‘Porgy and Bess’ Can Offend. Now Try Translating It Into Spanish.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/arts/music/porgy-bess-met-opera.html

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“Happy dust,” the powdery white drug at the center of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” is rendered in Spanish as “perico,” and in German as “Schnee” — both maintaining the slanginess of the original. But “buckra,” a derogatory word for white men, becomes the more straightforward “blanco” and “die Weissen.”

And the cagily mispronounced “abdomen” in “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” the one that rhymes with “home in”? That takes a bit more doing to translate properly — if it’s worth doing at all.

Ana Méndez-Oliver and David Paul confronted these and dozens of other linguistic puzzles over the summer as they worked on the titles for “Porgy and Bess,” which returned to the Metropolitan Opera’s repertory on Sept. 23. (It continues through Oct. 16, then comes back for another run in January.)

The company’s last staging of the opera closed in 1990, five years before the introduction of seatback titles. Unlike more common supertitles, which live above the stage, the Met’s system allows each operagoer to turn his or her screen on or off — or change the channel to another language. (The Met offers titles in English, Spanish, German and sometimes Italian.)

This has necessitated a team of translators, and a host of challenges: The screens only hold 72 characters, and the old-fashioned dot-matrix-style, all-caps format makes accents and diacritics difficult, which is one reason the Met doesn’t offer French titles.

“Porgy and Bess” brings its own set of obstacles. To depict the black denizens of Catfish Row, the opera’s coastal-Carolinas setting, the librettists, Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward, notoriously used an idiomatic English that was long referred to as “Negro dialect,” an especially uncomfortable strategy given that both writers were white. Charges of cultural appropriation have ebbed and flowed since the work’s premiere in 1935.

For many, the titles compound this unease: Hearing Bess give soaring voice to her newfound love can feel different than staring at the words “I’S YOUR WOMAN NOW.” When the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., presented the opera in 2016, it initially opted not to use titles for that reason.

“The language is so colloquial that it can feel dated,” Nigel Redden, Spoleto’s general director, said in an interview. “And those words become much more prominent with supertitles.” (Two performances in, however, complaints from audience members who had difficulty understanding the words prompted Mr. Redden to change course and add them.)

The discomfort over the written titles is part of the reason the Met got permission from the Gershwin estate to use the slightly modified set of English titles employed at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 2017. These titles use what Paul Cremo, the Met’s dramaturg and the man in charge of its English-language titles, called “more standardized forms of words for easier reading.”

He and Mr. Redden both described the original lyrics as something of a pronunciation guide. “Todd Duncan and Anne Brown, the original Porgy and Bess, were classical singers and had to be coached to use this dialect,” Mr. Cremo said.

As for the other languages, successful translation can be a matter of swapping out one set of colloquialisms for another. For example, Ms. Méndez-Oliver said, “the lack of verb agreement doesn’t translate into Spanish. That’s not an error we make.”

Instead, she relied heavily on contractions and abbreviations:

OH, I GOT PLENTY O’ NUTTIN’AND NUTTIN’ PLENTY FOR ME.

becomes

AY, YO TENGO MUCHO DE NA’Y NADA ES SUFICIENTE PA’ MI.

The two contractions — “na’” for “nada” (“nothing”) and “pa’” for “para” (“for”) — are designed to maintain the tone of Gershwin’s lyric while still being comprehensible to a Spanish-language audience. Similarly, the rich daddy and good-looking mama of “Summertime” become a “rico pai” and “guapa mai” (contractions for “papi” and “mami”).

Mr. Paul faced a different set of challenges. “The number of German words that are vernacular enough that they don’t pull the viewer out of the story is much smaller,” he said.

Instead, he used what can be an additional hurdle — the use of formal versus informal address in German — to his advantage. “When a cop addresses one of the Catfish Row citizens, it shows that class difference even more clearly,” Mr. Paul said. “And so do the informal ways the members of the community then speak to the cops.”

All three Met Titles writers stressed the importance of being sparing with their text. “You can’t drown people with titles,” Ms. Méndez-Oliver said. “You want them watching and listening to the opera, not reading it.” (Before “Porgy,” she added, one of her biggest challenges was Nico Muhly’s 2013 opera “Two Boys,” whose text-message-laden libretto often gave her no choice on this front.)

And what about that droll but linguistically thorny “It Ain’t Necessarily So” lyric, in which the irreverent Sportin’ Life explains the biblical story of Jonah as follows:

FO’ HE MADE HIS HOME INTHAT FISH’S ABDOMEN

Well, Ms. Méndez-Oliver swapped out “home” for “casa” and “abdomen” for “panza,” which translates as “belly.” And Mr. Paul gave up on the rhyme altogether:

ER MACHTE SEIN ZUHAUSEIN DEM BAUCH DIESES FISCHES

(In English, “He made his home in the belly of this fish.”)

In other words, it can get complicated. But Mr. Paul said these sorts of note-by-note, syllable-by-syllable dilemmas come into play with all opera translations. He described his work as “translation and interpretation and adaptation all at once.” Seventy-two characters at a time.