Art Nouveau Ho

Supertitle translation for opera is one of the things I do, and since I've just finished another marathon job (Wagner's Siegfried) I figured I would write about the process a bit. Following these general principles has resulted in supertitles which have been mentioned positively in reviews, as well as compliments from audience members.

For many in the audience, the supertitle is their first point of contact with dialogue, character and story. So your supertitle must:

- convey the emotion of the moment

- convey the 'voice' of the character who is speaking

while also:

- being concise (nothing too wordy-- you want the audience to spend more time watching the singers than reading the titles)

- not getting in the way of the action (nothing too prosaic or too purple)

AND it has to fit on two lines at the font size being used.

Lineation is important: verse dramatists and comics letterers know this. The principle is "one thought, one line." Or musically, if practicable, "one phrase, one line."

Ideally, line breaks should come at an intuitive point in the structure of the music or the sentence. Your audience will read at various speeds, but reading will be quicker and comprehension more intuitive if you follow this rule.

For example: in this last job I was given a set of someone else's titles from 2014 to work from. I ended up making alterations to almost every single slide, many of which involved lineation.

For example, I was given:

Out of the bush came a bear, who
listened to my tune

which I edited to

Out of the brush came a bear
who heard me playing

Just a small change, but it helps the title make intuitive sense when read.

Similarly, if the character is expressing one thought broken up into two short phrases separated by a breath or a rest, the supertitle should also break the thought into two lines.

Thus, Mime's first line could be written as:

Utter torment! Toil without end!

But the singer sings, and the audience hears, two distinct phrases. So the title should be on two lines:

Utter torment!
Toil without end!

Finally, a word about timing. First of all: the titles need to appear at a speed at which they can be easily read. You can get away with slightly faster changes by using less text per slide, but that's still risky: ideally you want titles that someone who reads more slowly can keep up with. I supertitled a Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 2019; the finales of Acts I and II involve large numbers of people all singing different text at high speed. At such times, all you can do is provide a summary, picking the bits of text most important to the scene and the story, and hoping for the best.

There are also certain moments when a change of thought requires a new slide, even if the line could all fit on one. That way, the audience discover the new thought at the same time as the character. In Act II of Meistersinger, when Pogner is wondering whether to go visit Sachs, he says:

Shall I? But what for?
...Better not

It wasn't until the dress rehearsal that I realised "Better not" needed its own slide, which gave a little more feeling to the moment when Pogner realises he's become distanced from his old friend Sachs.

Similarly, in comedy, if there's a joke being told, your slide should line up with the punchline so the audience discovers it as the singer says it. Ideally that title should be short and snappy, for ease of reading and comic impact.

If the original is funny, so should the title be-- but the singer should get the laugh.

Supertitle translation does call for your writerly skill, and will test your ability as a dramatist-- but your writing must always support the story and artists onstage. Beware of the temptation to impress with your cleverness or poetic flair: it's the director's production, not yours.

I write this as someone who's been supertitling for nearly twenty years. It's always someone's first time seeing the opera, and your titles can be pivotal to that person's engagement with the story. That's our greatest reward.

Speech given at the 57th annual Nebula Awards, in acceptance of the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award on behalf of Petra Mayer, presented by Amal El-Mohtar

(The ceremony can be viewed here)

Thank you, Amal. What a wonderful tribute.

This can only be a pale shadow of the speech Petra would have given you. She looked forward to the Nebulas every year, and she loved coming here and hanging out with her favourite bunch of people (and discovering new favourites with each passing year). I wish she were here to speak to you herself. There’s no substitute for her voice.

When you lose someone you love, sometimes you raise your head from the grief and shock, look out the window and think “why hasn’t the world stopped?” And you wish for a moment that everyone had known how amazing this person was.

So sinking into the abyss of Twitter in the aftermath of Petra’s tragic, sudden, early death, the consolation I found was that in her case, people did know. Even people who’d only heard her voice on the radio had a sense of her personality, and the authors and journalists and people from the book world among whom she’d lived and worked were dealing with their grief by raising her a cairn of words as only they could. So to everyone who felt Petra’s loss and wrote something, even a few words, at that terrible time, thank you. It helped.

It’s hard to think of Petra being gone. Petra was a force of nature, a tsunami of enthusiasms and brightly coloured plastic jewellery and baked goods and Doctor Who and Art Nouveau roses and Buster Keaton movies and elaborate costumes and loud singing and creative swearing and you could almost forget that you were in the presence of the doyenne of NPR Books, Petra Mayer of the razor-sharp mind and keen editorial eye, marshal to an army of reviewers and voice heard by millions for all her years on the airwaves.

