Here's my most recent brilliant idea. (or maybe not, just a pipe-dream] A book-length translation, not of a book of Lorca's, but of the words of *all* the Lorca songs I refer to in the book. It could be a companion book, a translation to accompany all the musical analyses. I would include the 13 canciones populares not by Lorca that are always done in conjunction with him, and which don't have good translations into English. And I would translate them in cantabile style, in other words, so that they could be set to music themselves.
I would buy this! Do you have any translations along these lines already?
ReplyDeleteIt would be something new for me. I've experimented a bit but not published any translations along those lines.
ReplyDeleteConsider yourself encouraged. I'd be interested for myself, of course -- I think I've made some progress since that Riding setting.
Deletewho have you been setting to music?
ReplyDeleteMy big project is a full setting of Yeats's "At the Hawk's Well." Others include George Herbert, Lawrence, Tennyson (from "In Memoriam"). I have some others in mind, but similarly leaning on well-known English poetry in the public domain. A change would be salutary....
DeleteOh, I also did one not in English, a short poem of Hofmannsthal. The less familiar language made me nervous, but it went OK in the end.
DeleteI'd love to hear some of them.
ReplyDeleteI don't have recordings of most of these -- but I'll be hiring people to record some of them in the next month or so, and I'll pass those on.
ReplyDeleteHere's a rehearsal of a choir doing my setting of In Memoriam 126 ("Love is and was"). I think it comes through OK, but it's composed to a more conservative taste than the songs.
Nice harmonies there. I miss my choir.
ReplyDelete