“Oh for Heaven’s Sake, Do I Need to Explain This Really?” Translation Skopoi in Live Art Song Concerts

Abstract

This quotation is taken from an empirical study into live audience experiences of translations in classical music concerts. Collected at a music festival in Oxford, UK, these remarks describe a participant’s encounter with a specific form of classical music: art song. Art song is a form that sets (often independent) poetry to music in the classical music genre (differentiated from, for example, popular, folk, or traditional music). Due to the form’s language-specific iterations—including but not exclusive to the German Lied, French mélodie, and Spanish canción—art song is often performed in languages other than the vernacular, forcing interlingual translation to be a determinant feature in the genre. As the aforementioned quotation reveals, this phenomenon creates a complex interpretive experience for audiences where the actions of “listening to the music” and “watching the performers” are often accompanied by translating actions, such as “following the foreign language text” and “read[ing]” translations in the vernacular. The challenges associated with art song in translation have attracted modest attention in the literature, which similarly suggests that art song and the way it generates, produces, and propagates meaning through translation leaves the listener “in a most difficult position.” However, translation scholarship to date offers a minimal amount of detail in terms of understanding the nature of these “difficult positions” from the perspectives of translation end-users—the attitudes and actions found in the phenomenological experiences of audience members themselves. This gap in understanding can be attributed to a dearth of academic literature concerned with song in translation, which as a practice requires multidisciplinary approaches, challenging assumptions around authorship, and often blurring theoretical concepts such as translation, adaptation, and creative writing. Within this limited body of research, studies of relevance to the art song genre can be located in functionalist views of song in translation; aligning with trends in translation scholarship that pay greater attention to the reception, social and cultural purposes and effects of translation, and its commercial uses and ethical and political consequences. A key model within this developing field is Peter Low’s functional account of strategies within song translation. Low adopts Vermeer’s concept of skopostheorie, where a translator’s aims are determined by the “skopos” or purpose of a “communication in a given situation.” Applying Low’s version of skopostheorie to the live art song genre reveals the presence of multiple “skopoi,” each requiring varying translation strategies. These strategies are targeted toward performance (word-for-word translations used by performers when learning songs) and consumption: (1) traditional approaches using communicative or semantic translations in printed programs; (2) developing approaches seen in communicative or gist translations used for surtitles and subtitles; (3) gist translations used for spoken introductions by performers; and (4) sung translations. The skopoi of most concern to us in this study are those targeted toward consumption. Although Low’s typology provides a useful framework to analyze the different translation types and strategies identified in live art song, this analysis takes place from a methodological position of some distance from TRANSLATION REVIEW 2023, VOL. 116, NO. 1, 1–12 https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2023.2231039