Translating For Singing

Ronnie Apter is Professor Emerita of English at Central Michigan University, USA. She is the author of two books, Digging for the Treasure: Translation After Pound (Lang, 1984; reprint Paragon House 1987) and A Bilingual Edition of the Love Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn in Occitan and English: Sugar and Salt (Mellen, 1999). She is the author or co-author of numerous articles which have appeared in American journals such as Ars Lyrica and Translation Review and in the British journal In Other Words, and of poetry translations appearing in Two Lines, The Literary Review, The New Orleans Review, Metamorphoses, The Classical Outlook, and elsewhere, and in several anthologies. Many of her 22 translations of operas, operettas, and choral works, written in collaboration with Mark Herman, have been performed in the United States, Canada, England, and Scotland, and have been praised in periodicals ranging from The New York Times to The [London] Times.Mark Herman is a literary translator, technical translator, chemical engineer, playwright, musician, and actor. For over two decades he has written the 'Humor and Translation Column' appearing monthly in The ATA Chronicle, the journal of the American Translators Association. Many of his book reviews have appeared in Ars Lyrica. He frequently collaborates with Ronnie Apter.

For those who love opera and the broader genre of lyric theater, and perhaps most particularly for those of us who are engaged in making it, selling it, teaching it, and striving to find and develop our own successors on stage and in the audience, Translating for Singing offers an important contribution to the discussion. My own modest proposal for its dissemination would be to find a way to place a copy on the desk of every opera house management, on the office chair of every Conservatory dean, opera director, and voice teacher in the UK and USA, and of course in the hands of anyone who is brave enough to engage in the traitorous act of opera translation.

• FrontispieceForeword by Jonas ForssellAbout This BookAcknowledgements Copyright Acknowledgements1. Translation and Music2. Singable Translations3. Foreignization And Domestication4. Adaptation and Re-Translation5. Dealing With Difference6. Censorship and Taboos7. Once Upon Which Time?8. Verbal Delineation Of Character9. Multiple Translations10. When the Music is Missing11. Verbal and Musical Form12. Music and MeaningAfterwordBibliographyIndex