Word: backtalked
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Especially in the fast-moving dialogue, Williams' translation is witty--and the production benefits. Compare the literal Greek of Pentheus' sarcasm (Hos thrasus ho Bakhos, How insolent is this Bacchus!) with Williams' "Bacchic backtalk!" Again in the same scene "Deinos su deinos kapi dein' erkhei pathe (I need a macron)," "You are wonderful, wonderful" (Laurence Welk, anybody?) "And wonderful are the experiences you go to meet" becomes in Williams "You are awe-inspiring. Your outcome will inspire awe." The translation and the production share the great felicity of exaltation in the words themselves...
...Matilde to let the "bowels of compassion" within her be moved by his plea (I wonder how that went in the original Italian), or when he criticizes his servants for revealing the secret of his sanity: "You jeopardized your own position. After all, no madman, no jobs." The insulting backtalk between the Countess Matilde and her lover, Baron Tito Belcredi, provides an element of domestic comedy that lightens the whole play. (This may be harmful in the long run, since it makes us disbelieve the seriousness of Tito's death in the end. We've been led to believe that...
Russia's Andrei Gromyko, who recently has had the unusual experience of having to listen to some unvarnished New England backtalk, painted an extraordinary word picture of his tormentor. Chief U.S. Delegate to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Said Gromyko: "The U.S. representative has not been speaking, but swearing, using a jargon of the hillbilly shepherds in the mountains of Kentucky...
...Backtalk & Business. His meeting with Wallis Warfield Simpson, at a house party, was hardly love at first sight. But later, visiting Mrs. Simpson's London salon, the Prince was impressed by her ease amid all the heady talk, and by her forthright backtalk ("One of the happier outcomes of the events...
...were high. There were self-conscious attempts at social snobbery, but neither the tradition nor the wealth and power which produce Newports, obsequious clerks and polite Park Avenue doormen; the Northwest's waitresses and laundry drivers were a neighborly lot, but were glad to say they took no backtalk from the customers...