English Translation
She gave herself to flames of love.
can 炎 also be pronounced ほむら? in which cases is it pronounced ほのお vs. ほむら？
@ericaw
Before taking your question, I have to say that the Japanese sentence sounds very unnatural. Another terrible word-for-word translation sourced from Tanaka Corpus…
We don’t say 身を焼く for a human being except describing a psychopathic killer or suicidal person.
I would propose:
彼女は恋い焦がれていた。(pron. こいこがれていた)
恋い焦がれる is a frequent idiom. 焦げる means “get burned” or “scorch”, so the idiom is closer to the connotation of “flames of love”.
Back to your original question: the difference between ほのお and ほむら. We pronounce 炎 as ほむら only in rare cases such as titles of classic literatures, songs or items of video games. – Note that Japanese video games and anime often use very strange expressions intentionally to let viewers/players time-trip to ancient or fantasy worlds. In other words, no one says ほむら in the real modern world.
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