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.
9 comments:
I would buy this! Do you have any translations along these lines already?
It would be something new for me. I've experimented a bit but not published any translations along those lines.
Consider yourself encouraged. I'd be interested for myself, of course -- I think I've made some progress since that Riding setting.
who have you been setting to music?
My 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....
Oh, 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.
I'd love to hear some of them.
I 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.
Here'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.
Post a Comment