Unnecessary translation
Jan. 21st, 2005 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rscThis is just a rant about the behavior of anonymous music publishers. You have been warned.
My voice teacher and I decided I should work on some Mahler. So I looked to see what I had, and she looked to see what she had that wasn't for high voice, and the result was mostly things I'd either worked on before or didn't really like much. There's no harm in revisiting things one has worked on before (in which spirit I'm having what I think is my third go at Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald), but we both wanted to do something new, and she seemed inclined toward the Rückert-Lieder, which is fine by me. So I went and ordered Volume IV of the International edition of 24 Mahler songs, which contains all of the Rückert settings.
Now, I already own Volume II of that collection, which I bought sometime in the early-to-mid 1980s. It bears a copyright date of 1950. The newly-purchased Volume IV says "Copyright 1950 & 1961". But somewhere in there somebody at International (there's no editor identified) made a curious decision.
For those of you who don't know¹, there's a long tradition of using Italian terms for indications of tempo, expression, dynamics, etc. in classical music. However, there's been a growing counter-tradition (going back at least intermittently to the early 19th century) of composers using their native languages for at least some of these things. Mahler invariably used German for everything except basic dynamics.
In Volume II, these German directions are all accompanied by parenthesized English translations. But in Volume IV they've all been replaced by translations -- into Italian!
I don't understand why they have done this. It changes the flavor of the directions -- no doubt Molto lento e ritenuto is a perfectly respectable translation of Sehr langsam und zurückhaltend, but it doesn't feel the same to me. Similarly, intimo for (I'm guessing) innig just doesn't cut it. Still worse is the appearance of words that are not common among Italian directions, and that I had to look up, e.g., non trainando and non strascinare, both of which seem to be representations of the German nicht schleppen (don't drag).
If they were going to bother to do this for an American edition, why Italian rather than English? And why do it at all?
I'm hoping that my teacher has a high-voice edition with the original markings, so I can write them into my copy.
¹Supposing that anyone who doesn't know this would have cared enough to read this far.
My voice teacher and I decided I should work on some Mahler. So I looked to see what I had, and she looked to see what she had that wasn't for high voice, and the result was mostly things I'd either worked on before or didn't really like much. There's no harm in revisiting things one has worked on before (in which spirit I'm having what I think is my third go at Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald), but we both wanted to do something new, and she seemed inclined toward the Rückert-Lieder, which is fine by me. So I went and ordered Volume IV of the International edition of 24 Mahler songs, which contains all of the Rückert settings.
Now, I already own Volume II of that collection, which I bought sometime in the early-to-mid 1980s. It bears a copyright date of 1950. The newly-purchased Volume IV says "Copyright 1950 & 1961". But somewhere in there somebody at International (there's no editor identified) made a curious decision.
For those of you who don't know¹, there's a long tradition of using Italian terms for indications of tempo, expression, dynamics, etc. in classical music. However, there's been a growing counter-tradition (going back at least intermittently to the early 19th century) of composers using their native languages for at least some of these things. Mahler invariably used German for everything except basic dynamics.
In Volume II, these German directions are all accompanied by parenthesized English translations. But in Volume IV they've all been replaced by translations -- into Italian!
I don't understand why they have done this. It changes the flavor of the directions -- no doubt Molto lento e ritenuto is a perfectly respectable translation of Sehr langsam und zurückhaltend, but it doesn't feel the same to me. Similarly, intimo for (I'm guessing) innig just doesn't cut it. Still worse is the appearance of words that are not common among Italian directions, and that I had to look up, e.g., non trainando and non strascinare, both of which seem to be representations of the German nicht schleppen (don't drag).
If they were going to bother to do this for an American edition, why Italian rather than English? And why do it at all?
I'm hoping that my teacher has a high-voice edition with the original markings, so I can write them into my copy.
¹Supposing that anyone who doesn't know this would have cared enough to read this far.
