Translation for article in La Tribune de Geneve

Courtesy of my dear friend Emily, here is a translation of the article about me that appeared in La Tribune de Geneve on August 5, 2008. A few clarifications (e.g. implications, misquotations) are listed below the article. Enjoy!

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The Tourists of the Hostel:

A Trip in Europe, Over the Course of Vocalises

Written by Henri Della Cassa for La Tribune de Geneve

Published August 5, 2008

Translated by Emily Markoe

Photo Caption 1: Ceceilia Allwein. The young American goes wherever the music is good.

Photo Caption 2: “I’ve found the people of Geneva very open.”

Article:

More and more young tourists prefer the banks of Lake Geneva to fine-sanded beaches. Who are they?

Coming straight from Massachusetts, Ceceilia Allwein lives for music. This smiling American, easy-going, is passing through Geneva with the only goal of listening to the notes playing right now in Calvin’s city*.

Open air festivals, chamber music concerts, the native of Indiana goes wherever the music is good. Two days, Ceceilia plans to spend only two days in our city, and then leaves in the direction of German-speaking Switzerland. Her journey in Geneva is the realization of a very precise desire: “I wanted to visit a part of a German-speaking country where French was spoken.” With Geneva, this is all found.

Ceceilia lives in Munich and benefits from a scholarship of an American foundation. This foundation gives the opportunity for young Americans to travel abroad in order to work in long-term internships.

“It’s the first time that I have left the United States,” she said this morning, at a table at the youth hostel City Hostel Geneva.

A vocal performance student at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, the young woman, 22, specializes in opera. On the Old Continent, her goal is simply “to hear music” and to immerse herself in a Germanic culture. A sort of return to her sources, as Ceceilia counts among the German descendants who fled the country in the 1920s, just before its most somber period.

During her lighted visit by the lake, the singer was not disappointed. A stroll along Lake Geneva, visits to the museums in the Old City, a guided tour of the Palace of Nations, not forgetting, obviously, the nighttime classical music concerts in the courtyard of City Hall. But Ceceilia takes even more pleasure in chatting with the inhabitants of the area where she set down her luggage. “I found the people of Geneva very open,” she says warmly. “I ate yesterday in a restaurant on the Rue des Pâquis, and I made the acquaintance of some very nice people from Kosovo.”

At the end of her short trip to Geneva, Ceceilia will continue on with a few days in Zurich. She may then be able to exchange memories with her good friend of Swiss origin…who currently studies in Boston. Then she returns to Bayern**. As soon as she returns, the student hopes to move on to the Netherlands, between Gouda and Utrecht; a region to which she has already traveled several times during her year in Munich.

For all this, despite the affection that the soloist, as much a musician in her own time, holds for this part of Europe, her future will be, according to her, in the United States.

* “Cité de Calvin”—I think this might be a local euphemism for Geneva.

** Literally translated: “Before returning to Bayern.” I think my construction this more sense in English.

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To clarify…

• My Grandmother’s family came to the US (actually, Saskatchewan, then the US) in the 1920s. It’s obviously not talking about me, as the English would seem to suggest. It’s implied that it’s not me in the French idiom.
• The journalist misquotes me in the last line…. I don’t see my future in the US. I see it in Europe, but it’s just the omission of a single negative.