– How are poetry and song lyrics translated from their original language to other languages without losing the rhyme scheme and meter?

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– How are poetry and song lyrics translated from their original language to other languages without losing the rhyme scheme and meter?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

To add onto the other responses, sometimes they aren’t. A good example of this is Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was originally written in Italian. The cantos that make up the book are written in a rhyming scheme known as terza rima, where every third line rhymes. Obviously in translation most people prioritize exact content over creative approaches to preserving style, so for English at least reading the divine comedy can seem jarring in most translations. One translator by the name of John Ciardi adapted the text into the terza rima scheme, which I find funny because while to me it embodies the tone and style of the text, it actually had to sacrifice its direct ties to the original language. All in all translation does not come without sacrifice, because content and style vary so much from language to language.

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