‘Adam and Sasha appear to have the perfect life - good jobs, a nice home, money and three perfect children. But as their marriage begins to unravel, their ballet-crazy daughter starts starving herself - and her parents are too preoccupied to notice. A haunting, heartbreaking novel.’
Being a tad out of touch with popular culture, I'd never even heard of CLOSER before. Now I see it's piled high on the shelves in the local supermarket.
Apologies for lack of normal blogging recently. Excuses: Tom went on tour for a month, I had too many daft things to deal with in his absence, got ill three times, am still not quite better, and there was the small matter of my first novel hitting the shelves in the meantime. Arguments about the vagaries of British critics and the merits or otherwise of 'Evgeny Onegin' at Covent Garden (principally 'otherwise') started to feel like they could wait for another day.......
Except this: yes, I did write 'Evgeny', not 'Eugene'. Calling the opera 'Eugene Onegin' is one of those tired old customs that make little sense but are hard to change, like saying 'The Marriage of Figaro' instead of 'Figaro's Wedding'... Do we talk about Eugene Kissin? Greg Sokolov? Mike Pletnev? Andrew Gavrilov? I know a few Vladimirs who are known as Bob, but I don't think Pushkin or Tchaikovsky thought of Onegin as a good old Gene.
2 comments:
Oh thank goodness someone else has finally joined this crusade! This has been driving me absolutely insane for decades now.
Yeah, and good ol' Peter "Pete" Tchaikovsky wrote a few nice tunes, didn't he?
Handel I can understand, he spent so much time in England, so calling him George is perfectly appropriate, but you'd have to know your music history to get that one right.
It took the famous Baltimore classical radio station *more than a decade* to stop saying Evgeny SVETlanov and start saying SvetLANov.
So thank you, J. thank you SO MUCH for that simple Evgeny Onegin!
WARNING This next comment is only for the very, very perSnickety:
Now, shall we take on whether it should be more accurately Yevgenii Onyegin? Or how about the Library of Congress' spelling of Tchaikovsky = Chaikovskii!??
Seeing that every language has its own way of transliterating names that are not in its own language/script, I would not even want to start on this. Tchaikovsky/Tschaikowsky/Čaikovskij/CZAJKOWSKI or Shostakovich/Schostakowitsch/Šostakovič/SZOSTAKOWICZ
are just four variations of these names. There is no one correct way of doing transliterations.
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