lily_handmaiden

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It's late, but I was determined to get this posted today. I translated most of this song at a play rehearsal for either "The Tempest" or the Scottish Play over the summer. Whitney and I were sitting offstage while she read and I translated, and I remember saying "Aww" a couple of times, telling her what the translation was, and her also going, "aww."

This is German "For Good." You can't say that something is changed "for good" in German. Once again, a song falls victim to the lack of "goodness" phrases. But "Wie ich bin" still manages to get the message across and is a really sweet song. It's another one where the revelatory act of translating really made the song new for me as I went.

I'm going to dedicate this translation to Whitney, Bethany, and celtic_songster . There are two or three others who the lyrics also apply to, for me, but circumstances recently have caused me to look back, and I cannot imagine what my life would be, what I would be doing now, how I would have gotten through college, without you guys. Love.

 

( What will happen now rests only with you, for both of us... )

 

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Before we get to the extra special translation of the day, I just want to point out that if you want to give money, or give more money, to Haiti, an fun way to do it is through this site. By donating through the Harry Potter Alliance to Partners in Health, you can become eligible to win some freaking awesome things, including a copy of Unseen Academicals personalized and signed by Terry Pratchett. Sir Pterry does not do the signing tours so much as once he did, for understandable reasons, so this is a big deal.

Folks, I am back in Illinois and I'm just about set to wrap up my German Wicked translation project. I've had all of these translations done, actually, since August, but I have to go back over them before I post them and make sure I didn't so anything dumb, and then I have to format them correctly, and then I have to make my notes on them, so it ends up taking me an hour minimum to do one of these posts, and sometimes other priorities win out, such as "homework," or "but I am le tired." However, I have a specific reason that I want to finish these posts by Friday, so. Homework can wait. My messed-up priorities, let me showz u them!

The next song up is the German version of "No Good Deed." Now, the clip I found to go with this song also features the entire preceding scene which, despite feminist concerns I would raise, has so universally become known as "the catfight scene" that there's not much I can do about it. And the sound quality on the clip was good, and it was a really good scene, so I thought, "Hey, why not?" (It ended up being harder than I thought, but I am no quitter.) So that's translated here as well. The translation is not smooth, but if I'd made it smooth, it would be what we call "the scene in English," since dialogue doesn't have to get changed for rhyme and meter. I will put the video here above the cut and the scene and the song under separate cuts so you can skip to whichever.

The thing about "Gutes tun," the German version of "No Good Deed" is that when I first looked up these songs online, this was the only one where the youtube comments would sometimes say, "I like this better than the English version." After I translated it, I wasn't initially sure why. I mean, it's a good translation, but so are they all, really. Then I realized that, no matter how much I fight the idea that German is an inherenty "ugly language," it is a language in which angry yelling sounds good. German is conducive to Elphaba's breakdown song. Enjoy.


(Lucy Scherer as Glinda, Willemijn Verkaik as Elphaba. I've seen a lot of people say, "Willemijn is Book Elphaba." This clip is a good example of that.)

( Of course it's always nasty to be stricken dead by a house like that... but, Elphie, accidents happen sometimes! )

 

( In the most terrible need and the darkest time... )

 

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So, here is the English translation of the German version of the song "Wonderful" from Wicked. It is a happy thing for this musical that German has so many words which translate more or less to "wonderful" in English. "Wundervoll" is the most literal, though this translation has also used "herrlich," and possibly "wunderbar" and/or "wunderschoen," I can't remember. Also, "wonderful" doesn't look like a word anymore.

 

( The people of Oz wanted to follow a leader... )

 

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Guess what? I finally took my German proficiency exam today. Hopefully I passed? Well, either way, to celebrate my having attempted it at least, let's get into Act II of English-German-English Wicked. Up first, "Wie herrlich," the German version of "Thank Goodness."

This is another translation I’m super excited about. I’m completely impressed with the mechanics of it—the translation preserves both the internal and the external rhyme, and the little syllabic repetitions between lines that characterize the song! (“Thrill,” “doesn’t thrill,” “will,” “still” here becomes “weh,” “doppelt weh,” “versteh,” and “steh,” for example. And even though a word doesn’t repeat where “cross” does in English, there is strong assonance in all the right places.) And on top of that, the meaning is preserved to an impressive degree.

This was the song other than “I’m Not That Girl” which, as I was translating, struck me with how sad it was. I think a couple of Glinda’s lines make this one sadder in German, too. Though you potentially can—and the Ozians apparently do—still brush off everything she says as general abstraction, she seems to edge closer to an open declaration of pain than she does in the English version. What do you think?


( This is a day to celebrate, a celebration day! )

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At long last, the German version of "Defying Gravity." I've been looking forward to being able to post this one. I think it's an excellent example of a translation which puts its own twists on the lyrics, often in lovely ways, while keeping the spirit of the original song. But don't take my word for it...

(Okay, take my translation for it.)

