As that moment nears, he repeats the phrase “Rise up,” perhaps alluding to ambition, or revolution, or perseverance, and pictures his wife. In the show’s penultimate song, “The World Was Wide Enough,” Hamilton dies. Hamilton: Teach me how to say goodbye/Rise up, rise up, rise up/Eliza This is what you did, and these are your consequences’,” Miranda said. So now the song ends with “brennst,” which is not a perfect echo of the word used earlier in the song, but which preserves the original meaning: “You burn.” “I really just wanted to make sure the last line was personal: ‘It’s not about the world - it’s about you. But that meant changing the final line of the song from words meaning “I hope that you burn” to words meaning “All this shall burn.” Miranda rejected that idea, insisting that Eliza direct her anger squarely at her husband. The translators initially sought to have Eliza repeat “brenn’n,” a shortened form of the word for “burn,” throughout the song. But there were other moments when they insisted on literalism, and the end of the song “Burn,” in which Eliza Hamilton expresses her outrage at her husband’s infidelity, was one of those. allowed the German translators to bend the original meaning in order to preserve lyricism and melody. There were many moments when Miranda et al. “And so we wanted to continue to reflect that.” ✣ ✣ ✣ New ImageryĪngelica: So this is what it feels like to match wits/With someone at your level! What the hell is the catch?/It’s the feeling of freedom, of seeing the light/It’s Ben Franklin with a key and a kite/You see it right? “A hip-hop fan who comes in, maybe, with their arms crossed, hears those references and goes ‘OK, the person who wrote this obviously loves this culture and loves the music’,” he said. Miranda, who listened to each German song quoted before approving the citations, said he views “Hamilton” as a love letter to hip-hop, as well as to musical theater, and that he considers the hip-hop quotations as a point of entry for some audience members. In a section of the song “The Schuyler Sisters,” when Aaron Burr flirts with Angelica Schuyler, the translators found a place to insert a phrase meaning “You are a babe, I’d like to drink your bath water,” from a 1995 German song “ Ja klar,” which was a hit for Sabrina Setlur, who rapped as Schwester S. But, in an effort to accomplish the same effect, the translators inserted several quotations from German hip-hop songs into the German score. Most of them were cut from the German version because the translations made them unrecognizable. The original “Hamilton” score includes a number of quotations from American hip-hop songs. Avoiding Hyperboleīurr: How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a/Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten/Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor/Grow up to be a hero and a scholar? ![]() The first line is the original English lyric the second is the German lyric and the third is the so-called back translation, which is what the German words literally mean in English. Here are six lyrics that demonstrate some of the challenges the team faced as they sought to preserve the meaning and melody of the original, but in a language with different sounds and syntax. ![]() There were drafts and demos and revisions a member of the “Hamilton” music team, Kurt Crowley, learned German to help coordinate the process, and ultimately Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator, had to approve or reject each line. The project turned out to be just as complicated as they had feared: complex rhyme schemes, elaborate wordplay and so many songs. How does one translate “Hamilton” into another language? That was the challenge facing Sera Finale, a rapper-turned-songwriter, and Kevin Schroeder, a seasoned musical theater translator, when they were asked to collaborate on a German version of the show - the first in a language other than English.
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