Şerban, Adriana and Chan, Kelly Kar Yue, eds. (2020): Opera in Translation: Unity and Diversity. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 369 p.

The traditional place of opera within Translation Studies might be best described as a niche area of interest for intrepid researchers who have some experience in music or theatre. But more and more translation scholars of varying backgrounds are taking an interest in opera’s complex, multimodal works, and I believe that is because opera is an art form brimming with translation. Even from a narrow view of translation as strictly interlinguistic transfer, most operas give translation researchers much to work with, be it the texts sung on stage, printed multilingual libretti, back translations that help singers learn their parts, multilingual liner notes that accompany recordings, surtitles projected onstage, subtitles displayed on screen, or plot summaries provided in programs. However, from an enlarged, post-positivist view of translation (Tymoczko 2007; Gentzler 2017), it is also possible to see operatic works as built on translation from conception to performance and beyond, from the intra- and interlingual adaptations and re-adaptations of literary works as operas to the translation of scores and libretti into multimodal live performances that are then reimagined in successive stagings around the world and over time. Adriana Şerban and Kelly Kar Yue Chan have brought together an eclectic collection of recent research in this area with Opera in Translation: Unity and Diversity. The subtitle sets the stage by evoking the tension between unity and diversity that underlies opera’s status as a singular art form that brings together drama, music and the power of the human voice in performance in a wide variety of cultural, geographic and temporal settings. The title perhaps also attempts to evoke the broad range of research being done in this area, as exemplified by the chapters included, while staking claim to a unified field nonetheless. The book is organised into five broad thematic sections: 1) Open perspectives, 2) Across genres and media, 3) Text and context, 4) From text to stage, and 5) Libretto translation revisited. Each section includes three or four chapters and there is as much diversity within the sections as among them, making it more important to consider the individual chapter titles and abstracts than the themes when deciding which chapters pique your interest. The contributions come from researchers of different backgrounds and levels of experience. There are offerings from well-known names in opera and translation, including Helen Julia Minors on opera as form of intercultural musicology, Lucile Desblache on the peculiar mix of tradition and transgression in W. H. Auden’s libretto translation practices, Klaus Kaindl on the politics of translating Mozart and his Jewish librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte in Nazi Germany, and Marta Mateo on translation strategies for multilingual libretti. Judi Palmer, who had a 25-year career as a surtitler at London’s Royal Opera House, brings the welcome voice of a practitioner to the discussion; she reviews how surtitling practices have changed over time and argues in favour of a practice that recognises how surtitles fit within the multi-semiotic balance of the overall performance. And Ph.D. students and recent graduates add the perspectives of young researchers to the mix. Of note is Karen Wilson-deRoze’s illuminating discussion of the intricate connections among language, poetry and music in Wagner’s operas, which extends her practice-based doctoral work on producing singable translations of Wagner’s works. I often come across claims that Wagner poses the ultimate translation challenge and Wilson-deRoze has helped me understand why. As might be expected in a work on opera—a consummately European art form—most of the chapters in Opera in Translation deal with the role of translation in the creation, recreation and dissemination of opera in Europe. However, there is an attempt to …