Claudia was first to alert me to the the New York Times story about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton getting translated into German for an upcoming tour. The art of translation is really interesting to me, especially when the translator is supposed to render a play on words in a different language or convey the sense of something deeply embedded in another country’s culture.
Michael Paulson wrote from Hamburg, ” ‘Hamilton’ is a mouthful, even in English. Forty-seven songs; more than 20,000 words; fast-paced lyrics, abundant wordplay, complex rhyming patterns, plus allusions not only to hip-hop and musical theater but also to arcane aspects of early American history.
“So imagine the challenge, then, of adapting the story of America’s first treasury secretary for a German-speaking audience — preserving the rhythm, the sound, and the sensibility of the original musical while translating its dense libretto into a language characterized by multisyllabic compound nouns and sentences that often end with verbs, and all in a society that has minimal familiarity with the show’s subject matter.
“For the last four years — a timeline prolonged, like so many others, by the coronavirus pandemic — a team of translators has been working with the ‘Hamilton’ creators to develop a German version, the first production of the juggernaut musical in a language other than English. The German-speaking cast — most of them actors of color — [reflect] the show’s defining decision to retell America’s revolutionary origins with the voices of today’s diverse society. …
“Hamburg has emerged, somewhat improbably, as a commercial theater destination — the third biggest city for musical theater in the world, after New York and London — with a sizable market of German-speaking tourists. The market began with ‘Cats’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera,’ and Disney shows are a big draw. …
“But less familiar shows have had a harder time here — “Kinky Boots” closed after a year. Sure, there are hard-core German “Hamilton” fans (some of them upset that the show is being performed in a different language from that of the cast album they love), but there are also plenty of Germans who have never even heard of Alexander Hamilton.
“ ‘It’s not like “Frozen,” which everybody knows,’ said Simone Linhof, the artistic producer of Stage Entertainment, an Amsterdam-based production company that operates four theaters in Hamburg and has the license to present ‘Hamilton’ in German. …
The German cast has already adopted its own take on the show: Whereas in New York, the musical is celebrated for its dramatization of America’s founding, almost every actor interviewed here described it as a universal human story about the rise and fall of a gifted but flawed man. …
“International productions have become an important contributor to the immense profitability of a handful of shows birthed on Broadway or in the West End, and they are often staged in the vernacular to make them more accessible. …
“For ‘Hamilton,’ Stage Entertainment executives invited translators to apply for the job by sending in sample songs, and then, not satisfied with any of the submissions, asked two of the applicants who had never met one another to collaborate. One of them, Kevin Schroeder, was a veteran musical theater translator whose proposal was clear but cautious; the other was Sera Finale, a rapper-turned-songwriter whose proposal was imaginative but imprecise.
“ ‘Kevin was like the kindergarten teacher, and I was that child who wanted to run in every direction and be punky,’ said Finale. … Both of them were wary of working together. ‘I thought, “What does he know?” ‘ Schroeder said. ‘And he thought, “I’ll show this musical theater guy.” ‘
“But they gave it a go. They wrote three songs together, and then flew to New York to pitch them to Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics for ‘Hamilton.’ Miranda can curse and coo in German (his wife is half Austrian), but that’s about it; he surprised the would-be translators by showing up for their meeting with his wife’s Austrian cousin. …
“Miranda had been on the other side once — he translated some of the lyrics of ‘West Side Story’ into Spanish for a 2009 Broadway revival — and he remembered observing how that show’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, listened for the sounds of the Spanish words. Miranda applied that experience to the German ‘Hamilton.’
“ ‘I’m going to feel the internal rhyme, or lack of internal rhyme, of which there is a lot in this show, and so it’s important to me whenever that can be maintained without losing comprehensibility,’ Miranda said. …
“Once Finale and Schroeder got the job, the process was painstaking, reflecting not only the complexity of the original language but also the fact that the show is almost entirely sung-through, meaning there is very little of the spoken dialogue that is generally easier to translate, because it is unconstrained by melody. They tried divvying up the songs and writing separately, but didn’t like the results, so instead they spent a half year sitting across from one another at the kitchen table in Finale’s Berlin apartment, debating ideas until both were satisfied. They would send Miranda and his team proposed German lyrics as well as a literal translation back into English, allowing Miranda to understand how their proposal differed from his original. …
“Figures of speech and wordplay rarely survive translation, but Miranda encouraged the translators to come up with their own metaphors. One example that Finale is proud of concerns Hamilton’s fixation on mortality. In English, he says ‘I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.’ In German, he will say words meaning, ‘Every day death is writing between the lines of my diary.’ ”
More at the Times, here. At National Public Radio you can read some details without a firewall.
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