The ATA Chronicle - March/April 2018 - 28

OUR WORLD OF WORDS continued
In addition to translating an opera's
dialogue and lyrics, you sometimes also
contribute lines and dialogue that were not
in the original. Tell us about that process
and give us a few examples.
Sometimes added words are necessary
to explain something that the original
librettist omitted-to add a footnote
directly into the performed libretto
because there is no chance for the
audience to read one. For example, in
François Boieldieu's French operetta
My Aunt Aurore, a satire on the early
19th-century craze for gothic novels,
the heroine Julie tells her aunt that
she has followed her instructions and
keeps a dovecote in honor of the one
kept by the title character in Samuel
Richardson's novel Clarissa. The original
early 19th-century audience would have
known that Clarissa kept a dairy, so we
added a footnote:
Julie: Good heavens, aunt, you yourself
desired me to keep a dovecote in
honor of the one Clarissa had.
Marton: Clarissa kept a dairy.
Aurore: Yes, but cows are so very large.
I explained all that...
Jokes are often not translatable
locally; that is, at the same places in the
translation that they are in the original.
For example, the French comic operetta
Madame Angot's Daughter contains the
following lines about Madame Angot:
"Captured in Malabar, she is believed to
be a widow, alas! They want to burn her
alive!" We added a joke to compensate
for those lost in our translation by
rendering the lines as, "The natives tried
to burn her / in Hindu Malabar. / They
took her for a widow, / but she refused
to char." This joke refers to the fact that
"char," in addition to its usual meaning,
is a British verb meaning "clean," and
cleaning women, also called "chars,"
were often widows.

Presumably, like the original librettist, you
fall in love with some of your words. Please
identify one of your favorite lines and tell us
why it pleases you.
One of our favorites is a couplet from
Mozart's The Magic Flute, with a German
libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The
meaning is "A man is of strong spirit, he
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The ATA Chronicle | March/April 2018

thinks about what he may say." The tone
is slightly humorous. We kept getting
stuck on the rhymes, working with "weakspeak," "man-can," and others. Finally, we
hit upon "A man is made of sturdy stuff: /
he knows when he has said enough." Our
version also adds a joke: the singers repeat
the second line four times, suggesting that
they should listen to what they are singing
and shut up.

Despite the concern, some might say
obsession, of many operas with sex
and violence, albeit occurring almost
exclusively offstage, most audiences would
still give most operas a "G" rating. Is this
because audiences don't understand the
foreign words? Have you yourselves ever
run into censorship?
Some "G" ratings do arise in part
because audiences do not understand
the foreign words. Also, some
translations are censored. Mostly,
however, the sanitized ratings come
from the fact that opera is considered
"high art," much as Shakespeare's plays
today usually get the same free pass
despite bawdiness and violence (though
there was a period when Shakespeare's
works were heavily "Bowdlerized").
We have encountered a few taboos over
the years. For example, in Mozart's The
Magic Flute, the character Sarastro sings
lines meaning, "A man must govern your
heart, / for without him / every woman is
likely to step outside her [rightful] sphere
of activity." We originally wrote, "Your
heart needs guidance from a husband. /
Without a man, / a woman will exceed
the sphere of woman's work." We were
required to change this to "Your heart
needs guidance from a husband, / or, like
your mother, / you will never learn to wed
desire and duty."

What are the most significant lessons you've
learned by doing this work? Do you have any
tips for translators who might be interested
in working in this area?
We've learned that opera translation, as a
branch of show business, is essentially a
collaborative endeavor, that the translation
is not finished until the performance
is over, and that new productions may
require additional tweaks. Translators
interested in working in this area,

regardless of inherent talent, should
probably start by participating in sung
performances of English lyrics. These can
be amateur affairs, such as community
choruses or community theater
productions of musicals. Then the skills
mentioned above should be acquired.
After that, the hard work begins.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
1. Apter, Ronnie, and Mark Herman.
Translating for Singing (Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2016),
http://bit.ly/Translating-for-Singing.
In addition to its own treatment of
the subject, the book has an
extensive bibliography.
2. Low, Peter. Translating Song (Routledge,
2017), http://bit.ly/Translating-Song.
3. Excerpts from performances in Apter
and Herman's English translations are
available on YouTube, including:
The Bartered Bride
http://bit.ly/Bartered-Bride
This features Marenka and Jeník's Act
III duet from Bedrich Smetana's Czech
opera The Bartered Bride, sung by soprano
Adelaide Boedecker and tenor Matthew
Grills. The Bartered Bride was produced
by the Eastman School of Music in
Rochester, New York.
Ernani
http://bit.ly/Ernani-ActII
This features the aria with chorus for
Don Carlos from Act II of Giuseppe
Verdi's Ernani, with baritone Russell
Malcolm as Don Carlos, the King of
Spain. The excerpt from Ernani is audio
only, although stills from the production
are shown during the aria.
Ernani was produced by the Tayside Opera
in Scotland.

Tony Beckwith was born
in Buenos Aires, Argentina,
spent his formative years in
Montevideo, Uruguay, then set
off to see the world. He moved
to Texas in 1980 and currently
lives in Austin, Texas, where he works as a
writer, translator, poet, and cartoonist.
Contact: tony@tonybeckwith.com.
www.atanet.org
http://www.bit.ly/Translating-for-Singing http://www.bit.ly/Translating-Song http://www.bit.ly/Bartered-Bride http://www.bit.ly/Ernani-ActII http://www.atanet.org
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