Found in Translation: The Inuit Voice in Moravian Music‪.‬

THE MOST HILARIOUS PARTY GAME of my pre-teen years was something we called "telephone." A group of excitable nine-year-olds sat in a circle as we whispered a secret from person to person around the room. As the secret advanced around the circumference of friends, it grew more distorted (and of course, more hilarious) with the incidental changes of mis-communication and colourful embellishments of each retelling. When the secret-no-more finally returned to its original whisperer, it was told aloud to convulsions of laughter. Not so long ago, the game of telephone came back to me in an unexpected deja vu moment. My daughter and I found ourselves in a eight-passenger compartment on a European night train. Among our six fellow travellers, each had one language in common with one other person in the compartment. Armed with a translation chain, we spent one of the most memorable nights of our lives telling jokes across six languages in a circle around the car. The hilarity was not far from the level of my childhood telephone games, but the source of the distortion was not merely the creative silliness of a group of friends. Instead the metamorphosis was occasioned by successive layers of cultural inflection as the joke was retold and remoulded across six languages. Both telephone games produced unexpected results--and no small amount of amusement. Both were also lessons in the fallibility of communication: to retell--to copy is to introduce error--to distort. Though on one level the transformation of the secret is a distortion, on another it is no more than the introduction of the voice of the teller. The story is thus amplified from its previous form, carrying with it the added resonance of the reteller. As Stravinsky famously said, in retort to the critics of Pulcinella, "to copy is to critique" (111-114). Copying introduces the filter of the reteller's sensibilities and judgment which render the story retold a story new.