Versions of 'The Ring'

...Clarity and fidelity are not necessarily compatible ends, and although space does not permit a catalogue of Porter's perfectly clear traducements of the original, a glance at the opening of The Valkyrie is instructive...

...Armour's work, albeit entirely respectable, belongs to a lost age...

...Such an imitation seems theoretically desirable, but the illustration argues against the practice...

...Briinnhilde herself in the apocalyptic blaze of Siegfried's funeral pyre —strike the eye and capture the mind with irresistible force...

...5) to reflect the differing tones of the characters' speech...

...Yet this is Hunding's house...

...480 pp...

...In love, his heroine's glory diminishes to the sick, cloying sweetness of a Burne-Jones, but as the virgin warrior in Die Walkiire and charging to her death at the climax of Gotterdammerung, she fairly glows with tragic dignity and grandeur...

...Zerknickt...

...With point (5) he has generally done well...

...Stewart Robb, whose singing translation of The Ring appeared in 1960 but has not, to my knowledge, been performed, renders these lines clearly and accurately: "No matter whose hearth,/ here I must slumber...

...His swollen, musclebound figures in their tacky habitations (Disneyland for the Gods, a Greek Revival courthouse for the Gibi-chungs) do nothing to enhance one's reading of The Ring...

...In his introductory essay Porter rightly observes that a translator cannot do everything, and lists his own desiderata: (1) to provide a faithful and clear version of the original...

...In the cherubic rose of his Siegfried's cheeks, we sometimes read all of his youth, little of his heroism...

...6) to find words that fit the music...

...Porter provides an example for point (4) and one sees what he means—Alberich's "Zer-triimmert...

...She habitually rests a greater trust in Wagner's images than does Porter (her Siegmund, for example, speaks of his sword's "sundering tooth" and of the balmy night as "the laughing house of the spring"), yet her spirit is too remote from us to serve in our day...

...The volume has been illustrated abundantly and horribly by Eric Fraser...

...4) to echo the sound of the German...

...Sieglinde, coming to Mime's cave prostrate and in despair, appears rather bedraggled...

...In larger matters, he generally knows what will not do (the Immolation Scene must not begin, as it does in an older translation, with the words "Mighty faggots"), and if Alberioh's curse shrivels under the blight of contractions in exposed places ("Care shall consume/ the man who commands it,/and mortal envy/consume those who don't...

...Illustrations that excellently conjure up the mythic Rhine landscape, its nymphs, gods, heroes, and villains—the famous series by Arthur Packham—have just been reissued in a facsimile of the 1910/1911 edition...

...And while it is not true that no Wagnerian soprano has ever had the lithe, proud, heroic grace to realize Wagner's visual expectations (photographs show that Kirsten Flagstad and Helen Traubel, to mention two, did indeed look the part), Rackham's Valkyrie sets standards that will never be matched in life...

...Porter (who acknowledges leaning on the translations of his predecessors) knows Robb's work, and I can see no justification for his version: "The storm drove me here;/ here I must shelter...

...they are inventive, it is true, and varied on different levels of the action, but absolutely graceless...

...A handful of the 64 color plates seem dimly reproduced, even allowing for Rackham's muted pal-lette, but the rest look superb...

...In fact, the idiosyncracies of Porter's prose, its shifts from bookishness to unabashed excursions into the sublime, gives his writing an affinity with the sometimes romantic, sometimes academic enthusiasm of Wagner's verse...

...2) not to shift the position of names and key words (ring, love, etc...

...To propel the mighty tragedy, Wagner sought words as monumental as his subject...

...He has also, as an examination of the parallel texts shows, managed point (2) to an astonishing degree...

...The tetralogy is a titanic metaphor for the corruption of power and the universal decay of fellowship, and beyond its elaborate web of correspondences and symmetries lies a vast, mythic pageant of fall and redemption...

...Wagner invites the same charge: Studded with out-of-the-way vocabulary, hidebound in alliteration, the lines of his Ring stutter prolixly on...

...Working closely with the English National Opera (ENO)?and most importantly Reginald Goodall, who is through this project coming to be acknowledged as the world's greatest living Wagnerian conductor—Porter strove for accuracy, immediacy and above all musicality...

...37.50...

...Spenser, in affecting the ancients," judged Jonson, "writ no language...

...Loge, the god of fire, darting from the rock to encircle Brunnhilde in a wall of flame...

...and tricked...

...At his best, in other words, Rackham (not having to traffic with Wagner's barbarian language) spreads before us all the majesty of The Ring's poetic conception...

...We are left with the first point, which seems to me paramount and tricky...

