Das Lied von der Erde ‘The song of the earth’ (henceforth Das Lied; Mahler 1988), a six-movement cycle of symphonic songs written by the German–Austrian Romantic composer Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), is based on seven poems contained within Die Chinesische Flöte ‘The Chinese flute’ (Bethge 1929), Hans Bethge’s early twentieth-century German translation of a series of Tang-era Chinese texts. Ever since its first performance, Mahler’s work has provoked significant debate over its musical and literary merits across a range of academic disciplines. For example, in the field of music history, Hermann Danuser (as cited in Fischer 2011, 563) describes Das Lied as “one of the most radical dovetailings of existing genres in the whole history of music until then.” Studies such as Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (Johnson 2009), Gustav Mahler (Fischer 2011), and Gustav Mahler’s Symphonic Landscapes (Peattie 2015) likewise focus on the musicological aspects of Das Lied. Meanwhile, Huang (1999), Yan (2000), and Qian (2001) have utilized detailed comparative textual analysis to highlight the differences between Mahler’s work and the original Chinese poems. Unfortunately, in both of these approaches, Bethge’s anthology — the key work that forms the bedrock of Das Lied’s greatness and connects the literary and musical systems — has been relegated to what Venuti (1995, 1) terms a state of “invisibility.” Therefore, analysis that is “aimed at the development of knowledge or understanding of the text or its context” (Strowe 2020, 490) is necessary for deeper appreciation of the cross-cultural and cross-systemic value of Die Chinesische Flöte. All three of Jakobson’s (1959, 233) categories of translation — intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic — are evident in Mahler’s adaptation of seven poems from Die Chinesische Flöte into Das Lied. Since then, the same texts have crossed yet more cultural boundaries as Mahler’s cycle of symphonic songs has been adapted into a number of classical ballets and modern dance pieces.

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