Perspectives on Retranslation by Özlem Berk Albachten Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar

Author:Özlem Berk Albachten,Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

Editorial Procedure

It thus becomes immediately clear that the choices set before the modern editor as retranslator are complex, as the text in question is highly individual, spontaneous, and unprecedented. The target audience for a modern edition is diverse, has various backgrounds and various demands between scholarly research and performance practice in different cultural contexts. It is important to keep in mind that, other than in text editing, the author and the editor are joined by the performer as a third actor (Grier 1996, 23–24, 44; Bent 1994; Hogwood 2013). Modern standards of critical edition have to be reconciled with general accessibility to readers from different (musical) cultures. It is important to account to ourselves about what and how we have to mediate and what is in danger of getting lost in retranslation.

Historical musicology distinguishes different types of editions according to the intended use and audience, the required methodology, and the desired depth of detail. It has to be kept in mind that “every piece of music is created under a unique combination of cultural, social, historical, and economic circumstances; an acknowledgment of those circumstances, and thus of the uniqueness of each creative product, affects the conception of all editorial projects” (Grier 2017). The two main types of interest here are the practical and the critical edition. The former is aimed at performers; annotations are generally kept to a minimum and accessibility is a priority. Changes to the original text of the source are possible—think of transposed editions of Franz Schubert’s songs for high, middle, and low voice with the former being the version notated by the composer (Schubert 2002). The critical edition focuses on the historically informed mediation of a source. It is equipped with a commentary in which the editor explains and justifies his/her choices. Often also annotations are added to the music itself, such as brackets where a missing passage could be inserted from a different source of the piece, or smaller staves containing deviant versions. Another important feature of critical editions are emendations and conjectures, i.e., corrections of errors perceived as such by the editor based on his/her understanding of the composer’s style and intention (Grier 1996, 31–33), which will invariably be marked in the music and explained in the commentary. Those editorial choices are open to discussion. The scholarly ideal of the original, true version of a piece as intended by the composer—the so-called Urtext, the “primeval” or “original text” (Grier 1996, 11–15; Tanselle 1976)—applies to the present case in a very limited way as oral tradition is involved and only ʿAlī Ufuḳī’s two manuscripts can be compared meaningfully.

As mentioned in the introductory paragraphs, change in the target culture creates demand for a retranslation—but which are the target cultures here? While we have no certainty about the intended audiences of ʿAlī Ufuḳī’s manuscripts apart from himself, a critical edition addresses the modern international scholarly community as well as prospective performers mainly in Turkey, but potentially worldwide. While ʿAlī Ufuḳī was bicultural, the present author is not.

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