The ATA Chronicle - March/April 2018 - 24

OUR WORLD OF WORDS: SPOTLIGHT ON T&I PROFESSIONALS

BY TONY BECKWITH

Interview with Ronnie Apter and Mark Herman,
Translators and Librettists

W

hat if your translation had to be
singable to a pre-existing melody
that couldn't be changed? What
if it had to be understood on the fly while
being performed? These are the sort of
"what if" questions that my guests for this
column, Ronnie Apter and Mark Herman,
have been facing for years.
Ronnie Apter, Professor Emerita of
English at Central Michigan University,
received her PhD from Fordham
University in 1980. Among many other
accomplishments, she is the author of two
books, Digging for the Treasure: Translation
After Pound (1984) and A Bilingual Edition
of the Love Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn in
Occitan and English: Sugar and Salt (1999).
Mark Herman is a literary translator,
technical translator, playwright, musician,
and actor. For over two decades he has
written the "Humor and Translation"
column in The ATA Chronicle. He has a
BS from Columbia University and an
MS from the University of California,
Berkeley, both in chemical engineering.
In 1979, the two were commissioned
by the Bronx Opera to translate Mozart's
The Abduction from the Seraglio into
English for performances in New York.
The production and their translation
were reviewed favorably in The New York
Times. Since then, Mark and Ronnie
have translated 23 additional operas,
operettas, choral works, and songs,
many of which have been performed in
the U.S., U.K., and Canada. They have
also collaborated on many translations
of poetry and children's books and
co-authored Translating for Singing: the
Theory, Art and Craft of Translating Lyrics
(Bloomsbury, 2016).

Thank you both for joining us today. To begin,
please tell us a little about the circumstances
of that first commission in 1979.
We had done a singable translation of
the lyrics to Carl Orff's 1936 choral
cantata Carmina Burana (ironically, for
copyright reasons, the translation can't
be sung publicly) and sent it to various
opera companies that performed at least
24

The ATA Chronicle | March/April 2018

Ronnie Apter

Mark Herman

occasionally in English translation. We
didn't receive responses from most of
them, but we did hear from the Bronx
Opera, a small company in New York
now celebrating its 50th anniversary.
They were looking for a new English
version of Mozart's The Abduction from
the Seraglio and decided to take a chance
on us, knowing that if we didn't deliver,
or they didn't like our translation, they
could still use an existing one. However,
they were hoping that we would come up
with a translation they preferred to the
existing versions.

poems and Mark was translating technical
documents for the library at Exxon
Engineering, where he worked as an
environmental engineer. And so we dove
into the Abduction translation.

How did you handle what I assume was a
relatively new challenge for both of you?
Had you already translated much poetry at
that stage? Any songs?
As mentioned, we had translated Orff's
Carmina Burana, a substantial work.
We found that matching words to sung
phrases came naturally to us. Also, we
had both written metered, rhymed poetry,
some of it published. Mark had written a
couple of librettos, and some music, for
musicals and Ronnie had written several
plays. Both of us had also sung in highquality amateur choruses for years. As
for translations, in addition to Carmina
Burana, Ronnie had translated several

You've said that opera translation requires
both musical and linguistic training. Tell us
about your musical training at that point,
and since then.
As children, both of us had instrument
lessons-Ronnie on piano and Mark on
saxophone and clarinet. As adults, we
both had professional vocal training and,
as mentioned, both of us were singing in
choruses. Also, Mark had taken courses in
music theory. We test our translations for
singability by actually singing them before
we submit them anywhere.

You've translated works originally written in
Latin, French, German, Italian, Russian, and
Czech. Are you fluent in all of them?
Unfortunately, we're not truly fluent in
any of them. We proceed with the help of
dictionaries and, when necessary, native
speakers of the source languages. In
school, Ronnie studied Latin and French,
and Mark Spanish, German, and Russian.
In graduate school, Ronnie studied Old
Occitan (also called Old Provençal,
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