Yay, my favorite filmmaker! Thank you.

Now, I have to point out a significant issue with The Seventh Seal. The scene where the Knight first meets Death seems to be mistranslated. And it is so mistranslated that the dialogue means the opposite in English. And since this scene is crucial to understanding the film and the motivation of the Knight (not to mention one of the most famous scenes in cinema history) I think it's worth an extra look.

First, in this trailer, where the voice-over says that the Knight asks for “proof”, what he actually asks for is “uppskov” which translates to “postponement” or “reprieve”. In the actual scene I reference below the translation is “respite.”

Why is this significant? You see, the dialogue where Death asks the Knight if he's “prepared” is also mistranslated in the subtitles. Check out the scene with subtitles here.

The answer the Knight gives him in the English subtitles is “My flesh is afraid, but I am not.” I'm not sure exactly which version of the film they got the clip from, but I have also seen this translated as “My body is scared, but I am not.”

The Swedish word for “prepared” or “ready” is “beredd” which spoken rhymes exactly with “r?dd”, the Swedish word for “scared” or “frightened”. Max Von Sydow says the line really fast so it is easily heard as “r?dd” instead of “beredd”.

So, the correct translation should be: Death: “Are you ready?” The Knight: “My body is ready, but I am not.”, which is the opposite of “My body is scared, but I am not.” This means that mentally he is not ready to die and it's the very reason he challenges Death to a game of chess, believing he can postpone the inevitable. The English translation as shown in the subtitles makes no sense, really. His body is afraid? His body is tired from being at war for years. I believe that is mentioned too somewhere in the film.

I haven't been able to find a copy of the original script to confirm my suspicions. The closest thing to it is an excerpt from the script in the archives at the official Bergman Foundation website here.

I'll have to buy the Criterion Collection on Blu-Ray to see if it's the same translation as the old version. If anyone knows more about this, please let me know. Thanks for reading.

This is one of my favoritest movies ever, and I'm the one who did the PDF of "The Seventh Seal" at Drew's Script-o-rama:

http://themovieguy.110mb.com/7thult.pdf

I made it with MM from a text file I got *somewhere*...

Anyway, I just looked, and Antonius says, "My body is frightened, but I am not." But your explanation makes much more sense.

If you can't take Bergman's heaviness. I can recommend his initial international success: Smiles on a Summer's Night. It is a great black farce in period costume.

The line in Swedish is (from the original script and it sounds like it in the film) is "Min kropp är rädd, inte jag själv." of which the raw Google translation says, "My body is afraid, not myself." and word for word I copped as "My body is afraid, not I myself."

No, you're wrong. And so is the Criterion translation. I have notified Criterion and Janus Films regarding this error which seems to have followed this film since it was released. The same error is printed in the book Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, originally published in 1960. Whoever translated this script into English made a mistake. Here is an updated link to the excerpt from the script hosted by the official Ingmar Bergman Foundation: http://ingmarbergman.se/production/det-sjunde-inseglet-2338#!citat-30 Döden: Är du beredd? Antonius Block: Min kropp är beredd, inte jag själv.