All the Same the Words Don't Go Away brings together twenty-five years of essays and reviews, linked loosely by three themes. First is the creative potential inherent in transposing classic
literary texts into other genres or media (operatic, dramatic) and the responsibilities, if any, that govern the transposer, audience, and critic. The practice of transposition, however, gives
rise to a creative conflict: is there a limit to the amount of ornamentation, pressure, or dilution to which the "mediated" word can be subject? Finally, the more polemical of the essays
included here are structured on the Bakhtinian notion of coexisting "plausibilities" and points of view. What a carnival approach can uncover in Pushkin that might have surprised and even
pleased the poet, what a libretto or play script brings out that the "true original" hides: here the work of the creator and the critic co-exist in exhilarating ways that respect the
competencies of each.
