Graduate Student, Music
Thesis Title: Translating Wagner
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Prof. John Deathridge
Prof. Roger Parker |
About
My doctoral research concerns issues of translation pertaining to Richard Wagner in his lifetime: his own translations of both his poetic texts and prose works, his negotiations with other translators, and his view of translation as a means to the spread and success of his works abroad. While some of Wagner’s plans for the translation of his works were successfully realized, others never came to fruition. How did Wagner attempt to put these ideas into practice? and what were the implications for the pre-existing works and for their subsequent reception and identity? More importantly, how does this activity of translation square with the importance Wagner placed – in writing as well as in the works themselves – upon the German language and upon the intimacy between word and tone? At the same time I consider the idea of ‘translation’ more broadly, in the sense of the transfer and mediation of a cultural product within (international) reception history: how did Wagner use publishers to disseminate his works, and arrangements of his works, abroad? and to what extent, and how, did Wagner attempt to exert control over the foreign productions of his works? Ultimately my focus on issues of translation will lend itself to a critique of Wagner’s German nationalism, which today remains the prevailing historiographical view in popular imagination as well as in scholarship.
