He'a always just kinda THERE - materializing into scenes. I love that.
OK, so now I know it isn't only my feeling. I saw it with Czech subtitles today, and there it was clearly translated as "Only when I'm dying." Does it mean it seems so to Czech speaking people?
The English sentence does not have a subject, so the one who is supposed to do the dying remains ambiguous.
I know that. There were more of such mistranslations actually, where they made a clear statement in a moment where it wasn't that clear in English. What I'm referring to, is the fact they mistranslated it with the same meaning I felt it could have, while English speaking people here seem to understand it the opposite way. So I was wondering if it had something to do with the language background.
And I also realised why we Czechs seem to choose Harmonica as the subject. Because in Czech there's such saying, literally "Only over my dead body", with the meaning "Only when I'm dead", used when somebody wants to show big objection to something. So for us it's natural to think Harmonica is saying something like this, because this saying is quite widespread in Czech.
Had he/she chose to be more literal, perhaps it would have been necessary to re-formulate the idea, thus: "only at the point where either one of us is dying." That sounds really awkward in English, but maybe there's a way to put it across in Czech. Anyway, if a subject has to be introduced into the sentence, it should be plural.
Just out of curiosity, what is that line in Italian? And because I don't understand Italian, is the English sentence directly translated?