INTERPRETATION AS THE ART OF RESURRECTION
Response to the comment on my Baudelaire reading.
Part 1:
"Recently, I have enjoyed some of your works in a theatrical genre. However, this work does not achieve what those works did."
Tatiana Gerasimenok: What exact parameters should be used to compare the achievements of Stravinsky, the composer of The Rite of Spring, and Stravinsky reading a Pushkin poem over his morning coffee?
Part 2:
"It seems that you are more focused on the technological aspects of how your voice sounds in your own ears through the headphones, rather than on the actual poetry, meter, rhyme, and the elements of the tailor-made style that explain why this work was presented at that moment."
Tatiana Gerasimenok: Only a highly intellectual person can truly sense the present, and this is the kind of individual that every artist working in academic field must be.
For an author's work to remain relevant after their death — rather than being locked away in a museum vault or performed in the dust of mediocre academic art events — the interpreter must be deeply attuned to the present, analyze the emotional structure and content of the work, understand its historical and cultural context, uncover its hidden meanings, and, finally, reinterpret the material through the lens of the contemporary era, using current forms of expression.
To give Baudelaire artificial respiration, not to embalm him, I, as an interpreter, create an intimate space for deep immersion into the atmosphere of his work. My narrative style is closer to trance and meditation. My task is to tear off the straightjacket of outdated templates and give him breath. Let him speak not as a monument, but as a living, contradictory, terrifyingly beautiful soul — just as he was.
Part 3:
"This is not a project, but a vanity installation, / completely disconnected from its soul in terms of the origin of the work."
Tatiana Gerasimenok: The second part of the statement is incorrect for the reasons I explained in the previous paragraphs.
Conclusion
Given that most "academic creators" have chosen the wrong field — they lack sensitivity to the present and sometimes even long for the past — all they can offer the authors of previous eras is to lock them in a crypt of rotten templates, leaving both themselves and those they interpret overboard the airplane of modernity.
If you disagree with the necessity of progress in academic art and plan to decompose in my comments with superficial judgments — I will be forced to throw you overboard from my page.
Tatiana Gerasimenok reads the Russian version of
Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Une Charogne” (1857):
LISTEN