Language
The Handmaid's Tale was from the beginning composed for Paul Bentley's English libretto alongside Ruders' Danish translation of the libretto. The Danish title was Tjenerindens fortælling.
The Danish Royal Opera who commissioned the work wanted the opera performed in Danish, but performances outside Denmark have all been sung in English.
Read more about this topic: The Handmaid's Tale (opera)
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”
—Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)