Music review — Federal University of Bahia
Cristina Capparelli Gerling
[email protected] – Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Over the past 30 years of my teaching career, spurred by an awareness that key musical texts needed to be made available to Brazilian students with limited knowledge of English, I produced and oversaw a number of scholarly translations. Casting these texts in Portuguese contributed to the widening of readers’ horizons, bringing different cultures and points of view to Brazilian undergraduate music students. Ricoeur (1997) discusses in his work the idea that tension is inherent to the act of translation given that “translation runs into resistance, in that it can be seen as a threat to the target language since we can always ask whether this language can really say what was already said in the other foreign, source language”.1
For instance, my initial encounter with this “resistance” happened between 1989 and 1990, when I introduced the central concepts of Heinrich Schenker’s theory to the Brazilian reader in four introductory texts.2 I had to contend with the difficult nuance of translating terms with deeply Germanic linguistic roots into Portuguese, where those terms in this context, were new. Terms ranging from Ausfaltung to Zug and including Bassbrechung, Kopfton, Urlinie and Ursatz, and/or their English equivalents, were given new Portuguese names, and with them, the need for new subtle distinctions arose. The term “Prolongation”, for instance, was translated as “prolongação” in order to create a distinction from the common Portuguese word “prolongamento”.3 This was a conscious choice but was at the time the subject of debate. By 2007, nearly two decades later, we took up the subject again, and noticed that by this time the usage of “prolongação” had become standardized to describe the treatment of contrapuntal elaborations.4
Having worked to make the Brazilian reader acquainted with the basics of Schenkerian Theory, over the past fifteen years I also found that innovative analytical views and new approaches to the comprehension of music were being developed by Brazilian scholars, and needed to be shared in two languages as well. This instance of translation involves bringing back to Brazilian soil texts dealing with Brazilian music written by Brazilian scholars Lúcia Barrenechea, Sérgio Barrenechea and Hermes Alvarenga. These scholars published their original texts in English as doctoral research projects in the United States. Acting as co-supervisor of their projects and aware of their relevance to Brazilian scholars, I decided to re-translate them from English to Portuguese. Três estudos analíticos: Villa-Lobos, Mignone e Camargo Guarnieri, published in 2000, added to the growing number of studies on Brazilian music originating outside the country. The first chapter in particular was of great significance because it opened up a valuable new line of research, investigating the role of influence in the dialogue between composers (Barrenechea e Gerling, 2000)5.
These texts have paved the way for bolder adventures in translation. At a composers festival in New Mexico (2004) I met with influential analysis professor Dr. Robert Cogan, who had been my professor years before. In conversation with Dr. Cogan and co-author Pozzi Escot, we decided that Sonic Design — The Nature of Sound and Music written (1976) should be translated for Portuguese readers.