Translating Opera
Opera is an art form that purports to have it all: poetry, music, costumes, and lots of drama. Opera in translation is ubiquitous, and what originally started as a private performance for Florentine nobles quickly spread beyond the palace walls and around the world with the aid of translation. With so much going on, translating opera is a multimodal undertaking.
Featuring: Lucile Desblache, a professor at the University of Roehampton in London who led the project Translating Music. Amanda Holden, a practicing opera translator who specializes in creating sung translations.
Originally released on Asymptote Journal
The World of Mundartliteratur, Part 1
The German-speaking part of Switzerland is home to many different dialects, often referred to as distinct languages: Baseldytsch, Bärndütsch, Züritüütsch.
Despite the lack of a standardized writing system, authors in Switzerland are writing the stories of modern Switzerland the way they hear them and in the language in which they live. This literature, referred to as Mundartliteratur, is a unique form of translation from the spoken to the written word.
Featuring: Professor of literature at the University of Fribourg, Ralph Müller and Swiss writer and poet Beat Sterchi, a member of the collective Bern ist überall.
Originally released on Asymptote Jounrnal
The World of Mundartliteratur, Part 2
In this episode of the Asymptote Podcast we return to the world of Mundartliteratur in Switzerland in an exclusive interview with Pedro Lenz, one of the best known Swiss authors who writes in dialect. His engaging and immediate works of prose and poetry present life in modern Switzerland as it really is: a far cry from the idealized herders of Heidi. His 2010 novel Der Goalie bin ig has been translated out of the Bernese Swiss-German into 8 languages, including Glaswegian English, and adapted as a film.
Lenz talks about the relationship between language, sound, and story. He says that the highly deliberate but ultimately artificial way he constructs his texts paradoxically allows a work to connect to its audience with fewer boundaries. He also speaks about how his work was given a new life and context when it was translated into Glaswegian.
Originally released on Asymptote Jounrnal
Building the language Bridge
Before we translate with a language, we have to pick it up. In this episode of the Asymptote Podcast, learn about people’s first interactions with new languages. Discover the funny stories about linguistic misunderstandings unearthed by Podcast Editor Dominick Boyle as he stands on a bridge between two countries. Plus, hear what’s in store for the podcast this fall.
Originally released on Asymptote Journal
The Power of the In-Between
Writer and educator Lauren Camp speaks about the experiences that inspired her poem Given a Continuous Function, We Define a New Function and what it’s like navigating family history though fragments. Then, translator Ghada Mourad talks about the striking work of Syrian poet and journalist Omar Youssef Souleimane, and her translation of his poem, Away from Damascus, which powerfully distills the experiences of Syrian refugees. She also discusses what it’s like to translate the work of those in exile and others from the in-between, and the power of poetry to move across borders.
Originally released on Asymptote Journal
Bio
The work of musician and linguist Dominick Boyle (1991) explores the fragmentation and recombination of place and memory through constructed soundscapes. Using his self-compiled collection of field recordings and interviews–memories collected around the word–as well as sounds from in and around the performance space, he aims to synthesize a sonic space surrounding the audience which fuses with the environment around them, augmenting rather than overtaking it. Using personally created software in the computer coding language ChucK, as well as violin, modular synthesizer and other effects he creates flexible spaces governed by his own input as well as chance.
Dominick holds an MA in Language and Communication from the University of Basel and a BA with a focus on Music from Sarah Lawrence College. He has also studied at the California Institute of the Arts. Performances in Switzerland include Snippet Festival (2022, 2020), Lust*Streifen Film Festival (2021), Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst FHNW, Bonjour Baby and SideEffects pop-up gallery. Podcast editor for Asymptote Journal of world literature and translation (2017-2019). Cooperation with dance, theater and filmmakers in New York, and performances at venues such as Experimental Intermedia, Danspace Project, Hudson River Museum and the NYC Summer Streets festival. He has lived in Basel since 2016.
