Translating Stein’s murder mystery Blood on the Dining-Room Floor was very much a case of transleaping. I had to leap into a language, German, that gives every noun, article and personal pronoun one of three possible genders: feminine, masculine, neuter. There is no genderless equivalent in German. So what was I to do with Stein’s “everybody”? Read the rest of this entry »
After the marker of 5O Stein blogs — talking about Stein’s one and only writing block –- did I contract one myself? No, for me, too, writing went on, on another page. Finishing a novel, writing about opera. Stein was writing her detective story during that ominous summer in 1933, when success caught up with her. She was troubled by questions of identity (“I am I because my little dog knows me.”) Some part of her seemed unreachable, dead. It must have been soothing to mirror her inner troubles outside, in the provincial life around her. Lots of shady things right then are happening in her village and the nearby little town Belley with its proud hotel – adultery, betrayal, feuds over money. Read the rest of this entry »
Every now and then there is a new reason to fall in love with San Francisco. This time it’s the advancing project of a new San Francisco Opera Ring cycle. After the first part, Wagner’s “prologue” Das Rheingold in 2008, now the curtain went up on part two, Die Walküre, one of the three 4½ to 5-hour mammoths of the cycle that are to follow next summer when the entire Ring des Nibelungen will be performed in Bayreuth fashion, one whole cycle per week. Read more about the new “All-American” Ring directed by Francesca Zambello at
http://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/jul-2008/html/renatestendhal0708.html