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In ‘Experiences in Translation’, linguist and artist Umberto Eco writes:
Every sensible and rigorous theory of language shows that a perfect translation is an impossible dream. In spite of this, people translate. It is like the paradox of Achilles and the turtle. Theoretically speaking, Achilles should never reach the turtle. But in reality, he does. No rigorous philosophical approach to that paradox can underestimate the fact that, not just Achilles, but any one of us, could beat a turtle at the Olympic Games. (2001: 1)
Translation, we know, is imperfect and impossible.1
Nonetheless it is useful, powerful, and can be a richly creative, meaningful act.
People translate during business conventions and during sessions of the United Nations, and even though many misunderstandings can arise, people of different languages agree on the fact, let us say, that the shoes of brand X are less expensive than those of brand Y, or that Russians do not approve of the decision to bomb Serbia. The majority of Christians have read the Gospels in translations (every nation in a different language), but all of them believe that Jesus was crucified and John the Baptist beheaded, and not vice-versa. (2001: x)
Translation is not only pragmatically indispensable, but is itself a creative act that, as Walter Benjamin argues, gestures toward something beyond the limits of any single language. Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ does not conceive of ‘pure language’ as the hidden essence of a specific work, but rather as a transcendent linguistic potentiality — a harmony of all languages that translation intimates but never fully achieves. For Benjamin, translations do not serve the reader so much as they serve language itself, revealing how fragments of meaning scattered across languages yearn toward a greater, unrealized whole. As he puts it, in a translation by Steven Rendall: ‘True translation is transparent, it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original’ (Benjamin 1997: 162).
Through this lens, the approach we lay out in this exposition does not seek to uncover a ‘true spirit’ locked within Heine’s German or Schumann’s music, but to participate in the Benjaminian project of ‘liberating’ language — allowing the work’s afterlives — in translation — to refract new dimensions of meaning. Translation here becomes a way to prolong the work’s reverberations, not to fix them. As Benjamin notes, ‘to set free in his own language the pure language spellbound in the foreign language, to liberate the language imprisoned in the work by rewriting it, is the translator’s task’ (163).
This liberation is not about fidelity to an original so much as fidelity to the gaps between languages, where the‘untranslatable’ sparks creative reinvention. Thus, in The Poet’s Love(r), we embrace translation’s paradox: its failures become opportunities to amplify what Heine’s text could mean — historically, emotionally, politically — when loosened from the constraints of nineteenth-century German and confronted with twenty-first-century sensibilities. Our project, then, aligns with Benjamin’s view that translation is a mode of awakening rather than replication. By layering new contexts (linguistic, visual via AI, performative), we trace how Dichterliebe’s translational acts — its multilingual echoes and reverberations — destabilize ‘pure language’ as a static core, reframing it instead as an evolving, dialogic process.
Benjamin is also helpful in allowing us to reframe our concept of translation’s fundamental purpose, taking the emphasis away from the faithful reproduction, word for word, of the source text. Translations, for Benjamin, should be more than a mere transmission of their original message, and focus instead on what comes after; works, in translation, should be concerned with ‘reaching the stage of their continuing life [Fortleben]: Just as expressions of life are connected in the most intimate manner with the living being without having any significance for the latter, a translation proceeds from the original. Not indeed so much from its life as from its “afterlife” or “survival” [Überleben]’ (153).
Roland Barthes, in his much-cited ‘The Death of the Author’, vehemently argues that approaches to artistic texts have long considered the creator and his intentions over that ‘true locus’ of a work and advocates for separating the two. According to Barthes, the tendency is not only to conflate the identity of the author with the work but also to give undue deference to the person of the author and what he/she was trying to convey through their art instead of focusing on the audience. He states, ‘the unity of a text is not in its origin [i.e. the author], it is in its destination [i.e. the audience/reader]’ (1967: 6).
The author is a modern figure, Barthes argues, ‘discovered in the prestige of the individual [...] The image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions’ (2).
Linguist and translation theorist, Hans Vermeer, builds on this idea in his Skopos Theory, shifting the impetus from the original work itself to the action of translation. Vermeer gives particular weight to the intended purpose of that translation, which he claims is the key element for assessing its efficacy. Skopos, which means ‘purpose’ in Greek, therefore focuses on ‘the translation itself [which] may be conceived as an action, as the name implies. Any action has an aim, a purpose. The word skopos then, is a technical term for the aim or purpose of a translation’ (2004: 227).
Skopos theory, according to Vermeer, reveals the focus of the translation to be not faithful representation of the source text, but the creation of something new. Translation is ‘an action [which] leads to a result, a new situation or event, and possibly to a “new” object. Translational action leads to a “target text”.’ Vermeer claims as well that ‘one possible goal (skopos) would certainly be precisely to preserve the breadth of interpretation of the source text’ (232).
