Hilo at Pazzo
By:
May 4, 2009
On Thursday, the editors of HILOBROW discussed the particulars of our project during a weekly meetup with Brian and Tom Nealon, proprietors of the excellent Pazzo Books (located in the Boston neighborhood of West Roxbury). We’re glad to see that we’ve infected their brains. In Saturday’s episode of Pazzo TV, in a segment devoted to La Place’s Le Theatre Anglois, Vol. I-IV (1746), the first French translation of Shakespeare (which was bowdlerized), the two gruff, folksy litterateurs had the following exchange:
TOM: It wasn’t until the 1770s that you had a proper translation, with the fart jokes kept in, by Le Tourneur. [Le Theatre Anglois has] got a false imprint of London, because nobody would have approved of it in Paris.
BRIAN: Too embarrassing.
TOM: It was too embarrassing. Although obviously it’s not the dirty stuff, which they liked there. The potty humor.
Brian: The lowbrow. The French are highbrow humorists.
Tom: Yeah, they are.
Buy the La Place set here, only $1,500. A steal!