Why did you kill your wife? Or: a new excerpt from The Gilded Hour

19th century Italy, via Miklian Maps

Quite some time ago I posted here and on FaceBook, asking for help with translating a single sentence (“Why did you kill your wife?”) into a wide variety of European languages and dialects of those languages.

The response was terrific, and tremendously useful. Over a couple weeks I learned the sentence in something like ten dialects of Italian, five of French, six of German, and a handful of Norwegian, Swedish, Spanish (European, and different parts of So...