Theatre Translation: An Italian Version of the Musical ''Wicked''

Lyrics are the most problematic aspect in the translation of musicals. They take up most of the script and present a far more fixed form than dialogues (even without claiming a literary dignity, they are often circulated in written form outside the theatre context, especially when the musical numbers become popular songs in their own right.). However, in spite of their “frozen” form, lyrics are much more conditioned than dialogues in their translation, since their performability completely rests on their matching the music, from which they are not separable.
The translation of lyrics can be compared to that of poetry, with which wrtitten-to-be-sung lines share many features. Levý (in Bassnett, 2002: 5) sees any literary translation not as “a monistic composition” but as a “conglomerate of two structures” (“the semantic content and the formal contour”).
In the translation of poems, in particular, a full correspondence between the source and the target text is impossible to achieve, but rather a network of correspondences (formal, semantic, functional, mimetic, analogical, macro- or microstructural) is established, and a hierarchy inside this network, according to which the poetic translator decides which aspects to retain in the translated poem (form, meaning, function, style), (Holmes, 1988: 83-6). In the case of lyrics the metrical pattern ranks highest in the hierarchy of what must be retained in the translated text: “singability” is the parameter against which the success of a translation is measured, and even semantic equivalence can be sacrificed to metrical correspondence.
More specifically the translated lyrics must fit the metrical deep structure of music (the beats) and the “surface” rhythmical pattern (the actual realization of beats through musical notes with variable values of duration and distribution of musical accents), (Della Casa, 1992: 119-20). For this purpose the most accurate translating method is writing the translated lyrics directly on the sheet music, so that the correspondence of syllables with notes (and feet with beats) is concretely visualized. In linguistic terms the metrical equivalence between original and translated lyrics is obtained by retaining the same number of syllables and distribution of stresses in each line. Minor discrepancies in the number of syllables are allowed if justified by the musical rhythm, which may realize a beat either with an equivalently long note or with two or more shorter notes: conversely, in the translated lyrics the feet do not necessarily have to present the same number of syllables of the correspondent feet in the original lyrics, provided the quantity of each foot remains unaltered.