Found in Translation: Jeremy Coleman is impressed by a new English translation of the ‘Ring’ poem by a leading British Wagner scholar

Review of Richard Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelung, tr. and ed. with an introduction by John Deathridge (Penguin Classics, 2018).

March 2019, Volume 13, Number 1, 82–5.

The task of the literary translator is usually framed around the notion of ‘fidelity’ to the source text. Whatever the translator is trying to be faithful to (which is another question), any betrayal of the original, according to this logic, is deemed a failure. Or, as the Italian motto has it, traduttore traditore. The translator Mark Polizzotti has recently challenged this view in his radical ‘manifesto’ Sympathy for the Traitor. ‘A good translation’, he contends, ‘offers not a reproduction of the work but an interpretation, a re-representation, just as the performance of a play or a sonata is a representation of the script or the score, one among many possible representations’. Polizzotti’s proposals may partly explain the approach taken by John Deathridge in his superb new English translation of Wagner’s Ring poem. Deathridge is the latest in a long line of previous attempts of varying degree of critical success at rendering the Ring in English, beginning with that of Alfred Forman in the 1870s. In Deathridge’s edition, which consists of the German text and the English translation in parallel on facing pages, he claims to eschew any ‘overzealous fealty to the original’ (p. xxxvii) which has allegedly compromised most previous efforts.