Literary texts have often provided the source for musical texts, moving across genre and time boundaries, and interlinguistic translation has often added to the variations produced on those originally literary works in vari-ous forms of translation modalities. This paper discusses the intersections between music, literature and translation, focusing on opera and turning our attention to Benjamin Britten, whose work Peter Grimes serves to illustrate first the process of translation as transmutation, in its journey from poetry to opera piece, and then that of translating vocal music into a different language and communication channel, in the form of Spanish surtitles and subtitles.