Word: idiom
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Kovacs plans to do three more midget spectaculars to substitute now and then for the Silents, Please program that he, in the idiom of the medium, hosts. The odds are that they will be the only shows on the air whose credits lists will flash the appealing message; SEE THE GIANT CLAMS EAT THE FRIENDLY NATIVES...
...more than middling lewd, it is so clangingly loud and heavy as to suggest marriage with the Anvil Chorus. Moreover, the lavish librettists have added Greek deities to Greek dames, offering scenes on an Olympus that, culturally, seems way below sea level. Furthermore, all the characters favor a modern idiom, so that when not dittying "Whoever is chaste has got to be chased," they talk of sponsors, top brass, secret weapons, summit meetings and population explosions. Against all this, the evening offers Jan ice Rule as a Diana down in Athens from Olympus, Cyril Ritchard as a Pluto up from...
...Cowper to T. E. Lawrence and A. T. Murray-who, with varying fortune, have tried to make good English of good Greek, or in his words from the poem, to "tell us in our time, lift the great song again." Each generation must do it in its own idiom. If there is missing "like ocean on the Western beach/The surge and thunder of the Odyssey" (in Translator Andrew Lang's phrase), it is because of the tight course Fitzgerald set himself. His aim was to make an easily spoken-verse story in the idiom of today, which...
...Shakespearean richness of plot and prodigality with blood and tears is unmatched by a corresponding richness of language. The actors measure out their lives in coffee breaks. Cigarettes, coffee and apple pie (how eaten or refused) and tone of voice, rather than choice of words, become the idiom in which tragedy must express itself. In this. Edge is perhaps closer to the naturalistic convention than most prestigious art forms; the common man, after all, faces the crises of life with a First Reader vocabulary no more elaborate than the Basic English of Edge. Every woman viewer knows what is meant...
Even in German, Brecht plays far better than he reads, and in translation, the language gap cannot be closed. Brecht fashioned such a personal idiom in German that his language has been called "a function of the body." The present translations need more body English. Even so, the volume is an excellent introduction to Brecht's restlessly animated evocation of life, in which his puppets-numberless versions of Everyman-dance to the Threepenny tune of Jonathan Peachum...