If This Be Magic
The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation
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How do you rebuild a 400-year-old topical joke in a new culture and with none of the same words?
How does Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting unfold if they can’t mention pilgrims?
What does Taming of the Shrew sound like in a language where every noun has a gender?
Why might Hamlet be even longer in Japanese?
And why are Lady Macbeth’s pronouns such a problem?
What does it mean to translate Shakespeare? When we change all the poetry, all the wordplay, all the syntax – all the words! – is it still Shakespeare? And is it still any good?
Daniel Hahn, seasoned translator and Shakespeare fanatic, will change the way you think about language itself. Ranging widely across Shakespeare’s works, and across the world’s languages, this book explores what translators have done and what is possible.
No knowledge of any particular language is required, though a bit of patience for the nerdiest of close reading is desirable. This micro-attention to language will reveal some of the complexities of Shakespeare; and by using his work as its subject, with the extraordinary pressures that he puts on language, it will reveal even more about the craft of translation, and the power of words themselves.
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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.
