For those readers of this blog who are classical music enthusiasts, it may be of interest to learn that translations of Russian names and titles are often mistaken or slightly inaccurate. I was reminded of this situation this morning while listening on my car radio to Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” which was announced by the host with just this traditional English translation of the Russian original (“Kартинки с выставки”). The mistranslation occurs where the original has the preposition с (the Cyrillic letter for Latin s), meaning “from”, but the translation has at. This may not seem like much of an error to the monolingual English speaker, but to a native Russian speaker like YHB it is an error nonetheless.
As a sidebar to this matter, the reader may be interested to learn that the composer’s surname, Mussorgsky (R Муссоргский), has stress on the initial in Russian, whereas in English it is invariably pronounced with the stress on the medial syllable.
MICHAEL SHAPIRO
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