If This Be Magic
The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation
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- 予約注文
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- リリース予定日：2026年4月21日
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
How does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare when every word is changed? In this playful, meditative exploration of translating the world’s most beloved playwright, Daniel Hahn guides us through the magic of bringing the Bard to a global audience.
"For those who care deeply about language, and about Shakespeare. . . this will be a treasured book." —James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare
Shakespeare may have breathed the air of sixteenth-century England, but today, all the world is his stage. Every year, millions of people, from Bogotá to Borneo, read Hamlet for the first time, thanks to the tireless work of translators. Drawing on the work of the very best of them, Hahn dives into the infinitesimally complicated ways the great playwright is reinvented and yet sounds, somehow, like himself—in Chinese, Dutch, Turkish, and more than a hundred other languages.
From word order, puns, and punctuation to metaphor, accent, and song, Shakespeare’s variety of genius presents an endless set of conundrums, among them: How does Romeo and Juliet’s love story unfold if their dialogue cannot form a sonnet (nor rhyme), as it does in the original? How can you form wordplay around the letter “I” and its sound if its meanings are not shared in other languages? These are just two out of millions of issues facing translators tasked with bringing Shakespeare to non-English languages, non-Shakespearean eras and cultures. To attempt such a feat, they must cut and add beats, maintain rhymes, adapt names and locations, and preserve meaning while not unilaterally prioritizing it, all while knowing that for each word, line, or scene they construct, another option is yet to be discovered.
Traveling the world, Hahn speaks to writers and actors engaging with Shakespeare’s work, sharing stories of his own. Hahn, whose great-grandfather produced one of Brazil’s earliest Shakespeare translations, emerges as a wise and enthusiastic guide, teacher, and sleuth. If This Be Magic does not require knowledge of any other language or more than a passing acquaintance with the Bard’s canon, but it draws out fascinating insights on both. As nerdy as they come (there is a chapter on commas), supremely readable, and funny throughout, this is a book for everyone and a fitting tribute to the Globe’s Bard.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Translator Hahn (Catching Fire) shows how Shakespeare's intricate wordplay is preserved and transformed into other languages in this lively exploration. Surveying works in dozens of languages, from Arabic to Yiddish, Hahn discusses the "big policy decisions"—to use verse or prose, rhyme or not— translators must settle before turning to finer points like word order, punctuation, and syllable count. Along the way, he demonstrates that all choices depend on what each language makes possible. For example, in Hamlet, a character makes a joke connecting the name Brutus to an actor portraying "a brute part." The joke works because English happens to have a pejorative derived from the Latin brutus. Hahn relays the experience of a Korean translator who played with a Korean word that sounds similar to Brutus that means swollen and, when employed with a local idiom meaning "his liver is swollen," achieves a stinging effect akin to the English joke. Hahn's delight in linguistic possibility is evident throughout, particularly when he challenges the notion of "untranslatable words," and he keeps the tone delightfully droll. (In a discussion of Shakespeare's use of monosyllabic words to convey grief, he expresses concern for the translators tasked with more polyphonic languages: "I have not yet seen Hamlet in Greek but the idea worries me.") This is a pleasure for scholars and hobbyist wordsmiths alike.
