“For the refugees, a harsh accent was the least of their troubles. The precise cases, endless portmanteaus, and complex syntactical structure of the German language made their transition to English a strain. It required a thorough rearrangement of thought. In German, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence; in English, it appears everywhere but. In German, conversation as well as written discourse, like a well-ordered stream through a series of civilized farms, flows. In English, such constructions are stilted. We like to get to the point and get there fast. For a displaced screenwriter – an adaptable one, anyway – American English lend itself to the kind of direct, immediate, constantly unfolding expressivity that German tended to thwart. Linguistically at least, American emotions are more straightforward. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it this way: ‘When you start a sentence in German, you have to know at the beginning what the end will be. In English, you live the sentence through to the end. Emotion and thought go together. In German, they’re divorced. Everything is abstract.’<\/p>\n
For a flexible storyteller like Billie Wilder – or Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, for that matter – the new mix of languages was wondrous, pregnant with sounds and bursting with meaning. Wilder’s ear picked up our slang as well as our pragmatic syntax, and his inventive, hard-edged mind found twentieth-century poetry in them. Puns, jokes, verbal color, even the modern-sounding American tones and resonances one could make in the mouth – all were deeply engaging to the young writer-ranconteur. It was exciting for him to get laughs in a new language.”<\/p>\n
– Ed Sikov, On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “For the refugees, a harsh accent was the least of their troubles. The precise cases, endless portmanteaus, and complex syntactical structure of the German language made their transition to English a strain. It required a thorough rearrangement of thought. In German, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence; in English, it appears […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":[],"categories":[3316],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":17,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2006\/04\/sophie-scholl\/","url_meta":{"origin":34779,"position":0},"title":"Sophie Scholl","author":"Jandy","date":"April 11, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Movie recommendation: Sophie Scholl: The Last Days My parents and I went to see this last Saturday, and we all came away very impressed. Sophie Scholl was a 21-year-old student in Munich in the early 1940s, and she and her brother were arrested in 1943 for distributing leaflets that detailed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Film"","block_context":{"text":"Film","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/film\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":249,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/wow-i-do-like-poetry\/","url_meta":{"origin":34779,"position":1},"title":"Wow, I DO Like Poetry!","author":"Jandy","date":"March 6, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"My European Romanticism professor had an interesting anecdote today. This is not an unusual occurrence--he has many, many wonderful anecdotes. There should be a book of just his anecdotes. This isn't even one of his more intriguing anecdotes, actually. But we were talking about how German Romantics theorize about poetry\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Books and Reading"","block_context":{"text":"Books and Reading","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":34866,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/completing-the-filmography-five-graves-to-cairo\/","url_meta":{"origin":34779,"position":2},"title":"Completing the Filmography: Five Graves to Cairo","author":"Jandy","date":"January 20, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"This year instead of doing Blind Spots or other list-based viewing, I'm focusing in on completing filmographies of certain directors - some of which I'm only a few films away from completing and will probably do so pretty quickly, while others may be in progress for quite a while. I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Film"","block_context":{"text":"Film","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/film\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/ctf-fivegraves-feat.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":102,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/august-recap\/","url_meta":{"origin":34779,"position":3},"title":"August Recap","author":"Jandy","date":"September 16, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Movies Night Watch (imdb) This was Russia's entry to the Academy Awards in 2005, and judging from that and the trailers I'd seen, I was really hoping it would be great. It's the first of a proposed trilogy dealing with the on-going supernatural battle between good and evil, fought unseen\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Books and Reading"","block_context":{"text":"Books and Reading","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":200,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/the-ruin-old-english-film\/","url_meta":{"origin":34779,"position":4},"title":"“The Ruin” (Old English) film","author":"Jandy","date":"January 30, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I came across this short film in a blog by an Anglo-Saxon scholar, the Unlocked Wordhoard. It's a 6-minute adaptation of an Old English elegiac poem, \"The Ruin,\" done by some students at the University of Oxford. I hadn't read the poem before (Old English and modern English text here),\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Books and Reading"","block_context":{"text":"Books and Reading","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/books\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":35358,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2015\/10\/letterboxd-season-challenge-the-big-parade-1925\/","url_meta":{"origin":34779,"position":5},"title":"Letterboxd Season Challenge: The Big Parade (1925)","author":"Jandy","date":"October 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Film 5 for the Letterboxd Season Challenge. The other films I plan to watch for the challenge are here. Week 5: PUNQ Week Challenge: Watch an unseen feature that ranked in the top ten on any of PUNQ\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pre-1940 lists. Film I Chose: The Big Parade PUNQ is a Letterboxd\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Film"","block_context":{"text":"Film","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/film\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/tf-feat-big-parade-3.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34779"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}