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TThe great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who translated William Faulkner, André Gide, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf into Spanish, drew a line from Shakespeare. Speaking of the moment when Hamlet asks the ghost why she returns to see “the moonscape,” Borges says: “I don’t think it can be translated. Perhaps the words can be translated.” Of course Shakespeare cannot be translated.
All, however, is not lost. “It has been said that Shakespeare cannot be translated into any other language,” added Borges. “But Shakespeare cannot be translated into English, perhaps, because he wrote what (Robert Louis) Stevenson called ‘this strange language, Shakespeare-ese’.” This may not be entirely true, as translator Daniel Hahn points out in this highly misleading book. Remembering the hip-hop song of Romeo and Juliet that he had seen earlier, he immediately forces us to “the words ‘Do you kiss my teeth, your family?’ proved to be the perfect translation of ‘Do you bite your finger at us, sir?’”
And if in English, then why not go to Portuguese, or French, or Māori? Hahn’s work is to argue that “Shakespeare and every word changed can be great, and it can still be Shakespeare”, and to achieve this he produces the letters of Dutch, Russian, Welsh, Thai, Arabic, Japanese, and a dozen other languages, betting that by simply counting the syllables or looking at the sound words in a language that one does not hear (as he listens with pleasure) the quality of translation. I didn’t believe that the wager worked most of the time, but the translators, as you can imagine, were getting a good workout, and the gambit paid off when a long passage from 12th Night was explained with boxes mentioning many choices of translators.
The highlight of the book are Hahn’s conversations with his fellow translators, who are able to explain their choices directly. In Māori, we learn, Lady Macbeth’s question to her husband, “Are you a man?”, is not clear at all, so the translator Te Haumihiata Mason has translated it into something that simply means “Do you have balls?” – “that is,” says Hahn with satisfaction, “is what Lady M is asking.” Meanwhile, Prince Hal’s name means “fish” in Hungarian, which would be unnecessarily confusing, so it’s changed to Riki, short for Henrik.
Hahn also provides many aspects of the frustrating and exciting interpretations of regularity. “The word ‘long’ is overused to mean a kind of ‘unbiased’ translation, which cannot exist,” he complains; and he suggests that, in many cases, the non-realistic choice may be better. When Mark Antony thinks of Caesar’s ghost “shouting ‘Doom'”, for example, the nearest Portuguese word is weak “destruction”; a better choice, suggests Hahn, is “kill” (kill), because it is short and easy to shout.
Each chapter answers a different question that translators face, for example if you translate a verse (carefully: as one French translator observes, you risk making “a wise man know more”), or how to translate a joke: it is often better, everyone agrees, to make a new joke – “to be faithful to laugh”, as Hahn calls it. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Germany, to preserve the songs of the dogs, we are promised that Thisbe will live in the “shadow of the mulberry” but that she will “hide like a newt”. Interpreters may even acknowledge the possibility of humor where there was none – which Hahn illustrates well by saying that the “choice hat” in Harry Potter has become, in French, le choixpeau (the chapeau who chooses).
Can you keep the alliteration? Sometimes, if you’re lucky: Love’s Labor’s Lost received the Greek name “Agapēs Agōnas Agonos” (“problems of love are sterile”). But if there are no such lucky ways, you can just replace one proverb with another: so, in Spanish, Much Ado About Nothing is often called “A lot of noise, not a lot of nuts”.
There are scratches to be made here and there. Hahn calls a line from Richard III “irregular” after reading the syllables, but it is a regular line that begins with an anapest (da-da-dum). And when Juliet says to Romeo “You are kissing with th’book”, Hahn shows this as accepting his “friendship”, but giving the problem of flirting. And – this being the publisher’s and not the author’s fault – the book has been produced, inexplicably, without an index.
However, all can be forgiven for the joy and endless curiosity expressed in these pages. “In Shakespeare, people are disappointed right“And he is very disgusted by some “translators” who translate new English translations of Chekhov or Ibsen without speaking the original language – the method is, as he thinks, “the highest type of translation that is called “literal”. the immortality of Shakespeare himself.
