It was a delightful challenge to render the literary translation of “Fratricide”. Delightful because French writer Dominique Warluzel did a superb job with the writing of this play. And challenging because a team of two translators and an editor had to bring to life – in functional spoken English – the interior incarceration of the characters. The author chiseled the script as a hefty duel between two brothers, where the unspoken has its own place. In particular, the language of one of the brothers made most of our fun work. He has spent 17 years in prison and he speaks like a thug. But he also spent most of his sentence working in the prison library, so he would often throw out interesting quotes or references to literature that seem to come out of nowhere. In the end, we can’t help being fooled by his language.
The play has been performed at Festival d’Avignon, one of the oldest and best-known theatre festivals in the world, and will be in Paris, New York, and Chicago this fall.
Watch the French actors talking about it in this video.
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