Monday, December 12, 2005

Two operas too late, what's in a name?

I'm getting the feeling everyone but me is liking-not-loving Villazon and loving-not-liking whom the Wellsungs have begun calling Trebs. A name I find rather handy, actually, because...how to explain this...if we're producing a sentence in English and a foreign name comes in the middle of it, what a lot of us do is say the foreign name with the closest available sounds in English. Only for reasons I can't imagine anyone wanting a detailed version of, the closest available sounds in Netrebko sound, taken all together, grotesquely unlike Netrebko. It's like how the president [sic] says Putin. It makes my eardrums raw.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You and your sensitive Slavic ears. :)

Jonathan said...

Oh! You thought that nickname ('trebs) through much more thoroughly than we. Rolando Villazon I find a bit tougher to shorten--but I have been thinking Ro'zon works (tho it sounds like an obscure antidepressant).

Maury D'annato said...

Monstre: No seriously, I'll demonstrate sometime.

J-sung: I know, I know, sounds like I'm overthinking everything. It's just I speak pretty good Russian and noticed myself madly switching gears to pronounce Netrebko.
Meanwhile, yeah, Rolazon is not working out so well. I'm guessing we're going to need a Bennifer-style joint nickname. Rol-Anna? It needs work...

Chalkenteros said...

umm, Rolatrebko?