Critics, especially in national media outlets, are to some extent gatekeepers; and editors even more so. But Petra was a gatekeeper who flung wide the gates, and would have ripped them off their hinges if she could. From the beginning, she sought out not just the authors she knew and loved, but the overlooked and the underpromoted. She sought out the work of authors and critics from marginalised groups— she couldn’t bear the thought of institutional bias robbing us of those stories, those voices. She widened her mandate to include not just SF and fantasy, but comics, horror, mystery and romance. And if she couldn’t fit in a review of your book, or if she read it after publication, it still might turn up in one of her Best Of lists or reader polls, or in the great work that drove her to distraction every year: the Book Concierge (now renamed Books We Love).

Whether you were an author or a reviewer, Petra was the person you always hoped would read your work. Petra had the book journalist’s talent for speed reading— she devoured books. But she savoured each one, and each particular blend of flavours would remain in her amazingly retentive memory.

As a reviewer, you would send Petra your work and it would come back better and clearer. She would discern your meaning through the layers of obfuscation and overthinking, and she would knock away your excess verbiage like the stone obscuring Excalibur.

Everyone here knows the hazards of making a profession of something you love— but in Petra’s case, that love never wavered. The world of American letters was lucky to have her— and she would have been even more of a presence had she lived to old age— but if she were here accepting this award right now, I know she’d say she was the lucky one. How many teenage nerds grow up to work with their icons? and to be admired by them? She loved every moment. She loved your work, and she loved you.

So, Petra would want me to thank all of you for this award tonight. She would want to thank Jeffee, Kate and the Nebula board. She would want to thank National Public Radio, all of her colleagues at NPR Books, and each and every one of her reviewers. She would give heartfelt thanks to her family, especially her parents, Elke and Jeff, and her longtime platonic life-partner Josh Drobina.

On behalf of the journalist, editor, reader, writer, and force eleven nerdicane that was Petra Mayer, I know she’d be overjoyed to accept this award. She would have longed to party with you afterward, but be assured that wherever you gather, she will be there in spirit. Thank you all.

Petra and I have been friends since around age 10. In middle school we fought a lot — largely because school was awful and we were in a continuously horrible mood for about 8 years. But by 9th, 10th and 11th grade we had settled into a friendship distinguished by public weirdness, extravagant modes of dress, sitting in the Bishops’ Garden playing guitars, singing, burning incense and eating crystallised ginger— the more fiery the better. And then, of course, there were comics.

We had this routine where we would go to Big Planet in Bethesda and buy comics, often from Jef, the nice (and extremely patient) fellow behind the counter. We’d dance up and down the aisles of colourful covers, calling to each other— have you read this? Ohmygod you HAVE to read this! I’m not letting you leave without this! Look, I’ll lend you mine, but you have to read this! (In retrospect, it’s not surprising that when Petra found her ideal career, it turned out to be, essentially, that.)

And then we would go around the corner to the Tastee Diner, order fries and chocolate milkshakes, dip the fries in the milkshakes and read the comics. In those days we read mostly indie comics, because those were sufficiently cool for us to be seen reading. We read our way through Sandman, Transmetropolitan, Preacher, Desert Peach, Finder and many other titles which are now problematic. It was only later that we discovered the joy of superheroes. As mature adults, we were ready to embrace the joys of fighting crime in colourful tights. (Anyone who’s ever read a 1980s X-Men comic will recognise a certain kinship with Petra’s fashion sense.)



We joke about how, in the X-Men and other superhero comics, death is a revolving door. But what it really is, I think, is a form of theatre. A favourite character will die so that the writer and the artist can give them that moment, and so that they can show all the other characters reacting, put those emotions on display. And then, after a certain interval, it becomes evident that you can’t really tell the story without that character, that the superhero team isn’t the same without them, and the fans are discontented— so a writer will find a way to bring them back. And that panel, the panel where you first see that character again, is always as beautiful as the artist can make it. Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, it can feel like light is emanating from the page.

And God, I wish Petra were only comics dead. Because right now, a lot of us are feeling as though the story can’t continue without her. And the various teams she was a member of are feeling distinctly less super. All our powers are dimmed and lessened in her absence. Without her, who’s going to want to read the book? What editor okayed this decision? And what kind of douchebag author would write it in the first place?

Petra didn’t really give bad reviews, but she would definitely deem this situation unworthy of inclusion in the august archive of NPR. She would read anything, but her least favourite genre was where everything is terrible for no reason.

But I wish Petra were only comics dead. Because then, in some future adventure, we might hope to see her again. Perhaps in the lair of a mad scientist— always a popular choice for resurrections (and very Petra). Or in some far-flung corner of the cosmos, or an alternate universe— someplace with a lot of Kirby dots. When we least expected it, there she’d be, and we would fall to our knees in disbelief and weep for joy.

