All the various artistic battle cries, Classicism, Romanticism, Naturalism, Surrealism, The-language-really-used-by-men, The-music-of-the-future, etc., are of interest to art historians because of the practical help which, however absurd they may seem as theories, they have been to artists in discovering how to create the kind of works which were proper to their powers. As listeners, readers and spectators, we should take them all with a strong dose of salt, remembering that a work of art is not about this or that kind of life; it has life, drawn, certainly, from human experience but transmuted, as a tree transmutes water and sunlight into treehood, into its own unique being. Every encounter with a work of art is a personal encounter; what it says is not information but a revelation of itself which is simultaneously a revelation of ourselves. We may dislike any particular work we encounter or prefer another to it but, to the degree that our dislike or our preference is genuine, we admit its genuineness as a work of art. The only real negative judgment—it may be ourselves, not the works, that are at fault—is indifference. As Rossini put it: "All kinds of music are good except the boring kind."
TRANSLATING OPERA LIBRETTI
(Written in collaboration with Chester Kallman)
silva: The cwp's prepared, and so rejoice;
And more, I'll let thee have thy choice. (He proudly presents him a dagger and a cup of
poison)
from an old translation of Ernani
To discover just how arrogant and stupid reviewers can be, one must write something in collaboration with another writer. In a literary collaboration, if it is to be successful, the partners to it must surrender the selves they would be if they were writing separately and become one new author; though, obviously, any given passage must be written by one of them, the censor-critic who decides what will or will not do is this corporate personality. Reviewers think they know better, that they can tell who wrote what; I can only say that, in the case of our collaborations, their guesses as to which parts were actually written by Mr. Kallman and which my myself have been, at a conservative estimate, seventy-five per cent wrong.
Ten years ago, if anybody bad prophesied that we would one day find ourselves translating libretti, we would have thought him crazy. We had always been fanatic advocates of the tradition upheld by British and American opera houses of giving opera in its original tongue as against the European tradition of translation. If people want to know what is going on, we said, let them buy a libretto with an English crib and read it before coming to the opera house; even if they know Italian and German well, they should still do this because, in a performance, one rarely hears more than one word in ten. As regards performances in opera houses, we still feel pretty much the same way, but televised opera for mass audiences is another matter. Whether the TV audience could ever be persuaded to tolerate operas in foreign languages is doubtful, not only because mass audiences are lazy but also because, on a television set, every syllable can be heard so that the irritation caused by failing to understand what is said is greater than in an opera house. (And then, of course, the big broadcasting companies are willing to pay handsomely for translations and we saw no reason why, if a translation was going to be made, we shouldn't get the money.) Once we started, we felt our aesthetic prejudices weakening for a reason which is not perhaps a valid one since it is purely selfish: we found ourselves completely fascinated by the task.
The three libretti we have translated together so far are Da Ponte's libretto for Don Giovanni, Schikaneder-and-Giesecke's libretto for Die Zauberflote and Brecht's text for the song- ballet Die sieben Todsiinden with music by Kurt Weill. Each has its special problems. Don Giovanni is in Italian, with sung recitatives and, stylistically, an opera giocosa; Die Zauberflote is in German, written as a series of numbers with spoken dialogue in between and, stylistically, an opera magica. Die sieben Todsiinden is not a traditional opera in which, as Mozart said, "poetry absolutely has to be the obedient daughter of music," but, like all the Brecht-Weill collaborations, a work in which the words are at least as important as the music, and its language is that of contemporary speech and full of popular idiom.
In comparison with the ordinary translater, the translator of a libretto is much more strictly bound in some respects and much freer in others. Since the music is so infinitely more important than the text, the translator must start with the premise that his translation must demand no change of musical intervals or rhythms in order to fit it. This law is absolute for arias and ensembles; in recitative, occasions may arise when the dropping or addition of a note is justified, but they are very rare. The translator of a libretto, therefore, has to produce a version which is rhythmically identical, not with the verse prosody of the original as it would be spoken, but with the musical prosody as it is sung. The difficulty in achieving this lies in the fact that musical prosody is both quantitative, like Greek and Latin verse, and accentual like English and German. In a quantitative prosody, syllables are either long or short and one long syllable is regarded as being equal in length to two short syllables; in an accentual prosody like our own, the length of the syllables is ignored—metrically, they are regarded as all being equal in length—and the distinction is between accented and unaccented syllables. This means that the rhythmical value of the trisyllabic feet and the dissyllabic feet are the reverse in a quantitative prosody from what they are in an accentual. Thus
A quantitative dactyl or anapaest is in 4/4 or 2/4 time. (March time.)
A quantitative trochee or iamb is in 3/4 or 6/8 time. (Waltz time.)
An accentual dactyl or anapaest is in waltz time. An accentual trochee or iamb in march time.
But in music both quantity and accent count:
A 2/4 bar made up of a half note followed by two quarter notes is, quantitatively, a dactyl but, accentually, a bacchic.
A musical triplet jf) is, quantitatively, a tribrach but, accentually, a dactyl.
To add to the translators' troubles, the felt tempo of the spoken word and of musical notes is utterly different. If, timing myself with a stop watch, I recite, first the most rapid piece of verse I can think of—The Nightmare Son from Iolanthe, let us say—and then the slowest verse I can think of—Tennyson's Tears, idle tears—I find that the proportional difference between the time taken in each case to recite the same number of syllables is, at most, 2,-1, and much of this difference is attributable, not to the change in speed of uttering the syllables but to the pauses in speaking which I make at the caesuras in the slow piece. Further, the two tempi at which I speak them both lie in what is in music the faster half of the tempo range. The tempo which in speaking verse is felt to be an adagio is felt in music as an allegretto. The consequence of this difference is that, when a composer sets verses to a slow tempo, verse dactyls and anapaests turn into molossoi, its trochees and iambs into spondees. The line Now thank -we all our God is iambic when spoken but spondaic when sung.
This means that it is not enough for the translator to read the verses of the libretto, scan them, and produce a prosodic copy in English for, when he then matches his copy against the score, he will often find that the musical distortion of the spoken rhythm which sounded possible in the original tongue sounds impossible in English. This is particularly liable to happen when translating from Italian because, even when speaking, an Italian has a far greater license in prolonging or shortening the length of his syllables than an Englishman.