Translating Schubert’s Winterreise: Sense and Singability
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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.
Keywords: adaptation, translation intelligibility, melisma, prosodic-musical alignment, rhythmic substitution,
singability, syllabism, song translation, translation of Schubert’s lieder.
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