Talk:Scenes of Bohemian Life

Page Redone

I reworked this page significantly, so some explanation: The article as I found it seemed to take as its subject the central generic "story", separate from any specific manifestation of said story, from which the various other works derive. That strikes me as too nebulous for a Wikipedia article, and it wasn't entirely accurate anyway.

I recast it as an article about Murger's novel, which I think is the closest thing to a central work, and rewrote the main article accordingly. This entailed removing the short story category tags. (It's been a novel, a play, and opera, but never a short story, though arguably the novel is really a collection of short stories.) I also removed the short plot summary, which was vaguely reminiscent of Rent but bore little resemblance to any of Murger's stories.

I left in place the list of derivative works, removing only the Murger items from the top. I don't know most of those works so I can't say what is their connection to Murger's story (or, more likely, Puccini's). I notice that the line for Moulin Rouge says it's based in part on "the original story", but it's not at all clear to me what that "original story" is supposed to mean. I'm not familiar with Moulin Rouge. If it is indeed based on an episode from Murger, the episode should be identified. If it's just generically about Bohemian Paris with no Murger connection, it should perhaps be removed from the list. The whole section should perhaps be titled and introduced differently, but I leave that for someone else more familiar with the modern works.

Technical questions:

• The main article should be titled "Scènes de la vie de bohème" (lowercase b), not "La Vie de Bohème". I'm not sure of the mechanics of moving an article. Can one just move it, or is that going to mess with all the redirects and links? If someone can take care of that, or explain to me what needs to be done, I'd appreciate it.

• I took out the short story category tags at the bottom. Is that sufficient, or does the item need to be removed on some other list? Arguably this article could now be categorized as a novel instead. If someone thinks it should, go ahead and make it so.

As always, I welcome any feedback, revision, or clean-up. Iglew (talk) 00:21, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Title change needs fix on disambiguation page, too. Iglew (talk) 11:47, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

But this is wrong. Murger's work is usually called La Vie de Bohème; the most recent translation (as opposed to reprint of translation), appears to be Hugus' 1930 version, which called it La Bohème. We should use one or the other. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:20, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Redux

Having come upon this article for the first time, I’d like to make some comments (which I wrote before I saw the above). The history seems to be :

• Between 1845 and 1849 Murger published 20 stories, all with separate titles, but with some common characters and locations. From the 3rd story on, they all had the subtitle "Scènes de la bohème" (Title 1). But they were all still separate entities at that stage.
• In 1849, Murger and Barrière collaborated on a play based on the stories. The play was titled La Vie de la bohème (Title 2).
• Murger then collected most of the separate original stories into a single work, which also included some new material. He titled this work Scènes de la vie de bohème (Title 3).

In summary, the article is about three things: the stories, the play and the novel. All had different titles, none of which is exactly reflected in the title of the article, La Vie de Bohème (Title 4), which seems to have no authority, but I am open to correction on that point.

The categories relate to the stories and the novel, but not the play. If the article purports to cover the play, shouldn’t there be play-related categories as well?

I can’t speak for France, but the only cultural memory of any of these incarnations we have in the anglo word is what the Puccini and Leoncavallo La bohème operas were based on, the novel Scènes de la vie de bohème. As this is English WP, shouldn’t that work assume pride of place in the title, if we have to make a choice? -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 14:10, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

There is a new English translation of the book: Scenes of Bohemian Life, translated by Robert Holton (that is me!) and published by Anthem Press (London, New York) 2023. Perhaps it could be added to the "Translations"

sections. Thank you! Rob Holton 2607:FEA8:BD24:8E00:689A:D45C:2A62:50B2 (talk) 18:22, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Source for English title and much more

Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930 by Jerrold Seigel --Espoo (talk) 20:57, 20 December 2019 (UTC)