Words and Music

Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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Music: Classical

A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

A weekly journey of discovery, weaving together a range of music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

Words and Music: Translation

Translation

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Translation

From the idea of the interpreter and language differences to translating emotions in music

From nonsense words in Alice through the Looking Glass to Babel in Hitchhiker's Guide, poet Sacha Dugdale translating Russian and The Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand in German.

Miscommunication, the multiple meanings of words and what it means to translate emotion into music are explored in today's programme. Our readers Jonathan Keeble and Emily Pithon bring us Humpty Dumpty's wonderfully pugnacious encounter with Alice, in which he states "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less', we hear Nabokov's commentary on words within Eugene Onegin, underscored by the musical version of Pushkin's novel in verse, composed by Tchaikovsky.  A recent work from poet laureate Simon Armitage is a modern retelling of the medieval poem The Owl and the Nightingale. Another excerpt comes from TS Eliot's The Wasteland in which he quotes, in German, from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.  And New Generation Thinker Islam Issa has picked out an Arabic translation by Professor Mohamed Enani of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee.    

Producer: Nick Holmes

In the Free Thinking archives you can find a series of episodes looking at language asking what language did Columbus speak?, exploring dead languages including Oscan and decoding Egyptian hieroglyphics and uncovering writing in Black Country dialect. 

Readings:
Lewis Carroll     Alice Through the Looking-Glass 
William Shakespeare, trans. Prof. Mohamed Enani  Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day (Sonnet 18) read by Islam Issa
T S Eliot             The Waste Land; The Burial of the Dead
Ezra Pound        The Seafarer 
Reginald Shepherd     A Few Thoughts about Translation 
William Shakespeare   A Midsummer Night’s Dream 
Dany Laferrière, trans. David Homel    I am a Japanese Writer 
Douglas Adams      The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 
Diane Thiel              Love Letters 
Mireille Gansel, trans. Ros Schwartz     Translation as Transhumance 
Vladimir Mayakovsky trans. into Scots by Edwin Morgan   War Declarit read by Michael Rossi
Sasha Dugdale       Translator’s Note to Our Sweet Companions Sharing your Bunk and your Bed by Marina Tsvetaeva 
Marina Tsvetaeva   trans. Sasha Dugdale  Our Sweet Companions Sharing your Bunk and your Bed 
Mark Twain             The Innocents Abroad 
Simon Armitage      The Owl and the Nightingale 
Vladimir Nabokov   translation of Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

You can find a dramatisation of Simon Armitage's The Owl and the Nightingale available now on BBC Sounds

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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