Intermedial Adaptation Strategies When Setting Poems to Music

There are several ways to adapt a poem to a new medium and create a song based on it, such as a simple reference, narrative continuation of the poem, parody or other reflection on its content or form. One of the most common methods is, undoubtedly, setting poetic texts to music with minimal intervention, such as transferring verses, repeating them, or even eliminating them. It is commonly thought that this kind of musical adaptation preserves the poem and gives it a new life in another medium, but studies of which textual mechanisms come into play and why are scarce. This work presents an analysis through textual collation of 65 poem–song pairs, to analyse the types of modification that occur most frequently and, within them, to examine critically which are the criteria that determine the choice to add, delete, or repeat verses or other sequences. To this end, we worked with the corpus provided by the PoeMAS project, which collects, in a comprehensive, publicly available database, a wide variety of Spanish lyrics (from 1975 onward) based on poems. Using this corpus, a pairwise collation of the poems and their song adaptations was carried out in order to examine the textual differences between a poem and each of its adaptations. We have drawn from the theories of intersemiotic translation (Jakobson 1959; Romano 1994, 1999) and intermediality (Rajewsky 2005; Wolf 1999) to propose a formal classification for the types of change that occur most frequently and analyse them in our digital corpus. The pairwise collation of song–poem texts and the classification of changes using this taxonomy allowed us to reach conclusions about text modifications and about the criteria underlying them in lyrics, explaining therefore why and when some lines or sequences are repeated, suppressed, added or changed.