Olomouc, the extent to which the act of translation is a primary act of creativity indistinguishable from the first act of writing, and the great energy it brings to writing.

The notion of 'interpretation' does not do this process justice, no more than the term does justice to Carter's setting of Bishop. The original words are merely a starting point, a collection of vague materials from which new things are made. But the new making involves the disturbance of assumptions, the disruption of boundaries whether they be personal, linguistic or cultural, a thorough interrogation of possibilities, choices, structures and above all else a major re-thinking of what it is to be a writer and the relationship between 'reading' and 'writing'. 

Shame it is then that we live in a time when the major English-language publishers in Europe and beyond are turning their backs on literary translation.

The other side of the music / poetry equation is the degree to which the language and metaphors of musical composition can be useful in defining, shaping and moving the writing process.

As an author, I feel I owe much to my early encounters with music of all forms, and when talking about writing, at least my own, I find myself very easily drifting into the language of music.

Music analysis, for example, draws on a greater range of spatial metaphors than its equivalent in writing circles. Particularly, the notions of horizontal and vertical elements in a composition - the horizontal being the chordal and thematic movement, the vertical the timbre, orchestration and other voicings. I am sometimes struck by the power of writers who grasp the importance of such vertical elements in their work, in the way they use words not just to tell a story with its narrative (horizontal) elements but to explore colouration and tone. Sometimes, I am aware when reading that some writers in sections of their work, maybe just a few lines or paragraphs or an entire chapter, virtually cease all horizontal development of the work in favour of a prolonged exposition of tone.  

As writers we often talk of having or trying to find our own 'voice' and how important this is. 'Voice' is, I believe, our own unique blend of vertical and horizontal stylings, our own mix.

As an example, I am often stunned by the timbrel qualities of the work of Irish novelist Niall Williams ('Only Say The Word', 'As It Is In Heaven', 'Four Letters Of Love'), and likewise but to a lesser extent (different mix) in the early novels of Colm Toibin, the short-shorts of Alasdair MacLeod. On the other side of the equation, some of the early short stories of Ian MacEwan I think of as being almost like exercises in horizontal form. 

Composers often impose on their work a much greater and rigid pre-determined structure than novelists. The structures are not, these days, anyway, rigid formal devices but self determined and adhered too on a voluntary basis.  They are not, often at least, rules of compliance with the demands of a specific genre, but how often I read a novel now and wish that the writer had considered the meta-structures and grand forms in their work before committing them to print. Joyce was, of course, the great explorer of these notions, but today so many writers seem blind to the beauty or ugliness of the internal structure of their work.

Sometimes, of course, form comes later, and we must as writers, particularly in lean times, learn to scribble and then allow form or structure to present or suggest itself in a more organic manner than  the predeterminisms we sometimes seek when the words just won't come.

Your examples of the literature you've found through music, most welcome.