Translation holds so many places in our society, and it can be very interesting to learn about some of them. I’m not a big opera fan, and I never thought about translation needs of an opera house. In the Baltimore Sun, they wrote of an opera performance where a poor translation lead to a distraction of laughter during the performance.

The Baltimore Opera Company’s opening performance of Verdi’s darkly beautiful ‘La forza del destino’ was nearly ruined for me by a sound not typically associated with this work: laughter. No, I’m not talking about the mild comic relief Verdi intended, a la Shakespeare, in a couple of scenes involving an out-of-sorts friar. The giggles and guffaws came instead in the midst of deadly serious business. I consider the primary culprit to be supertitles, the translations of the text projected above the stage. Sometimes I think people were better off not knowing every line in an opera.

…The line in ‘Forza’ that started the laughter Saturday night at the Lyric Opera House came at one of the most introspective and lyrical passages in the score, when the doomed Alvaro contemplates his misery. The original words from the libretto are probably best translated as ‘Life is hell for those who are unhappy.’ The translation used here (if memory serves) was ‘Life is miserable when you are unhappy.’ Either way, it’s not a great line — in English. And I can understand why it would strike some folks as comical. I still wouldn’t disturb a performance by laughing, or blurting out, as the man behind me did, ‘Boy, that’s profound.’ The point, expressed by Alvaro in more poetic Italian, is that the heavy curse of a cruel fate has made him feel that living without his beloved Leonora is worse than not living at all. When people are robbed of what gives them happiness, life is hell. Not such a belly laugh, now, is it? I hope the opera company will replace that supertitle translation in the remaining performances, and just get the gist across, not worrying about the closeness of the translation. Or just remove it entirely. Nothing, at any rate, should disturb Antonello Palombi’s gorgeous singing in that scene.

It may strike most of us as a minor difference in meaning, but to the intended audience is meant a lot. Like many translations, it’s not the literal meaning of the words, but the shades of language and communication that are so difficult and so important to capture. Read more.

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