Let’s start with some low-hanging fruit. When, in Henry V, the king inspires his army before Agincourt, the Danish translator – here, Niels Brunse – can hope for a relatively easy win: ‘Vi fa, vi muntre fa, vi flok af brodre.’ Or, in the classic Schlegel-Tieck version of Macbeth, now rooted in German literature, the cursed usurper finds that tomorrow and tomorrow ‘Kriecht so mit kleinem Schritt von Tag zu Tag’. Linguistic kinship, comparable speech rhythms, shared verse forms: sometimes the happy not-so-few, the global band of brothers (and sisters) who translate Shakespeare out of English, face a stiff but still feasible task.
Even in familiar languages, though, pitfalls await in every line. Surely, Richard III’s opening soliloquy will slip smoothly into French? Well, now: ‘Maintenant’ sounds a draggy word to launch a torrid play. Enter Jean-Michel Déprats, raiding an older French word hoard: ‘Ores voici l’hiver de notre déplaisir’. Lear’s bleak quintuple ‘Never’ could easily become the Spanish ‘Jamás’, except that the syllabic stress would shift. So Vicente Molina Foix pivots, and retains those trochees of sheer despair: ‘Núnca, núnca, núnca, núnca, núnca.’ Besides, the natural pick may not quite work. A dozen eminent Spanish translators have Hamlet ponder ‘Ser o no ser’; not one of them has the Prince consider the (obvious) ‘pregunta’. Instead, ‘enigma, problema, dilema, duda’, even ‘cuestión’.
What about The Merchant of Venice in Japanese? Macbeth in Swahili? Othello in Azeri? Romeo and Juliet in Thai? A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Hindi? Or Julius Caesar in Latin – where ‘Et tu, Brute’ becomes, thanks to the Victorian scholar Henry Denison, the (probably more authentic) Greek ‘Kai su, teknon’: you too, son? Daniel Hahn’s funny, learned and invigorating book about translations of Shakespeare scours the planet and beyond for its evidence. We even hear about a translation of Much Ado About Nothing into Klingon. Endlessly erudite, never pedantic, the author dives deep into Shakespeare’s reinvention not just in neighbour languages but those where few or no basic markers – pronouns, syntax, grammar, word order, punctuation – have close parallels in English.
Shakespeare can do ‘wondrous things with a monosyllable’, for sure, but many languages don’t feature that lexical concision. In Greek, the only one in a core list of 100 everyday words that might fit is the borrowed ‘keik’ (say it). Still, there’s plenty of gain as well as loss. Agglutinative tongues can roll entire Shakespearean phrases into a single word. The murderer Macbeth may say that ‘I have done the deed’; in Swahili he simply has to growl ‘Nimelifanya’. Orsino in Twelfth Night demands ‘Give me some music’; but in Georgian one word could suffice: ‘Momasmeninet’.
Puns, wordplay, tongue-twisters, verbal gags – they are never ‘untranslatable’ (Hahn scorns the notion), but invitations to seek ‘not exactitude of meaning but equivalence of effect’. Portia in The Merchant of Venice wants to be ‘light’ in the sense of radiant, not flighty: in Sho Kawai’s Japanese, she can be bright (‘akarui’) but not weightless (‘karui’). As Hahn puts it: Chapeau! The Greek play literally known as ‘Love’s Barren Struggles’ may seem to have missed a trick in its transition until you realise that (thanks, Errikos Belies) it’s ‘Agápis Agónas Ágonos’.
When Lear ambiguously mourns that ‘my poor fool is hanged’ (the Fool himself, or Cordelia?), Brunse’s Danish can seize on its single-letter gap between ‘little fool’ and ‘little darling’: ‘lille nar/lille nor’. One scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor riffs on rude schoolboy twists on Latin phrases; in French, Déprats and Jean-Pierre Richard ‘made a list of all the Latin words that made them giggle at school’ and ran riot with them. As Hahn says, translators should be ‘faithful to the laugh’.
If This Be Magic is both enormous fun and an intellectual treat. Hahn could have trawled translation history (Dutch gained The Taming of the Shrew as early as 1654, Gujarati the same problematic piece in 1852) and delivered a very interesting study that nonetheless kept readers at a distance. Rather, this accomplished and versatile translator in his own right (Portuguese, Spanish, French) has found a smarter way. Exchanges with colleagues anchor a witty and spirited dive into Shakespearean translation topics ranging from metres to genders, names to accents and commas (inflexible in German) to puns. It succeeds as a workshop, a masterclass and a practical taster, as Hahn makes us spot verbal shapes, sequences and patterns even in the lines of non-Latin scripts, from Thai to Korean. Chapeau, too, to Canongate’s typesetters for their virtuoso performance.
What about Macbeth in Swahili? Othello in Azeri? Romeo and Juliet in Thai?
‘Nobody reads more closely than a translator’, and this celebration of their art also illuminates the texts that they transform. Shakespeare’s words present translators with a ‘multi-dimensional choice’, but theatre doesn’t live by words alone. Hahn acclaims and analyses translations that convey the full package – ‘meaning and music and detailed dramatic effect’. When Lady Macbeth asks her indecisive spouse ‘Are you a man?’, the withering resonance of that ‘man’ is, we learn, notoriously tough to transmit. Kudos to Te Haumihiata Mason, translating into te reo Maori, for her ‘He raho ranei ou?’ ‘So have you got balls, or what?’
It is the close-up, fine-grained case studies – with a bravura chapter devoted to one scene in Twelfth Night – that make this polyglot panorama so special. Yet Hahn (whose Brazilian great-grandfather translated Hamlet into Portuguese) widens his focus with essays on Shakespearean music and art, the making of literary canons and the ominous ascent of AI translation – ‘a handy tool for humans, not a bargain substitute for them’. He even examines various schemes to translate Shakespeare into English, from fixes snuck in by directors in order to sidestep obscurities to the dismal efforts to ‘simplify’ or ‘modernise’ his language. One supposedly up-to-date Hamlet has the Prince ponder: ‘To live or not to live. That is the issue.’
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