Translation or Poetry?

I'm not exactly a poet, but I do appreciate the beauty of words strung together in an artful and rhythmic manner. Operas are often times translated literally. That's just the easiest way for an audience to understand what is going on, on the most basic level. These are the translations most often used for supertitles, CD jackets, and printed librettos handed out to an audience. But relying on these steril translations completely ignores all the time that the librettist, who is really a poet, spent on composing the text. We often only associate composers with opera, relegating the librettists to the sidelines. But the librettist was(is) the most important artistic partner a composer has throughout an opera's development. Consider the partnerships of Mozart/Da Ponte, Strauss/von Hofmannsthal, Verdi/Piave then Boito. Each of these produced some of the greatest operas in the repertoire today. It is obviously the music which brings these text alive, hence musical drama, but we ought not forget the poets. They take great care in structuring a text to have a certain number of syllables per line, depending on the music's meter, while at the same time rhyming and giving the phrases emotional depth. We, as an audience, cheat ourselves out of experiencing this magical marriage of words and music by remaining complacent, satisfied with unartistic translations.

J.D. McClatchy's new book Seven Mozart Librettos is a verse translation of Mozart's mature operas. It is the most reassuring hope English translations have of matching the poetry of the original. What McClatchy does not do is maintain the musical meter, making this book unusable for performance. But by twisting the literal meaning occasionally (never deviating too far away), he makes the lines rhyme and come alive with imagery. Opera translation is finally actually a libretto again.

Lets take as an example the aria Dove Sono from Le Nozze di Figaro. The original Italian by Lorenzo da Ponte is rhymed with a specific number of syllables per line. You can almost feel the rhythm when speaking them...

Dove sono i bei momenti

di dolcezza e di piacer,

dove andaro i giuramenti

di quel labbro menzogner?

Perché mai se in pianti e in pene

per me tutto si cangiò,

la memoria di quel bene

dal mio sen non trapassò?

Ah, se almen la mia costanza

nel languire amando ognor,

mi portasse una speranza

di congiar l'ingrato cor!

The literal English translation, naturally, totally ignores the rhyme and meter. It goes something like this...

Where are those happy moments

Of sweetness and pleasure?

Where have they gone,

Those vows of a deceiving tongue?

Then why, if everything for me

Is changed to tears and grief,

Has the memory of that happiness

Not faded from my breast?

Ah! if only my constancy

In yearning lovingly for him always

Could bring the hope

Of changing his ungrateful heart!

Here is McClatchy's version...

Where are they now, the vanished days,

The moments of pleasure's afterglow?

Where are the vows, the murmured praise

Spoken by that liar so long ago?

Why, if sweetness turns to regret,

If every hope becomes a grief,

Why is it still I cannot forget

The love that vies with disbelief?

If only my waiting, my long endurance,

The patience that true love imparts,

Could bring the slightest reassurance

Of changing his ungrateful heart!

There is rhyme, a meter, and imagery, just like the original Italian. It is poetry! Too bad the meter is not the music's. The thing is, McClatchy HAS proved he can translate to a performable version. The current abridged English version of the The Magic Flute at the Met is his own. And it is a success! Was doing the same for all Mozart's mature operas too daunting?