SOURCE: Honegger, Gitta. “Seeing through the Eyes of the Word.” Theater 24, no. 1 (summer 1993): 87-92.

In the following essay, Honegger, an English translator of Handke's work, discusses the usage of speech pattern and sound in Handke's The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other.

… As though everyone everywhere in the world, day in, day out, always had his pictorial mission: the mission to be a picture to others: the woman walks “past the train station, along a puddle collecting the falling rain, as ‘the housewife on her way to the market,’ and further in the distance someone walks by as ‘the man with the umbrella;’” thus, offering their pictures of themselves, they help one another (me, at least) …

—Peter Handke: Fantasies of Repetition, 1983

Peter Handke's most recent work for the theater, The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, is a play without words. It takes place in a...