I recently purchased the Criterion edition of Throne of Blood and it came with
with two sets of subtitles.
One by Linda Hoaglund, the other by donald ritchie.
If you have this edition i would like your opinion about which one is superior.
i just watched it with the ritchie subtitles since hes a kurosawa scholar or whatever. but i think they should both be equal. try both out to see what you think since you bought it
latest movies seen:
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
I saw Throne of Blood just a few days ago in its original 35mm format as part of a Kurosawa Film Fest. The subtitles in this showing were different from the one in Criterion Collection (I only have one version so I don't know if it's the Ritchie or Hoaglund version)... however the subs in the movie screening had more words and the opening chant told of the strong warrior and gave more background on the context of the battle, in contrast to my Criterion Collection copy that gave a more somber tone in minimalist translation.
Hope this helps...?
We switched back and forth a few times and watched one scene with both titles, and we concluded that the titles numbered 02 were slightly better than the 01 ones. They were more readable (in bold-face italic), and a little more explanatory. In the scene we watched with both, version 01 said something like "The great lord's corpse will open the gate." We said "huh??" and replayed it with version 02, which explained "He will open the gate for us if we have the lord's coffin with us." (The menu was somewhat confusing, and we couldn't tell which was Hoaglund and which was Ritchie.)
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I watched the movie twice yesterday-once each with the two translated subtitles. I found the movie made more sense and was easier to follow with the Donald Ritchie subtitles.
shareA bit late with the reply, but I think the Hoaglund subtitles are better, since they, I believe, were translated from the literal Japanese (case in point comes when the forest witch sings the chant - I did a translation of it a few years back, luckily by catching a few words and then searching for it on Google using the Hiragana [I'm using this for an Evangelion doujinshi continuation I'm making, A-Eight ]and then set the translation on Google Translate, and the translation I got from the poem matched closely the ones Hoaglund made). So Hoaglund for the win (to use today's vernacular).
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