What fascinated me most about "The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer" was the filmmakers' deep examination of the process of translation itself.
Singer was extremely hands-on. Again and again in "The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer," a young woman spends hours and hours alone in a room with Singer while they transform a source text from Yiddish into English word-by-word, sentence-by sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, and page-by-page until Singer decides they are done. As a writer myself, I was mesmerized...
Only one woman seems to have escaped Singer's controlling grasp and that woman was Barbra Streisand. Although Galay and Betser do devote a couple of minutes to Streisand's film "Yentl," this is the one subject on which "The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer" falls short. Hopefully the filmmakers will tackle this next!
Singer was extremely hands-on. Again and again in "The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer," a young woman spends hours and hours alone in a room with Singer while they transform a source text from Yiddish into English word-by-word, sentence-by sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, and page-by-page until Singer decides they are done. As a writer myself, I was mesmerized...
Only one woman seems to have escaped Singer's controlling grasp and that woman was Barbra Streisand. Although Galay and Betser do devote a couple of minutes to Streisand's film "Yentl," this is the one subject on which "The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer" falls short. Hopefully the filmmakers will tackle this next!