From ballad to rock. A continuing tale of intra- and multi-lingual adaptation

In this article, we will look at the evolution of a traditional ballad into the modern popular folk song recorded most notably by the American folk singer Joan Baez (1941-) with subsequent adaptations in English by other artists (i.e. Sandy Denny and the Collins sisters) as well as translations into other European languages: French, Italian, and Danish. Our aim is to illustrate how, over time, artefacts from popular culture are subject to constant change and recontextualisation as each artist and each generation come to appropriate them and impose their own interpretations upon them. We shall examine this process with translation, looking at how rewriting and re-performing in different codes leads not only to re-encoding but also to re-interpretation within different cultural and socio-political frames.