Think of the elaborate journey of Michelangelo’s texts, from conception to being heard in a Shostakovich setting centuries later (the Suite on Verses by Michelangelo Buonarroti, Op. 145). To adequately represent that journey, and to help the listener follow along intelligently, I created, with invaluable help from Marlboro’s head librarian Koji Otsuki and the baritone Simon Barrad, the below PDF, which tracks the text through four crucial iterations.
First comes the original Italian—Michelangelo’s own “Rime”. Next—the inspired Russian translation of them by the poet Abram Efros. These Efros texts are the ones Shostakovich actually sets in his great Op. 145 suite. Third, we’ve placed my transliteration of the Russian into phonetic English, so the non-Russian-reading listener may always know where exactly we are in the work. And finally comes Simon Barrad’s excellent translation of the Russian into English, to give an English-speaking listener the closest possible sense of the text that governs and shapes Shostakovich’s masterwork.