Even if it were one of those comics where she came back as Evil Petra in a cool new costume and extravagant eyeliner, somehow convinced that she must use her unholy powers to destroy us all, we would know what to do. We would play her some Magnetic Fields or some 80s rap, or put on an episode of Bake Off, or point over there and say “Hey, is that David Tennant?” And she’d immediately forget to be evil and go “ohmygod, where?!”

And you’d get that scene which we get over and over in comics, but we still can’t get enough of: that scene where a character’s turned evil somehow and there’s a big dramatic fight scene, and then their best friend or someone who’s been on their team for a long time will grab their arm and say “This isn’t you. I know you, let me tell you…” and the character is recalled to themselves by that recollection, that voice. And that’s absolutely what a friend is and does. A friend is someone who can tell your own story back to you when you’ve forgotten it. And Petra was such a great friend to so many of us, she knew so many of our stories and carried them with her. And even though we all know we’re bit parts at best, Petra could make you feel like a protagonist.

So what we have to do for now and later on, and maybe for the rest of our lives, is: to live our stories as though Petra were reading them. Because maybe, somewhere, she is. And when we arrive where she has gone, as we all must, the last thing we’d want is to have bored her.

Meanwhile, today, we should tell the stories we have about her. Tell the funny ones, the embarrassing ones— the ones that would make her want to come back from the grave to tell us to shut up— the ones where she’s great (which is all of them). Because, as she carried parts of all our stories, so we all carry parts of hers, and we always will.



I’d like to close with a short verse by Edna St Vincent Millay, one of the few poets (I think) capable of capturing the emotion of a moment like this:

For you there is no song,
Only the shaking
Of the voice that meant to sing; the sound of the strong
Voice breaking.

Strange in my hand appears 

The pen, and yours broken.
There are ink and tears on the page; only the tears
Have spoken.

After this evening's (excellent) Messiah, the conductor and I got talking to one of the ladies who run things at the church, an older lady named Carolyn who had been singing in the first soprano section. She was telling me which museums I should go to in DC; she mentioned the Museum of African American History and the Native American museum. Then she said "And if you get to the Natural History Museum... in there, they have a lunch counter that used to be in a store called Woolworth's in North Carolina. I was arrested there while we were holding a sit-in, and I spent the night in jail."

( Carolyn's story below )

(I started this post on my last day in Venice.)

It's been a very intensive week of rehearsals, and my way of relaxing has been to slip away in the breaks and have adventures. Luckily Venice is a very adventuresome city. Usually I'd end up in a mask shop, exercising my lousy Italian by talking with the maker.

Most good mask shops have someone sitting in there finishing masks during the day, to drive home the point that these masks are authentic and not imported. My particular passion is Commedia masks in leather, which only a few people make; most artists concentrate on the more highly decorated Carnival masks, which are traditionally made in cartapesta-- something between plaster-of-Paris and papier-mâché.

The first shop I staggered into was Artifex, up by Fondamente Nuove. The makers are a husband-and-wife couple, Giancarlo and Federica; Giancarlo was in the shop when I went. We had an excellent talk about eighteenth-century geekery and the history of Commedia characters. He also recommended two museums, Ca'Rezzonico (devoted to the eighteenth century) and Palazzo Mocenigo (the textile and costume museum). I bought an Arlecchino mask from him; a friendly face which pleased me. Arlecchino, the Harlequin, is traditionally shown with a bump on his forehead, as are some of the other servant-class characters. In the case of the less intelligent Pedrolino, said Giancarlo, the bump is the mark of a beating by his master; but Arlecchino's name comes from the same root as Hellequin and Erlkönig, and his forehead bears the stump of one of his horns from when he was a demon.

Speaking of demons, the best shop for fucking creepy masks is La Bottega dei Mascareri, just on the Cannaregio side of the Rialto. That maker did the masks for Eyes Wide Shut, and his shop is full of empty-eyed puppets and clowns that leer down at you from every side. He's a superb artist, but I actually couldn't stay there long because I was so creeped out.

The shop of Alberto Sarria is a tiny trove of mindblowing beauty. I was initially drawn to his leather commedia masks, which are things of beauty (he has many photos of troupes of actors wearing them), but his plaster ones are also made with great care and finely decorated. I bought a Capitano from him, which was my big expenditure this trip; only the aftershock of that kept me from also buying EVERYTHING else in the shop, which was so full of amazement I hated to leave. Alberto also has a real eye for how a mask fits, and if it doesn't suit you he'll tell you, which I found helpful.

