Aranjman :|rewriting foreign pop songs for the Turkish cultural repertoire

Abstract

The present study focuses on pop song rewrites, in other words, aranjmans in 1960's Turkey. After reviewing previous scholarly approaches to song translation, it elaborates on aranjman, in other words, imported songs on two levels. The macrolevel investigation deals with how political, economic and cultural developments paved the way for the importation of pop music as a genre, whereas the micro-level is concerned with the analysis of songs in the light of the macro-level findings, both from the perspective of translation theory. The theoretical framework fuses Even- Zohar's concepts of "cultural repertoire", ''import'' and "invention" with Lefevere's "rewriting" and "patronage". Problematizing views that place excessive emphasis on the semantic rendering of lyrics in song rewriting, the study underscores that "singable" song translation and the criticism thereof cannot be fruitful unless a holistic approach is adopted. In a similar vein, appropriating Lefevere's notion of "rewriting" and subdividing it into "rewriting" lyrics, "rearranging", "recomposing", "reperforming", "resinging" and "rerecording" songs helps cast light on the fact that, in the real world of the music industry, the various modes of rewriting are all dependent on one another, and thus song rewriting can not be reduced to lyrics rewriting alone.