This is something that’s been nagging at me for a while and, yet, I have no idea how to go about finding the answer. Another poster suggested to me off-board that it’s a good question for Cafe Society. So I said, misspelling it, “Let me forumlate it” for that forum.
There are plenty of songs in English written in rhyming poetry. These songs also get translated into many other languages and even the translations become popular. Obviously, for certain target languages, the English rhyming will be lost.
So, are these songs in the target language now just prose sung to the tune or are they written as a kind of poetry in that language?
I’m mainly curious about hymns but I think it’s a good question for secular music too.
From my experience with English to French translations, rhyme is usually preserved simply because the songs are more like adaptations than translations.
Generally the lyrics are *re-*written, the goal being to keep the original intent behind the lyrics but to have the new language lyrics still work as good lyrics.
The German lyrics to the song Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß translate (roughly) to:
The only song I know personally well enough would be Queen’s “Teo Torriate (Let Us Cling Together)” A friend of mine who speaks Japanese told me* that Teo Torriate is an actual Japanese poem, but the language is fairly archaic. He said the English translation is not exact, but is “close enough for government work.”
(*consider this entire post hearsay and file it accordingly.)
In Japanese (with some misspellings very likely):
Teo torriate kono mamaiko
Isurohito yo
Shizukana yoi ni
Hikario tomo shi
Ito shiki
Oshieo idaki
In English:
Let us cling together
as the years go by
Oh my love my love
In the quiet of the night
Let our candle always burn
Let us never lose the lessons we have learned
Might be exactly what you’re looking for. When you’re on a page, at the bottom will be a link to versions in other languages, along with multiple translations. Though it appears not every language will show up at the bottom of every hymn page, it’s probably possible to find a path to the language you want.
Well, the thing is, I do have a Korean hymnal from my church and an English one, too. Evidently I’m missing something in the translation. I just don’t find it poetic in Korean. That’s not limited to my appraisal of Korean writing, either. I find a lot of stuff written in English that people gush about as being poetic, well, not poetic at all. Many of the songs translated into Korean are obviously not rhyming, so what kind of poetic styles are used to make these songs as attractive in the translation as they are in the original?
Oh, and I listen to that cyberhymnal site a lot. I really like Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.
Hmm… I listen to a lot of Japanese music, but this question is really making me think.
Due to the language structure, it’s very easy to rhyme in Japanese, so it would consequently be easy to preserve a sense of rhyme, but I cant think of any rhyming songs in English that are popular in Japan now.
For the reverse situation, most Japanese songs dont focus on rhyme, only J-Rap really. Thus, I dunno…
All in all, a very interesting question. Looking forward to the replies.
What you quoted isn’t archaic at all, as a matter of fact some of the constructions are distinctly modern. It should be:
Te wo toriatte,
kono mama ikou
Ai suru hito yo
Shizukana yoi ni
Hikari wo tomoshi
Itoshiki oshie wo idaki
A litteral translation would be:
Holding hands together
Oh my love
In this quiet dusk
Turn on the light
Holding onto a message of love
Anyway, here’s an example of French to English adapting lyrics to make the translation rhyme as well, Charles Aznavours original song, Hier encore:
Overly litteral translation:
Yesterday, still, I was twenty, caressing time and playing life, like we play love. I lived at night without counting on my days, that were running away into time.
I think translations into English are a lot easier to rhyme since there are so many synonyms in English. Most of what I know of hymns relates to the German ones, which mostly rhyme and are often pretty faithful (e.g. Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her [From Heaven Above to Earth I come]).
Since this is lyrical poetry, I think the role of the music should also be considered. In my brief music theory training, the professor said that he thought the most popular translations of hymns managed to put an important word at the ‘accented’ note (often the highest note in a phrase, but not always). In English, for instance, these notes often get ‘God’ (or releated pronouns), or might get a verb instead of noun.
Since then, I’ve sort of noticed it in some songs and sometimes it does stick out in a bad translation.
This is one reason I find “99 Red Balloons” so awful (but it has other problems too):
original: Hast du etwas Zeit für mich
singe ich ein Lied für dich
von 99 Luftballons
auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont
You and I in a little toy shop
buy a bag of balloons with the money we’ve got Set them free at the break of dawn
'til one by one, they were gone
It doesn’t take much to improve that IMHO -
“Set them free at the break of day
'til one by one, they float away”
is already better (notice that float - a verb - gets the accent)
Kind of a hijack, but I’ve noticed this in movie subtitles too. I recently picked up a DVD copy of the French-with-English-subtitles movie Amelie, to replace my ageing VHS copy. I’m dismayed to discover that the subtitles are slightly different, and not in a good way. The VHS version played a bit loose with the translation, but was more poetic and idiomatic than the DVD version, which seems to be striving for literal accuracy but in doing so, comes across as clunky and cold. It’s only in a handful of places, but it stands out like a sore thumb.
Having a huge collection of musicals translated into a myriad of languages, I can tell you the lyrics always rhyme. The people who translate the lyrics and manage to make them match the music, the ideas, and make them rhyme get paid extremely well. And they really really earn it.
See, I would love to do that. You get to be creative but you don’t have to create the ideas. I bet it’s not the kind of career that’s easy to start out in though.
Do you have some time for me?
I’ll sing a song for you
about 99 balloons
on their way to the horizon.
(I’m least confident about the first line. Note I inserted a question mark even… It might be “do you have some time for me to sing a song for you…” but I don’t think so since “singe” is not an infinitve but rather a conjugated verb.)
Around our house, that’s known as “The song Daddy sings over and over, alternating with Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, when trying to rock the baby to sleep.”
In some cases they just keep the melody and change the lyrics/story altogether. Case in point, Comme d’habitude, a French song by Claude François in which a man tells his wife how he is tired of their couple’s routine and loss of love and how things now always happen “as usual”, initially tanked in France. Then, Paul Anka bought it, had it translated, and it became… My Way, sung by Frank Sinatra.
What’s noteworthy in that episode is that when the song became a mega-hit in English, it immediately, albeit belatedly, did the same in French.
Similarly, there’s a Jacques Brel song narrated by a man who reveals to his wife and his best friend that he’s known about their affair. This was translated from French into English, rewritten, and released in the US as “Seasons in the Sun.”
