In the late 1970s, Seattle Opera produced Wagner’s RING twice each summer, once in German, the next week in Andrew Porter’s English singing translation. KUOW broadcast the English-language performances, so radio listeners could follow the story.

Here are Paul Crook as Mime and Raimund Herincx as Wotan in an excerpt from the Riddle Scene in “Siegfried” (Wotan has just asked Mime about the history of Nothung, the broken sword). Crook was Mime in both German and English at many Seattle Opera performances. Herincx also sang the Porter translation for the English National Opera, who had commissioned it originally.

MIME: Now the bits are saved by a wily smith; for he knows that only with Wotan’s sword a brave but foolish boy, Siegfried, can kill the dragon.
[highly delighted]
Now twice the dwarf has rescued his head?

WOTAN [laughing]: The wittiest and the wiliest Nibelung! the cleverest dwarf I’ve known! But since you’re so wise to use for your purpose the youthful strength of the hero, let me ask my final question now. Tell me, you wily Nibelung: Whose hand can make new those fragments? Notung, the sword—who will forge it?

MIME [jumps up in extreme terror]:
The splinters! The sword! Alas! Ah! What can I say? What can I do? Accursed steel! Would I’d never seen it! To me it has brought only pain and woe! Stubborn and hard, my hand cannot weld it; heat and hammer, all are in vain!
[As if demented, he throws his tools about, and gives way to total despair.]
The wisest of smiths fails at the task. Who can forge that sword if my hand fails? How can I give you an answer?