In the world of art song, our area of focus, there is an ongoing debate as to the validity of translating song texts at all. Proponents of this argument state that art song texts are sacred in their original languages and must not be interfered with. When dealing with nineteenth-century canonical classical music works, there is likewise a degree of veneration which makes any and all divergences from an idealized reproduction of the composer’s purported intentions immediately suspect. Keen awareness of these hurdles was foremost in our minds as we considered engaging with this source material. While it is easy to get bogged down with the question of permission in regard to translating Lieder, we chose instead to focus on what Vermeer refers to as translational action as an artistic act in itself.
In this spirit, instead of focusing primarily on how things get lost in translation,2 this exposition explores what translation can do with the multi-layered historical texts which are nineteenth-century song cycles. While acknowledging translation’s limits and failings, and accepting our own inevitable shortcomings, we choose to celebrate the degree of accessibility, the hidden meaning, and the unexpected emotional responses and empathies which we have found through our creative translation processes.
Specifically, we examine the possibilities and challenges of translation as a creative approach to nineteenth-century song cycles through interrogation of our own work with Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Op. 48 on texts by Heinrich Heine. We lay out our artistic journey in creating The Poet’s Love(r), a translational process begun in 2019 and continuing today. Throughout, we interrogate our motivations and concerns during this experiment, examine external and personal responses to it, and set it in relief against other translations of the same composition.
Translation, in this case, is therefore understood in the literal, linguistic sense, but also more broadly, as the creative transformation and addition of con|text, which we interpret as adding a new layer to that assemblage of interpretations, writings, understandings that comprise a musical ‘work’ along with the score. We draw here particularly on Paulo de Assis’s depiction of musical works as assemblages, which he in turn extrapolates from Deleuzian ontological concepts. In brief, for Assis,
the shift from a work-centred perspective to a vision of an exploded continuum made of innumerable objects and things, in steady intensive interaction with one another, creates fields of discourse, practice, and perception based on pure difference, leading to processes of differential repetition. (2019: 272)
This perspective envisions a work of art as much more than the score, the expression of the original author’s intentions, or any of its other single parts. It views it instead through its potential in connection with every iteration in performance and interpretation. It also assures that a ‘work’ of art may be much more robust in nature; instead of appearing as something tiny, fragile, and holy which must be protected and guarded against corruption, it becomes a decentralized entity, one which only grows through added engagement. Returning to Benjamin, through each translation, ‘the original’s life achieves its constantly renewed, latest and most comprehensive unfolding’ (1997: 154). Similarly, Barthes, who refers to the communicative potential of a text as a code, notes, ‘a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be “played with”’ (1967: 3). Assis concurs, noting that this purview is one of the particular strengths of artistic research as it engages with known musical compositions:
In the place of a reiteration of uncritically inherited performance practices, or patronising instances of surveillance and control, this perspective offers a methodology for unconventional, critical renderings that expose the variety and complexity of the musical materials available today. More than repeating what one already thinks one knows about a given work, it claims the pure unknown as the most productive field for artistic practices. Rather than accepting a reproductive tradition, it argues for an experimental, creative, and vitalist attitude. (2019: 272)
In the process of translating Schumann/Heine’s Dichterliebe, Op. 48 into a new, singable English translation, other layers of artistic creation revealed themselves and became part of our assemblage, titled The Poet’s Love(r). One layer included giving voice to the unnamed female protagonist by creating novel poetry in her voice to be held in dialogue with the male narrator. These sixteen original poems alternate with the sixteen Heine settings-in-translation and can be recited or read between (sometimes during) them. In addition, to further engage the female voice within the narrative, we conducted an experiment, feeding both the translated and novel poetry into Dream AI Art Generator, a Large Language Model producing graphical representations to textual prompts. Part of our motivation for doing this was a recognition of the similarity between the act of linguistic translation and the methodology behind AI text-based image production models. In brief, when a translator has a work to translate, the options branch at every turn, and quickly expand, only to be reined in by limits and guidelines (connotation, rhyme scheme, rhythm, poetic style, musical setting, etc.) while an AI generator is limited by prompts. Much, however, is seemingly random ‘choice’ when multiple selections could potentially serve more or less equally well.
A discussion of ethical implications of using AI in this manner, the results, and both the hidden gender bias inherent in visual art of this period as well as some of the exciting and provocative hallucinatory revelations discovered in the course of what might be termed a post-human reflection of our nineteenth-century/twenty-first-century hybrid composition, is found in the final page of this exposition.
All graphics included as illustrations within the exposition, unless otherwise indicated, stem from this experiment.