A Singable Translation of Noel Rosa’s “Minha Viola” (“My Old Guitar”) according to Peter Low’s Pentathlon Principle

Abstract

In this article, I present and comment on a Portuguese-English singable translation of the 1929 song “Minha Viola” (“My Old Guitar”) by Noel Rosa. In this track, one of his first compositions, Noel Rosa – a famous samba singer-songwriter –uses characteristics of the coco de embolada, a musical genre from the Brazilian Northeast in which two singers defy one another. For the translation, I used the “Pentathlon Principle”, a method developed by New Zealander professor and translator Peter Low. It consists of five criteria (sense, rhythm, singability, naturalness, and rhymes) of lower or higher importance according to each song. In this case, rhythm and rhymes were prevalent without neglecting the remainder. The singable translation was performed in collaboration with Prof. Low himself, who was an external member of a research project on song translation carried out at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte.