Aiming at a singable Turkish version of G. F. Händel’s duet “As steals the morn upon the night”
Mine Güven
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Title
Aiming at a singable Turkish version of G. F. Händel’s duet “As steals the morn upon the night”
Abstract
This paper focuses on Händel’s duet “As steals the morn upon the night”, investigating the possible factors that may guide the creation of a singable language version. Comparing German and Turkish lyrics, the paper tries to show that singability is a function of a complex interaction between music and language. The findings suggest that deviations from the original English lyrics are inevitable, given that both the musical score and the canonized source content limit the choices of translators. However, prosodic factors such as the number of syllables, relative prominence of syllables, musical phrasing, and even the choice of vowels for extended melismas prove to be much stronger constraints in creating singable lyrics, suggesting that, if layers of singability in the sense of Johan Franzon (2008) were to be hierarchically ordered, the prosodic layer would be higher than the poetic and semantic-reflexive layers, even in the case of prestigious literary texts.
Keywords
Song translation, singability, prosody, melisma, prominence, intertextuality
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