Saturday, March 11, 2006

Keyser Söze


Was reading an old article in EWeekly about 'The Usual Suspects,' which includes a story about the name 'Keyser Söze.' Apparently, Christopher McQuarrie knew somebody called 'Keyser Sume,' and wanted to use the name. [Full article is here.] The name had to be changed a bit, and McQuarrie needed a new last name. He scanned the English-to-Turkish dictionary for evil, devil, fire to no avail. However, when he looked for 'Verbal', he found 'söze'.

The article mentions that 'only filmgoers from Istanbul [as in 'only filmgoers from New York' I guess] would have been able to guess the film's last twist. Honestly, I never got it. I remember thinking, during the film, that the name was not Turkish. Yeah, 'Keyser' is not very common; that's a given... But, 'Söze' did not even sound Turkish. I assumed it was a mistake, and maybe a Hungarian name or something.

After reading the article, I ended up looking at the dictionaries we have around. Then, it was clear. I believe McQuarrie looked at 'Redhouse Dictionary' which is a very good and popular one, but words are a bit old, and doesn't include modern versions of some of the words [modern = those defined by original TDK {Turk Dil Kurumu} and progressive groups; old = Arabic and Ottoman versions which are still common]. Readhouse has 'söze ait' for 'verbal'. However, without the second word it is not a direct translation. Literally 'söze' means 'to word'. Still good, but a modern version would be a better translation: 'sözel'.

I would have guessed who 'Keyser Sözel' was in a few seconds. Oh well! Still one of the best movies of the century.

In the picture above, our old Redhouse dictionary is the one at the top, and one of the best references we have in the house is at the bottom.