INTERVIEWER
How did you decide to put the dialogue in contemporary English?
MANTEL
[excerpt from her answer] ...Sometimes there just isn't a Tudor word for what you want, and then you have to think hard – if no word, could they have had the thought? Boredom, for example, that doesn't seem right. Were they never bored? But tedium, they know. And somehow ennui seems fine. Sometimes words play tricks, change their meaning. Let doesn't mean "allow," it means "forbid." They call a doll a "baby" often as not. They call a clever man "witty." It doesn't mean he can make jokes. So you can't be slavishly literal. You can try to be authentic.
Of course, I'm very concerned about not pretending they're like us. That's the whole fascination – they're just not. It's the gap that's so interesting. And then there are other ways in which they are like us.
Hilary Mantel: The Art of Fiction No. 226, Interviewed by Mona Simpson in Women at Work: Interviews from the Paris Review
How did you decide to put the dialogue in contemporary English?
MANTEL
[excerpt from her answer] ...Sometimes there just isn't a Tudor word for what you want, and then you have to think hard – if no word, could they have had the thought? Boredom, for example, that doesn't seem right. Were they never bored? But tedium, they know. And somehow ennui seems fine. Sometimes words play tricks, change their meaning. Let doesn't mean "allow," it means "forbid." They call a doll a "baby" often as not. They call a clever man "witty." It doesn't mean he can make jokes. So you can't be slavishly literal. You can try to be authentic.
Of course, I'm very concerned about not pretending they're like us. That's the whole fascination – they're just not. It's the gap that's so interesting. And then there are other ways in which they are like us.
Hilary Mantel: The Art of Fiction No. 226, Interviewed by Mona Simpson in Women at Work: Interviews from the Paris Review
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