A Journey to Resia and an analysis of Resian melodies and dance airs

Ella von Schultz Adaïewsky – a pseudonym for Sophia Christine Gertrud Elisabeth von Schultz (1846-1926) - was a nineteenth Russian composer, pianist and musicologist. Her French language manuscript 'Un Voyage à Résia' is a hybrid text, with a first part (about one third) in the genre of travel writing and the second and third parts in the genre of an academic musical analysis. The whole constitutes one of the earliest ethnomusicological studies, based on her 1883 visit to the Resia Valley in north-eastern Italy (with the Polish linguist Baudouin de Courtenay), which for reasons unknown remained unpublished during her lifetime. The manuscript was discovered in 2009 in Venice by the author’s niece, Elsa Geiger, who gave it to the Italian musicologist and critic Quirino Principe. Recognising its historical and scientific importance, Principe gave the manuscript to the Friulian Associazione Musicale Sergio Gaggia, which, with the help of local government funding had the manuscript transcribed (by Giuseppe Frappa) and translated into Italian (by Frappa and Christine Canci); the transcription and Italian translation were published in 2012 by the Libreria Musicale Italiana (Lucca, Italy) in Voyage à Résia: Il Manoscritto di Ella Adaïewsky del 1883 e la Nascita dell’etnomusicologia in Europa.The English language translation was inspired by the wish to make Ella Adaïewsky’s highly original and far-sighted contribution to the field of ethnomusicology available to a wider, international audience. The translation aims to convey the historical and idiosyncratic stylistic features of the original French text as far as possible, whilst providing some supplementary information in the form of footnotes and occasional in-text paraphrases to facilitate and enhance the modern reader’s understanding. I have opted for a literal, semantic, source-based translation that seeks to capture as many as possible of the features that make this text unique, whilst accommodating the contemporary English-speaking reader with some supplementary information in the form of a limited number of footnotes and in-text paraphrases or synonyms. The ‘work in progress’ feature and textual layering of the revisions is rendered by mirroring (with some adaptions in the case of grammatical corrections) the differently coloured annotations in the original manuscript. I have maintained in translation the sometimes haphazard, idiosyncratic use of punctuation and with it the spontaneous and spoken feel which this and other features confer on the source text (ST), such as the frequent authorial interpolations. I have often prioritised the ST word order over a more natural English word order, with a view to imparting an unfamiliar feel – ostranenie - already present in the French language discourse of the ST (that the writer was not a French native speaker is apparent from the French text). And I have maintained the wordiness of many formulations particularly in the more academic, argumentative part of the work, which in English recalls the slow paced, slightly pedantic (to modern readers) academic prose of the nineteenth century. One major technical difficulty of this translation was the extensive reference to Ancient Greek musical theory, using both ancient Greek and French or German transliterations of terms for which it was necessary to find the corresponding transliterations in English. For this task I used the reference works Barker, A (1989) 'Greek Musical Writings 1: The Musician and his Art'. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press' and West, M. (1992) 'Ancient Greek Music'. Oxford: Oxford University Press. For translation theory in general I drew on my previous research in the field of translation studies (Swain, 2001, 2014).