On translating the Ring text into English

[Anselm]

There have been several attempts at this, each of which adopts different approaches. My question is: which one most closely approximates the experience of Wagner's original Bayreuth audience in 1876? Would the text have struck them as sounding archaic, the equivalent of our "thees and thous", much as Jameson's translation or the King James version of the Bible strikes us today, or would it have sounded more contemporary to them, as we would hear Porter's one?

(The question isn't so much about Stabreim, which is a separate issue. It can certainly be conveyed either way, tricky though this might be, although Porter seems to eschew it - which must have made life easier for him. Spencer and Jameson make decent if sporadic stabs at it. I note that Seamus Heaney's translation of "Beowulf" in contemporary style makes no attempt at it either.)

[Bert Coules]

That's a very interesting question. My German (modern and archaic) isn't
good enough to know exactly what the impact of Wagner's text would have been
on a contemporary audience, but it is received wisdom that the Ring is
written in (or perhaps incorporates elements of) a language that certainly
wasn't in everyday use.

Given that, then perhaps (to stick just with singing translations) Porter
and, more so, Sams, don't reproduce the original experience. This is, of
course, by deliberate intention. Porter:

"I looked... at earlier singing versions to see whether there was really
room for a new translation - and decided that perhaps there was. I thought
it might be possible to try for something a little more fluent and direct, a
little easier to understand, than Jameson and Newman had been."

So yes, the earlier attempts - Forman in 1873, H and F Corder (early 1880s),
Jameson (1900ish) and the rest - probably do get us nearer to what Wagner's
first audiences encountered. Maybe the earliest attendees at Die Walküre
thrilled to the German equivalent of this:

on the steadfast pair of thine eyes, -
that so oft were stars of my storm,
when hope was fierce
in my heart like fire,
when world's-delightwards
my will was lifted
from dread wildering darkness -
for latest healing
here I must lean
in last farewell
of lingering lips!

That's Alfred Forman, almost Shakespearian in language as well as sticking
very closely to the Stabreim.

There are recordings of early versions and they make fascinating hearing. A
modern-day performance which deliberate used archaic language would be
equally intriguing - and would fit nicely into the presently-fashionable
authentic period style approach - but sadly I can't see it happening any
time soon.







"Anselm" <anselm.kerste...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:f193df74-3161-4173...@googlegroups.com...

[Bert Coules]

In this context, this British Library event tomorrow is of some relevance:

http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event145303.html

A dramatic reading in English of the entire Ring, with a cast which includes
John Tomlinson (as narrator/host, not as Wotan) and actors from one of
London's leading acting academies.

I believe, but I don't know for sure, that they're using the
Millington/Spencer translation. I'm hoping to go, so I'll report back.

[Mike Scott Rohan]

On Friday, June 7, 2013 10:33:08 PM UTC+1, Anselm wrote:
> There have been several attempts at this, each of which adopts different approaches. My question is: which one most closely approximates the experience of Wagner's original Bayreuth audience in 1876? Would the text have struck them as sounding archaic, the equivalent of our "thees and thous", much as Jameson's translation or the King James version of the Bible strikes us today, or would it have sounded more contemporary to them, as we would hear Porter's one?
>
>
>
> (The question isn't so much about Stabreim, which is a separate issue. It can certainly be conveyed either way, tricky though this might be, although Porter seems to eschew it - which must have made life easier for him. Spencer and Jameson make decent if sporadic stabs at it. I note that Seamus Heaney's translation of "Beowulf" in contemporary style makes no attempt at it either.)

Wrote you a neat answer to this, which my stone-age village broadband service promptly swallowed. I tried to reproduce it, but it came out rather long-winded instead; apologies. I think it still makes the point, anyhow…

Basically, I think Wagner’s audiences, being educated 19th century Europeans, would have found Wagner’s language odd, but not wholly alien – just a degree beyond what they were used to, and in less liberally educated people, their comfort zone. They were primed for “poetic” language, which in the Romantic era included considerable archaism – especially the “High Style”. But this would have been mostly rather classical and dignified – although Goethe had bucked this precedent with the burry, rhythmic Knuttelvers in which he wrote Faust, he still aimed for a fairly classical, unfolksy means of expression. Wagner, though, took this tendency a lot further, using very recherché, rough-textured words, partly for the archaic atmosphere, but sometimes for the sake of the sound alone; so he often sounded rather uncouth, and indeed was accused of that.

