Of all the great composers of the 20th century, there is none whose music cries out so desperately for some kind of translation -- or resists it so thoroughly -- as Dmitri Shostakovich.

"What can this possibly mean?" a listener asks when faced once again with the stirring orchestral bombast, the grim jokes, the grainy lyricism and anguished lamentation. "How am I to understand it? Can I understand it? Is this communication, or propaganda, or irony, or autobiography, or something else?"

There is no answer to any of these questions, and yet they must be asked. The difficulties go beyond the general impossibility of settling on a definitive interpretation of any work of art, for two reasons.

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One is that Shostakovich wrote music, the least hospitable of all the arts to specific meaning. The other is that he spent his career in the Soviet Union, where nothing worth saying could be said explicitly -- or at least without complication.

This year marks the centennial of Shostakovich's birth, and if his place in the musical pantheon is securer now than at his death in 1975, the uncertainties surrounding his legacy seem as daunting as ever.

We encounter the music more and more often in the concert hall -- not only such perennials as the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies or the operatic masterpiece "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," but rarer fare like the Fourth and Fifteenth Symphonies or the late string quartets.

On Wednesday, conductor Mstislav Rostropovich begins two all-Shostakovich weeks with the San Francisco Symphony. This week's program includes the Fifth Symphony -- still the composer's unchallengeable greatest hit -- as well as the "Festive" Overture and the First Piano Concerto, with soloist Yefim Bronfman. Next week brings the Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled "Babi Yar," with its pained, denunciatory settings of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poetry.

Yet even with the increased exposure, Shostakovich's utterances still reach us as if through a cloud of evasiveness and misdirection. The oversize rhetoric of his most heated passages can simultaneously feel both powerful and parodic; stretches of pathos are constantly undercut by short, sharp shocks. Shostakovich can make you weep while poking you in the eye.

In this respect, he is a little like Mahler, who served as his primary model for thinking symphonically (and Shostakovich was a symphonist first and foremost -- even his string quartets are symphonies by other means).

But the stakes here are higher. If Mahler was the deeper orator and (to my mind) the more complex creative artist, the world he addressed was ultimately only that of his own psyche.

Shostakovich was compelled by circumstance to grapple with an external landscape that was infinitely darker and more horrific. This music commands our attention not only because of its innate beauty and dramatic vitality, but because it is a document of one of history's most appalling chapters.

From the day in 1936 when Shostakovich found "Lady Macbeth" pilloried in the official pages of Pravda -- in an article that included the thuggish warning that things "could end badly" for the 29-year-old composer -- his position became permanently precarious, in a truly life-or-death way.

In this respect, he was like many another Soviet artist, struggling to survive under a tyrannical system whose brutality and capriciousness remain impossible for Americans to fathom. If the case of Shostakovich seems to inspire particular fervor, it is both because his music is so potent and because his own attitudes remain so ambiguous.

For years, the prevalent image was of an artist who had reached some kind of more-or-less viable accommodation with the Soviet system, deploying his skills in its service as required while trying to retain whatever artistic autonomy he could.

With the controversial 1979 publication of "Testimony," which purported to be the composer's dictated memoirs, a new portrait emerged. In this version, Shostakovich was a secret dissident, concealing anti-Stalinist squibs between the lines of his compositions for those listeners with the ability to hear them.

That story line has proved difficult to sustain in the face of persuasive arguments against the authenticity of "Testimony." Yet the debates continue to rage over the exact nature of Shostakovich's relationship with the Stalinist regime.

One response to this has been to try to divorce the music from its historical or political context, urging attention to "the music itself." But that impulse, as understandable as it may be, is an evasion.

For Soviet composers, there could be no such thing as "the music itself." "Formalism," after all, was the gravest charge that could be brought against any Soviet artist, and if (like Prokofiev) they weren't particularly interested in politics, politics was certainly interested in them.

Shostakovich's music was always about the Soviet system, even if that was never all it was about. The closest he got to music that was a pure play of form may have been his set of preludes and fugues modeled on Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier."

Even the Ninth Symphony, the composer's wonderfully high-spirited little 1945 homage to Haydn, can't be understood without reference to its defiance of official expectations that he would produce a grand celebration of the Allied victory in World War II.

No, the dilemma has to be faced squarely. It is utterly imperative to place this music in its historical context, and at the same time it remains well-nigh impossible, especially for latter-day Americans, to do so fully.

None of this, I think, would have surprised Shostakovich. There is a certain degree of incomprehensibility built into his music -- not structural intricacy in the modernist sense, but a kind of emotional cryptography, the result of being unable to give voice directly to the horrors he had lived through.

Mahler, facing the incomprehension of his contemporaries, proclaimed boldly that this would change with time. Shostakovich could hardly have been so confident.