** Click here for Episode 133 **
Last week we wondered how Yoda’s syntactical mischief is expressed in other languages. Tom from Battersea sheds light on the linguistic larkery:
Re: Star Wars in other languages, I couldn’t resist piping up, as I spent a year in my early twenties making replica light sabers in an Umbrian hill town. I was so poor I lived off stale panettone and coffee for weeks at a time, and it was so cold in my tiny flat that the oil set hard in my cupboard.
Wait right there, Tom – this sounds like a promising scenario for a rom com! Do any of you readers have an in with the greenlight guy at Universal?
Il Maestro Yoda does indeed fuck around with standard sentence structure in the same way as in English, sticking the verb at the end for wise effect. For example, instead of saying ‘TU HAI molta fretta giovane Jedi’ [you have much haste, young Jedi], he says, ‘Molta fretta HAI TU, giovane Jedi’ [much haste have you, young Jedi].
It is a different bloke who did the dubbing for the recent ‘prequel’ Star Wars films, but he tries to maintain the same sound as the bloke who dubbed the original films. In general, Yoda’s voice is less guttural in Italian than the English voice, less alien, and more wise old man, sort of thing – they’re trying to recreate an Umberto-Eco-after-six-hours-of-armchair-discussion at an Italian arts festival type of character, rather than the grumpy persona George Lucas originally went for.
Sounds much better than the original! Umberto Eco would certainly be a pleasing addition to the Star Wars oeuvre, although probably has less appeal than Yoda in the range of spin-off collectable dolls and backpacks.
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by Petronius: Who doesn’t love an excrement fight with their gang rape? And the dis-memberable poetry reading in the last chapters is inspired.
by José Saramago: More gang rape and excrement, topped off with a scene in which a man is brutally stabbed through the neck while engaged in an act that leaves an unusual mixed aftermath on his partner’s face.
. Part of the book was set in the criminal underworld in Japan and a torture method was to place people in a cavity at the end of a ten pin bowling alley so that their heads were sticking out. The gang members would then bowl ten pin bowling balls at them.
. The book tells the story of the murder of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi during “Freedom Summer” of 1964. Huie begins the book by re-telling the story of what happened in Birmingham, Alabama in 1957. Six men from a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan gathered to decide who deserved a promotion to a higher rank within the group. One of them wanted the promotion, and to prove he deserved it, he was willing to get “blood on his hands.” They kidnapped a local Negro man, castrate him, and dumped him by the side of road.
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