By the French especially, and you can see why. No language has remained so classical in style until so recently, to the point where Shakespeare is almost untranslateable. Something like “ditch-delivered by a drab” is impossible to render in coherent French; the economy of expression simply isn’t there. Wagner had it much worse. Berlioz’s libretti, or Gounod’s, were considered Romantic, but compare their stately, well-ordered lines to Wagner’s –

“Mon fer, o surprise!
Dans les airs se brise!”

“Comme le sable emporté par les vents
Chassons dans ses déserts brûlants
Le Numide éperdu; qu’il tremble.”

The Italians had even worse problems; in Pertile’s classic version of Mein Lieber Schwan he’s obliged to sing Merce, merce, cigno gentile. So it’s safe to say that for the speakers of Romance languages that first year at Bayreuth – and that would include Russians like Tchaikovsky – Wagner would have sounded like his least ept translators, pretty damn arcane.

That wouldn’t have been so true of the English, however. They were somewhat freer, being used to Chaucer, Shakespeare etc., sounding a lot older and more arcane than Dante or Petrarch. All the same, we know Wagner’s alliterations fell very oddly on their ears. There was a highly popular pamphlet Against Wagner, written by a retired colonel of the classic type, who lambasted Wagner for not sounding like Shelley or Keats; probably that would reflect a lot of ordinary people, well read but not especially intellectual. Col. Blimp was well aware it was an attempt at archaic style; he just didn’t think that was a good idea at all. Nor would he have seen much of a resemblance to the Bible, which was generally not thought of as verse or even in literary terms at all.

Perhaps the best way to judge what more liberal contemporaries might have made of Wagner, though, is to compare William Morris’s enormous poem The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, which he wrote while Wagner was writing his version (and was very annoyed by the idea!). Morris’s many saga and folklore translations tended to use a heavyweight High Style which made Wagner’s mild by comparison, but this was original work, among other things attributing somewhat socialist ideas to the great hero. A passage we’ll all recognise:

“Then into the Volsung dwelling a mighty man there strode
One-eyed and seeming ancient, though bright his visage glowed
Cloud-blue was the kirtle on him, and his hood was gleaming grey
As the latter morning sundog when the storm is on its way;
A bill he bore on his shoulder, whose mighty ashen beam
Burnt bright with the flame of the sea, and the blended silver’s gleam.
And such was the guise of his rainment as the Volsung elders had told
Was borne by their fathers’ fathers, and the first that warred in the wold.”

This is a mixture of the fluently modern, the archaic and the selection for primarily onomatopoeic effect not unlike Wagner’s. It was generally well received by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and not (unlike the heavyweight saga translations) considered anything especially hard to deal with. So, probably, Wagner’s version wouldn’t have been seen as much more difficult.

However, it’s worth noting that at the time there seems to have been a taste for obscurity, or at any rate a lack of judgement. If you could understand something at first sight, some people seemed to feel, it couldn’t be genuinely archaic. So you get the sort of ludicrous spellings and snaky constructions that Chatterton delighted in for his forgeries. And that influenced several of Wagner’s early translators. Many appear to have taken Morris’s saga style as their model, and the incipient Celtic twilight – the classic example of this being Wotan’s innocent “Er geh seines Wegs!” translated as “His weird he shall dree!” This is impossible to judge, because people didn’t really expect to understand it, rather as they tolerate jargon today, when it creates the right frame of mind. Look, after all, at what Ezra Pound made of the Analects of Confucius.

It’s interesting to reflect that the High Style is still considered quite accessible today– the classic example being JRR Tolkien, who was of course much influenced by Morris. But even hard SF writers often revert to it when they want to convey a sense of something ancient and wise – as in the Star Trek films, where it’s used (horribly ineptly) to suggest Vulcan wisdom. I certainly don’t think it would hurt to render the Ring in that fashion – very carefully. Porter comes close to it at times. It’s certainly a mistake to try to be too up to date – as the late William Mann, for example, in the translation DG used to use, rendered the Wanderer as “the Traveller”. But in fact “Wanderer” is the original Norse name for Wotan in that guise. So in this case, and I suspect many others, the poetic term is in fact the best.

{Incidentally, while in English “Thees and thous”, were considered archaic, almost every other major European language retained them, representing intimate and formal address as well as singular and plural and has continued to do so. Only now are they sometimes disappearing, under the influence of English; but ol;d-fashioned politeness remains just that. In Poland you don’t generally ask bluntly “Do you speak English?” but “Chi pan mowie Angielsku?” – “Does the Sir speak English?” And that after half a century of communism!}

Cheers,

Mike