IAN McMILLAN Stress levels mount while I’m lost in translation

ANYBODY watching me over the last few weeks writing at the dining table (my usual writing spot; it’s not too far from the kettle) could have been forgiven for thinking that I was messing about playing air piano instead of being involved in what TS Eliot called the endless struggle with words and meanings.

Well, both would be more or less true because I was engaged in the aforementioned endless struggle but I was also thinking about music.

My stubby fingers were waving like seaweed because I was counting out syllables and tapping out stresses because for the task I’m currently engaged in, stresses and syllables are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That’s an interesting set of words, of course; it’s got eleven syllables and the stress of the phrases falls squarely on that word truth every time. Ah, those stresses and syllables can get more than a bit addictive, I can tell you.

Let me explain (four syllables, stress on the last syllable. I promise I’ll stop doing that now). A while ago, in the prepandemic before times, I was asked to translate the well-known opera The Barber of Seville into Yorkshire dialect. As I’m always up for a challenge, and I’m interested in new ways of working with our beloved Yorkshire dialect, I said yes. I got my syllable-counting and stress-detecting head on and produced a couple of scenes for a showcase in Bradford which seemed to go well and the idea was that the whole opera would be done once the funding was in the place.

And then the pandemic happened and lots of things ground to a halt and I thought, sadly, that the Barber

of Seville had snipped his last quiff but then I got an email and it’s all back on, and so I have to crack on with writing it.

Mind you, it almost didn’t happen because I couldn’t find the huge 342-page score I’d been working on and on which I’d scribbled loads of detailed notes; I had a very vivid memory of doing some decluttering and in my mind’s eye I saw the score sticking out of a packed skip.

In the end it turned up (ominously, next to a shredder) and I was able to revisit my notes and restart the task that Covid had shelved. As a writer I enjoy restrictions whether temporal or stylistic. In other words I like it when people ask for something to be written ‘by tomorrow’ or

‘by this afternoon’.

That kind of deadline makes me think more quickly although not necessarily with more depth. And I like it when I impose rules on myself about a piece of writing because it gets my brain into top gear; I remember years ago deciding that I’d write one of these columns without using the letter E. That was a headache, or should I say a mind-jolt.

Anyway, enough of these distractions; back to the opera. I gaze at a line, at the existing English translation which is very much not a Yorkshire dialect one. I try to imagine it in Yorkshire speech. I count the syllables, my fingers working overtime.

I say, or sometimes if I’m alone in the house, sing the line to find out where the stresses lie. I try to make the line sound authentic and dramatic at the same time. I curse the number of syllables the score has handed me because if I had a couple more I could write a better gag.

Onward, maestro! I’ll keep you all informed as to when the curtain finally goes up!