 

( Something in me is different. Something in me awakes. )

I have read that in Germany this song is particularly powerful because of the resemblance of the Gale Force to Nazis, the strong presence of propaganda, the Wizard's portrayal as a dictator interested in genocide and roadworks, etc. I don't know if that's necessarily true or not, but looking at the way several things throughout are translated, I can definitely see where the connections have been deliberately highlighted, and it makes sense that it would be particularly powerful. So when the troops bust in, it actually gets a little scary. But Elphaba stands up for what's right and defies them all, and that makes her extra heroic and amazing in the German context.

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Here is the next song from Wicked: Die Hexen von Oz. This one is the German version of "One Short Day."

Usually with German, there is a problem with fitting the translated words into the meter of a song because the German word will be longer than the English word. It's a language with lots of compound words and a fondness for lots of syllables. (For a good time, search for the German version of "Seasons of Love.") This is one of the rare exceptions where the opposite is the case. In the English version of this song, "Emerald City" covers five syllables. In German, "Smaragd" means "emerald," and "Stadt" is "city." Therefore, "Smaragdstadt." Three syllables. Which leaves the song in the awkward position of having to continually refer to the place as the "green Emerald City." You know, as opposed to all the other colors such a city might be. Enjoy.

 

( This is my town. It speaks to me! )

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Strictly speaking, the German translation of "Popular" is probably the worst of the bunch. I know this because of YouTube comments. Apparently no self-respecting German would actually use the term "Heissgeliebt," at least, if I am reading correctly, not for the past several decades. And that's just one issue out of many.

But to be fair, you've got to admit, this song must have been a bitch to translate. It's full of complex rhymes and wordplay and contemporary slang and colloquialism. I honestly believe that no one could have done better than this. It preserves, in a language which is not necessarily conducive to it, the fun, light tone of the song.

Tone is something as important to maintain through translation as the meanings of words, I'm discovering. Like, in the German version of "Out Tonight" from Rent, I have no idea what's going on half the time, but it still makes me want to dance. That's the most important thing to that song. And "Heissgeliebt" still makes me want to bounce around like a cutesy spazz. It rhymes words like "Ehrlichkeit," "Begehrlichkeit, and "Unentbehrlichkeit," words which, while not necessarily meaning what we're used to, sound fun and light and silly when put together. It sounds right. And "Popular" is a song that absolutely has to sound right.

That said, I get the impression that when compared to English/American Galinda, German Galinda is... kind of a slut. What's a less severe term than that? More promiscuous? Sexually enthusiastic? You'll see what I mean.

 

( In which Galinda vows to do her best to get Elphaba laid. )

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Strangely enough, it was the short songs in Wicked: Die Hexen von Oz that were hardest to decipher. This is the first one I had really big problems with and, indeed, it wasn't until recently that I finally found a dictionary that had "geheuer" as a word in and of itself, and not just the negative phrase, "nicht geheuer." (Automatic translators oh-so-helpfully gave me, "Nothing is more geheuer." Thanks.) Not long ago, the best I could do with this title was "Everything Is Dubious Anymore." The way it is now makes a lot more sense.

 

( Oh, Miss Elphaba—everything that comes to one’s ears nowadays. )

This journal is owed four belated Merlin reviews starting this weekend.

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I was going to post the last Project Twilight entry today, but I got busy, so I'm bringing you my next Wicked re-translation instead. This is the one I'm probably most proud of out of all of them because it was the first one I did that was really hard, and because I was delighted to discover at the end that it was, I think, one of the best English-to-German translations. Note that Madame Morrible's name becomes "Madame Akaber" in German, I guess so that it continues to rhyme with something unpleasant. Also, I'm trying a slightly more user-friendly footnoting system. Let's see if it works.

( Have I understood correctly? Have I underestimated myself all the time? )

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First of all, happy Fourth to everybody.

Second of all, I highly recommend both The Proposal and Away We Go for your moviegoing pleasure.

Third, I have to take a German comp-out exam in the fall. Due to some technicalities involving the classes I tested out of in undergrad and such bureaucratic nonsense, I have to take this test to get my Masters foreign language credit. One of my projects for this summer therefore had to be brushing up on my German, and it was the project I was probably least looking forward to-- digging out all those old workbooks and nineteenth century stories about people dying miserably-- until I found Wicked: Die Hexen von Oz.

This is the German version of the musical Wicked, which debuted in Stuttgart in I think '06 or '07. I talked a bit about it in my last entry. I decided that a fun way to practice German would be to translate the German translations of the songs (which I found in full here) back into English, and the results so far have been pretty amusing. I've decided I'm going to post my re-translations of the songs on my journal. I'm also going to embed YouTube videos for each song, featuring the original German cast whenever possible.

First up, "No One Mourns The Wicked" (original English lyrics here), which became "Keiner weint um Hexen," or "No One Cries for Witches."

I've footnoted a few comments-- you'll see a number in parentheses like this: (1), which will correspond to a note at the bottom.

 

( How good! She died! )