Today's adventures involved the costume museum at Palazzo Mocenigo, and finding the best lemon granita in history at Gelateria San Stae. Oh yes. I'll be sad to leave this city.

From Tristram Shandy, vol. IX, ch. viii-ix, by Laurence Sterne

I will not argue the matter : Time wastes too fast : every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen ; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more ---- every thing presses on ---- whilst thou art twisting that lock, ---- see! it grows grey ; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make. ----

---- Heaven have mercy upon us both!

Now, for what the world thinks of that ejaculation ---- I would not give a groat.

( Tristram who? )

On Thursday evening, I went to hear some Beethoven string quartets at the Wigmore Hall.

This is a bit of a departure for me. If I'm at the Wigmore Hall, I'm normally there to hear lieder or other vocal music. But my mother's in town, and she loves the wild-haired deaf guy, so we got tickets for the Artemis Quartet's show. On the menu: op. 18 no.6 in B flat; op. 18 no. 3 in D; op. 130 in B flat with the Grosse Fuge.

I first heard the late Beethoven quartets in the autumn of my very first year in Britain, at the house of an English tutor who was helping me prepare for the Oxford exam. I'd asked my friends what this tutor was like, and they said "He basically is Chaucer." So I rang the doorbell and was met by, essentially, the Franklin, with a floridly pink face and a shock of tousled white hair. He offered me a drink-- and insisted when I demurred, a marked contrast with every single American high school teacher from my past.

This chap did have a reputation for constant inebriation-- but he was a mellow drunk, and generally cheerful, so it was cool. He knew I was a classical-music sort, so after our study sessions he'd get out vinyl records of the late Beethoven quartets, and he'd hand me the score to follow-- he knew them all by heart-- and we'd listen to them. His very favourite was opus 130, and I still remember how lovingly he pronounced the words "alla danza tedesca", the heading of the fourth movement ("in the manner of a German dance").

I had hardly thought about those evenings until I glanced at the programme from my seat in the Wigmore. There, again, was alla danza tedesca. The esteemed Chaucerian tutor is, of course, long dead; I don't think I properly grieved for him until now, or thanked him nearly enough while he lived.

And only now do I have the years, and the regrets, to understand what those Beethoven quartets are saying to me.

(A coda: I knew I'd heard the melody from the alla danza tedesca movement used as shorthand for "posh people dancing" in the soundtrack to... a film? A Jane Austen TV series? I couldn't place it, until I finally realised that it's the music for the ball scene in the Firefly episode "Shindig": an elegant touch by series composer Greg Edmonson.)

I probably won't be able to post tomorrow, so here are my advance Halloween links for your viewing ?pleasure?.

When I was a schoolkid, I (like all my friends) had the shit scared out of me by a book called Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. Thanks to a post on MetaFilter today (whose every comment is along the lines of "I remember that, oh god") , I learned that the illustrations that horrified me so are online for all to see. Galleries One, Two, Three.

I reread some of the Alan Moore Swamp Things recently and yes, they are still as fucking disturbing now as they were during my teenage years. I mean, it's Moore, so there are the philosophical ones and the psychedelic ones and the ones with John Constantine... but the straight-up horror ones still fragment your rational mind and leave what's left screaming, knowing the vultures will come eat it and there's nothing it can do.

Also, the really gory deer-butchering verses of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight have come up just in time for Halloween over at gawain_project.

On a less frightful note, there's a good article on the BBC's website about people who decorate their houses extravagantly for Halloween. This is mostly a US phenomenon: I remember a couple of houses like this in the neighbourhood where I grew up, and I remember thinking it was the coolest thing ever. The article makes the excellent point that Halloween in the US is basically about personal expression, which people are a lot less shy about there than here.

A UK friend with whom I was talking recently expressed satisfaction that Bonfire Night is still holding out against the inroads Halloween is making into Britain. It is easy to see the two holidays as competing-- but I do rather love the osmosis that seems to be occurring between them. The political backdrop of Bonfire Night highlights the anarchic side of Halloween: the misrule that comes with the masquerade. And Halloween's shadow casts Guy Fawkes in a supernatural bogeyman role, one of the malign spirits to be feared and gleefully propitiated.

Which is as much as to say: Trick or treat?

It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat...
W B Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter

Last night, I made my favourite summer salad. Seriously, this is summer in a bowl. It sounds incongruous but tastes divine:

-Cubes of watermelon
-Pieces of fresh tomatoes
-Leaves of basil
-Crumbs or cubes of feta cheese
-balsamic vinegar (The secret ingredient that ties all the flavours together)
-a splash of olive oil
-black pepper

And as a bonus, a piece of silliness I randomly posted to MetaFilter a year-and-a-bit ago:
( Your own personal cheeses )