Translation tortures Mahler's Rückert Lieder

It's just as well these songs are being performed at Lucerne in German rather than the tortured prose of Universal's English version
Claudio Abbado conducts Mahler's first symphony at the Lucerne festival
Claudio Abbado conducts Mahler's first symphony at the Lucerne festival this week. Photograph: Georg Anderhub/Lucerne festival

Mahler's Rückert Lieder is coming up in Lucerne tonight, from Claudio Abbado and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra with Magdalena Kozena, before they continue their decade-long Mahler cycle with the Fourth Symphony. I'm looking forward to hearing how Kozena, one of the most thoughtful singers around, dramatises Rückert's poems of 19th-century Weltschmerz, and the miniature psychodrama Mahler's music creates from them.

She'll be singing the original German version, of course. Which is just as well. In my wee grey-bound miniature score of the Rückert Lieder, published by Universal Edition, they provide an English translation designed to be sung as an alternative to the German, following Mahler's vocal writing as well as helping you out with what the poems mean. The result is extraordinary. Here's what the anonymous translator makes of the opening lines, "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen". The first line, usually rendered as "I am lost to the world", becomes "O garish world, long since thou hast lost me". Which sets the tone for what follows: "Whose sweet delights my fond heart once cherished/ Beyond whose ken thy surging waves have tossed me/ Thou well mayst fancy that I have perished!" Garish? Delights? Ken's surging tossings? None of that is in Rückert's original.

But nothing is sacred in this translation, which visits an exquisite, McGonagallian torture on every element of these songs: the meaning of Rückert's poems, sacrificed on the altar of having to make the words fit Mahler's vocal line (in another song, for no apparent reason, linden blossoms in Rückert's poem become "roses red"); the English language – what did it ever do to deserve such contortions as "tho' naught may I gainsay, I despair not"?; and Mahler's songs, which would sound like a weird kind of sentimentalised salon music if they were ever performed in Universal's translation. Sometimes it really is better to bask in the phonemes of a foreign language in vocal music and not worry about what the words mean.

Ah well, time for another day in Switzerland, or, as Rückert's sadistic translator has it, "My soul but listens for Nature's steven [no, me neither], whose charms my silent soul ever throng." Couldn't have put it better myself.