“La bohème” by Giacomo Puccini

Notes on the Libretto

The text of La bohème required remarkably little substantive correction. In preparing the Italian and English libretti for side-by-side reading, the principal work was editorial rather than translational: clarifying the visual distinction between speakers and dialogue, aligning corresponding passages, and regularizing character names. Speaker headings such as Mimì, Rodolfo, and Marcello were given greater visual prominence, an especially useful distinction in the rapid ensemble scenes where voices succeed or overlap one another.

One small inconsistency concerned Benoît. His name appeared with its proper French circumflex in the list of characters but without it in the dialogue. Benoît has been retained throughout, preserving both consistency and the French form appropriate to the Parisian setting.

The few corrections discovered through close comparison were chiefly traces of transcription or OCR: dalia quale for dalla quale in the opening stage direction, boulevrad for boulevard, and II bel tambur maggior! where the letters “II” had displaced the Italian article Il. These are modest details, but parallel presentation makes such blemishes unusually visible. In a libretto as familiar and frequently reproduced as La bohème, careful formatting and the removal of these small textual accidents often matter more than editorial intervention in the text itself.