The article overviews research in song translation studies. A growing interest and the not-too-coherent wealth of case studies need to be made relatable to one another. The article asks what makes song a special object for translation studies and what a map of song translation studies should encompass. The answer suggests three cornerstones: source-oriented, transfer-oriented and target-oriented studies. The first would need some acquaintance with musical verse and a fluid definition of song; the second some kind of multimodal conceptualization – one that allows both plain prose translation of song lyrics, such as in for example subtitling, and much variable audiovisual adaptations, such as, for example, the many YouTube videos of Shervin Hajipour’s “Baraye”; and the third would need to chart the long-term afterlives of songs, conceptualizing their post-translation use in manifold ways. The discussion is exemplified by translations of Bertolt Brecht and Pete Seeger’s “My Rainbow Race”.