If This Be Magic and Shakespeare in translation: some further thoughts

 1/ When asked whether we know a writer if we only read them in translation, I suppose most people would say either yes or no. I think it depends: I think some but not too much is lost if we’re talking about Jane Austen, Trollope, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Fielding, Balzac, Zola, Molière…; but Nguyễn Du in translation is no longer Nguyễn Du and I’d say the same about Shakespeare, Melville, or Wodehouse; and I can’t help feeling that I don’t really know Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, or Ovid. 

There’s a reason that non-Russians name Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Chekhov as the greatest Russian writer, whereas Russians say Pushkin. 

That doesn’t mean we reject everything in translation. We look at different translations; we do what we can. Am I going to learn ancient Greek? No, I have no gift for languages. To read as widely as I aim to do, I need translators, for whom I’m forever grateful. I’m just saying that sometimes we do lose a lot: Wodehouse’s comic genius is in the phrasing, so what do we have when his sentences are now rephrased by someone else? It’s something to keep in mind. 

2/ In my previous blog post about Daniel Hahn’s If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation, I wrote: 

“When people read or watch Shakespeare in translation, his poetry is lost but his other qualities—his metaphors, his range, his characterisation and psychological insight, his examination of power and politics, his understanding of human nature, his sense of pacing and understanding of drama, and so on—are still there. When I read Racine, I suspected that much of his greatness was in the French alexandrine verse that got lost in translation.” 

Glad to later find Hahn making the same point in his book: 

“… Jean-Michel cited this distinction to explain why we see so few plays by Racine staged in English—he’s a writer for whom language is everything. A play like Bérénice has very little plot— ‘it’s all music, it’s all language.’ It’s a beautiful literary play, but Racine never wrote anything as generously, theatrically user-friendly as A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (ch.32) 

The plays of Racine are all talk talk talk. 

If we leave aside the ancient Greek plays (different tradition of drama, with lots of singing), I have noticed that sometimes a long speech in someone else’s play is just the author writing poetry, whereas long speeches in Shakespeare are usually either rhetoric (a character trying to persuade another, which moves the plot forward), or a soliloquy (which depicts a character’s stream of thoughts). Spanish Golden Age playwrights, except for Lope de Vega, very often write those long speeches which neither move the plot forward nor do anything for characterisation (I’m looking at you, Tirso de Molina—what’s the point of that four-page speech about Lisbon?). The closet plays of Seneca, or Goethe’s Faust, have many passages and scenes that I know wouldn’t work well onstage. 

Shakespeare and Molière are performed widely around the world—in translation—because they understand theatre so well, having such a great sense of pacing and tension and pitch and dramatic effects (I once saw a bad production of Othello which still managed to make me tear up at the end).  

I’ve also noted that some of the playwrights who do well onstage in translation wrote in prose: Chekhov, Ibsen (except for some early plays)… Different beast, then. 

3/ Daniel Hahn’s book makes me have immense respect for translators of Shakespeare into other languages, and I do think many of the examples—the choices, the solutions to the problems inherent in translating Shakespeare—are brilliant. But at the same time, the book reinforces my view that Shakespeare is best appreciated in English, that I’m glad to read and watch his works in the original, and that it’s silly to call for a translation of his plays into today’s English. 

(Yep, over the years I’ve encountered lots of philistines who think readers of Shakespeare in translation have an advantage over us). 

When a translator finds a clever solution for a joke or a pun in Shakespeare, it might be funny (and the translator deserves an applause), but that joke or that pun is not Shakespeare’s. Hahn also explores many other problems and not everything gets a neat solution. What do you do when Shakespeare plays with the coexistence of Latinate/ Romance and Germanic words in the English language? Or when he marks an accent or regional dialect? Or when he includes words from another language? Or when he includes words from the target language itself (i.e. what does a French translator do with the French passages in the plays)? And if you make a choice between domestication and foreignisation, how far do you go and where do you draw the line? 

The translator is thus the second author. 

Hahn raises a million questions—sometimes there’s a brilliant answer, sometimes there’s no neat solution—and the book gets one to think more deeply about Shakespeare and about the art of translation. One aspect I’ve never considered, for example, is that a translator of Shakespeare tries to think about beats, rhythm, and rhyme, which is challenging enough if some languages (such as Italian or Greek) have longer words than English does, but things could be even further complicated by accents: a play translated by a Brazilian might end up losing some effects in the mouth of a Portuguese actor, as they pronounce syllables differently.

4/ This is interesting: 

“Just as everyday English carries idioms drawn from our own greatest canonical translation, the 1611 King James Bible (and its more quietly influential predecessors), so translated Shakespeare looms large in other languages, phrases from his work inflecting people’s speech.” (ch.37) 

I like that. 

(Does this happen in Vietnamese? I have no idea). 

“We readers can become attached to [translations] in just the same way, and it’s hard to imagine the validity of alternative interchangeable versions. Just recall the stories that mattered most to you as a kid, when some of the strongest bonds were formed. For me, those books included classics that were definitely not called ‘Gretel and Hansel’ or ‘Cindergirl’, Lindgren’s Pippi Longsocks, Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Small Mermaid’.” 

In Vietnam, some titles of classics—Giấc mộng đêm hè (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Bắt trẻ đồng xanh (The Catcher in the Rye), Đỉnh gió hú (Wuthering Heights), Cuốn theo chiều gió (Gone with the Wind), Tội ác và trừng phạt (Crime and Punishment), and so on—have become so iconic that retranslated titles would flop, or new translators don’t bother. It’s like Dostoyevsky’s Братья Карамазовы: since Constance Garnett, everyone has called it The Brothers Karamazov even though some later translators (such as Ignat Avsey) translated it as The Karamazov Brothers. 

We become attached to translations: I love Constance Garnett’s translations of Chekhov (still going through the 13 volumes); Aylmer and Louise Maude’s versions of Tolstoy are dear friends, including their War and Peace (revised by Amy Mandelker), though now the Anna Karenina copy I keep is by Rosamund Bartlett; I suspect I’m also attached to Robert Fitzgerald’s translations of Homer, which is why I (unreasonably) stick to Akhilleus when everyone else says Achilles, and so on. 

If This Be Magic is a very good book—a celebration of Shakespeare and a celebration of translators—and it’s certainly one of the books I’ve enjoyed most this year.