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Jonathan Woolf's Ethel Smyth review
Posted by Martin Walker on July 15, 2020, 11:11 am
Of course one appreciates Jonathan Woolf's gently ironic humour about listeners' possible 'recourse to your capacious leather-bound library of German literature'. To be boringly factual, however: Emily Zust, as I believe has been mentioned on MW before, has an online resource for Lieder etc: the translations of the poems involved is not necessarily the bees' knees as poetry goes but does the job of rendering the texts quite well. There there is/was the Penguin Book of Lieder, which I believe is no longer currently on offer by Penguin but can be found on the usual online sites reselling books at fairly low prices, and S.S.Prawer's translations are very good, often giving a lively (if unrhymed) impression of the poetry. It is not, however, a capacious book, and some less familiar poems may not be included - in which case, Zust.