...The British performers rise gloriously to the challenges of the music...

...Deeply influenced by the translators and philologists who were embarked on recovering the long^forgotten Norse sagas, he forged an idiom at once new and archaic, with the dust of passing ages seemingly preapplied...

...indeed, since no international house can muster better forces, the ENO singers (notably Rita Hunter, the vocally radiant Brunnhilde, and Norman Bailey, the Wotan) have lately been much in demand...

...Crushed!'" but actually "Shattered...

...He has succeeded impressively in fitting his version to Wagner's vocal lines: Words and phrases fall with a native cadence, and his renderings of dramatic confrontations seem, in the main, as straightforward as possible...

...I have already praised Porter on the last point, for his skill in matching his English to Wagner's musical phrases...

...Siegmund, flying his mortal enemy through a storm, staggers weaponless and spent into the deserted house of Hunding, his foe's kinsman...

...the Giants' legal tirades resound authoritatively, the Rhine-maids babble endearingly, and long stretches of the incandescent first act and almost all of the second of The Valkyrie come across splendidly...

...Reviewed by M. Anatole Gurewitsch Contributor, "Modem Fiction Studies," "Harvard" magazine Some poets stake a claim to greatness with the splendor of their language, others with the force of their vision...

...duplications are integral to Porter's style and one comes reluctantly to accept them...

...Viewed as a whole, though, the sequence gives a generous and spacious reflection of the world of Wagner's legend...

...Rackham's spectral designs for the Gods suddenly aged at Freia's departure and the Noras vanishing at dawn have an unearthly, deliquescent cast of terror, and he possesses a rapturous sense of the elemental beauty of fire, water and air...

...according to Porter "literally 'Destroyed...

...3) to reproduce something of Wagner's alliteration...

...Many of Rackham's images—the Rhinemaids surging from the river, wringing their hands in supplication to the gods who heedlessly approach the Rainbow Bridge or rising from the waves to warn Siegfried of impending doom...

...The lavish rehearsal time Goodall enjoyed, his magisterial command of the material, and his personal attentions to each member of the cast have yielded a wonderfully intelligent and passionate reading of the scores in both symphonic and dramatic terms...

...Porter's English text comes through with commendable clarity, and the performances prove how fully he has met the demands of a singing translation...

...Donner's arms reach sticklike from his burly trunk as he swings his hammer...

...The Ring of the Niblung By Richard Wagner Translated by Margaret Armour Illustrated by Arthur Rackham Abaris, two volumes...

...The critic Andrew Porter—whose pieces in the New Yorker probably constitute the wittiest and most solid music criticism being written in English today—has over the past several years produced a singing translation of the Ring that has received uncommon and deserved interest...

...and Hunding is a deadly enemy—as well as Siegmund's twin sister's husband...

...Snapped...

...The Angel discs are musically thrilling...

...Minor complaints might be made over Porter's heavy use of "one" ("Freia, the fair one,/Holda, the free one . . ."), his blind reliance on "blessed" to describe any and all manner of election and gratification, vague pronoun referents, and so forth...

...Richard Wagner, if one allows him poetic greatness at all, belongs to the second type, especially in his most ambitious work, Der Ring des Nibelungen...

...Wes Herd dies ouch sei," gasps Siegmund, "hier muss ich rasten," and faints...

...Questions of fidelity to style and meaning are another matter, and for their answers we must look to the recently-published bilingual edition of the complete translation...

...Never mind about the insistent repetition of "here...

...nevertheless, she suggests the perfumed sentiments of Rossetti and William Morris far more than the blustery pomp of the original...

...is rendered "Defeated...

...The years have had some adverse effects on Rackham's illustrations, too...

...I can find no compelling evidence for any sustained interest in fulfilling point (3...

...within musical phrases...

...On the other hand, he has sprinkled his "now"s and "then"s (indispensable aids of translators into English verse) with admirable restraint...

...Siegmund does not know where he is...

...The text they accompany is Margaret Armour's poetic translation, but the lines do not follow the music closely enough for singing, making the two-volume set chiefly of artistic and bibliophile interest...

...His achievement, and that of the entire enterprise, is lavishly documented: The Rhinegold (Angel SDC 3825), The Valkyrie (Angel SELX 3826) and Siegfried (available only as a prohibitively expensive import that I have not yet heard) have been recorded complete at performances in London (and Twilight of the Gods, also live, is in the works...

...He is too exhausted to care...

...Acoustically, the recordings fill space with an expansive grandeur one expects only in the best concert halls...

...More important is his embellishing freely at the expense of suppressing the essential...

...Her language, like Wagner's, seems artificial and distant...