Interview with Philip Boehm [Read This Next]
For those who didn’t get enough from the other week’s we’ve added Here’s a little excerpt:
Lily Ye: What did you think of the way in which Rezzori is able to voice different characters (as there is a lot of direct quoting in this novel) and how did you approach the translation of these different registers and argots into English?
Philip Boehm: First I have to āhearā the voices in the original. Then I try to find a suitable musical key in English. I also work professionally as a theater director and am often struck by how that activity overlaps my work as a translatorāinterpreting the text, envisioning the script, clearly defining characters, etc.
In rendering the accents and argots, itās important to bear in mind that a Russian inflection, say, sounds different to a German ear than to an English one. There are also occasions when itās best to know the proper mispronunciation.
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