Translating Schubert's Winterreise: Sense and singability

Abstract

The activity of song translation is not only of scholarly interest in the field of musicology, but also aids translation studies because of the focus it places on the relationship between linguistic content and form. Moreover, translating such canonical works as Schubert's lieder provides a rich, multidimensional perspective on such adjacent topics as cultural history, comparative literature and even international relations. Whereas choices faced by poetic translators typically involve the unavoidable contest between faithfulness to the semantic content of the source text and preservation of its poetic form, translators who wish their texts to be sung must resolve this contest by following the primary criterion of singability. In this article a discussion of the choices faced by a contemporary English translator of Wilhelm Müller's poems set by Schubert in his song cycle Winterreise is presented in terms of singability and intelligibility.