Operatic Translation and Sostakovic: The Nose

Abstract

TRANSLATION of an opera libretto demands the examination of two related issues. One is adaptation, the process of translating an existing literary work to the operatic stage. operatic adaptation may or may not be in the same language as the source text. other issue is the problem of translation per se, that is, the translation of a libretto, often an already adapted text, from one language to another. Analysis of some of the problems involved in translating the text of Dimitri Shostakovich opera Nose (1930), itself an adaptation of Nikolaj Gogol's short story The Nose, provides a case study by which both of these issues may be explored. Although the main concern of this discussion will be operatic translation in the second, conventional sense of the term, a few remarks must first be made about the first type of operatic translation, the adaptation.