A Quote by Etgar Keret
When my works are being translated, I always get this question from my translators: Up or down? Which means, should it sound biblical and highbrow, or should we take it all down to sound colloquial? In Hebrew, it's both all the time. People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn't write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech.
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People in Israel would write in a high register, they wouldn't write colloquial speech. I do a special take on colloquial speech. When I started writing, I thought [the language] was telling the story of this country: old people in a young nation, very religious, very conservative, very tight-assed, but also very anarchistic, very open-minded. It's all in the language, and that's one thing that doesn't translate.
I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.
What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time.
Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.
The word translated, koan, it means a problem. But it's a very special problem. And to strip it down to the way it works, you are given a problem which has no rational solution. There is a contradiction built into it. One standard - one is this is the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand clapping? And so on. All right, so the first thing is that it brings your rational mind to an impasse.
It's always easy to get people to condemn threats to free speech when the speech being threatened is speech that they like. It's much more difficult to induce support for free speech rights when the speech being punished is speech they find repellent.
Though most of my titles are translated into about 7 to 8 languages, I feel that translations, to some extent, can lose the flavour of the colloquial words used otherwise in the regional narrative.
I have a few minor rules for myself but I break them all the time. For example, when translating from Romance languages to English, there is often a choice between a Latinate cognate and a Germanic equivalent. An easy example would be the Portuguese escuridão: English offers both obscurity and dark or darkness, and some translators will tell you the Latinate word is generally reserved for poetic and figurative expressions, while the Germanic word is used for colloquial and idiomatic use.
I write about what is getting to me at the time, about the things you need to talk about, but which would sound silly if you sat down and told them to your friend. I only write for myself, to get my emotions out. It's self-therapeutic.
When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.
I write my novels in English first; then they are translated into Turkish by professional translators. Then I take their translation and rewrite. So basically, I write the same novel twice.
Watson, ... if I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in its intensity, as the air varies in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech.
On the very last day of shooting [of The Last King of Scotlang], I remember wanting to get the [Idi Amin] character out of me right away, as much as I could. You literally take a bath to wash him off you. Luckily, I went into another part not so long afterwards, so I was kind of able to push it away a little bit. But speech patterns, and little sounds, particularly colloquial things, like the way you ask questions or might respond, were sticking with me, probably because I'd worked so hard to make it a part of my everyday way of expressing myself.
There wasn't a colloquial phrase, or curse, that went something like, "May your day be full of angry dragons" or, "May every dragon you meet today be pissed off." But, there should have been.
A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.
I don't write anything. It's all done onstage, which is why I always tell younger comics that they just have to go do it. You have to get up, talk, and take a thought or a word and just expound, and you find it in there. I don't sit down and write.
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