If This Be Magic – Translating Shakespeare: A Conversation with Daniel Hahn

Philip Rowe (0:11)

Welcome to The History Of European Theatre podcast, and thanks for joining me on this journey through millennia of theatrical history. Episode 233, If This Be Magic, Translating Shakespeare, a conversation with Daniel Hahn.

Last time, Cymbeline took us back to a Shakespearean vision of Ancient Britain. But did you know that in 2023, you could have seen the play at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London presented in Juba Arabic using a translation by Joseph Abuk, which he had produced for the South Sudan Theatre Company in 2011 Cymbeline, like all Shakespeare plays, has been translated and performed in many languages, and productions and publications using translations account for a large part of the global reach of Shakespeare. In his book If This Be Magic, Daniel Hahn explores the world of translating Shakespeare and looks at the challenges and benefits of Shakespeare in translation. By examining some of the very big and very small decisions a translator has to make when faced with a Shakespeare text, Daniel takes the reader into a world of words and meanings and ponders the question of how does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare when every word has been changed?

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator. His recent work alongside If This Be Magic, The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation include translations of fiction from Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala and Peru. He is currently co-editing the Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories and re-translating a French children's classic.

Daniel very kindly fitted me into his very busy schedule, so I spoke to him over a Zoom call from his hotel room in Nepal, where he is about to hold some workshops for translators. Seeing Shakespeare in translation is, I think, something for those of us who see and hear the work in the original 16th century English find quite difficult to understand. For us, a big part of the point is the language itself. And then there's the complication of much of it being in verse. So you're a translator yourself, and your book sets out to explore the art of Shakespeare in translation, and you get the help of people who've actually done that work. So to start with, perhaps you could just summarize for us, what are the challenges that a translator would face, particularly when working with Shakespeare?

Daniel Hahn (2:33)

Well, thank you for the question and thanks for having me on the podcast. In one sense, translating Shakespeare is like translating anything else. The job is to work out what this source text is doing, and then produce something that does all of the same things just using a completely different set of tools.

And when I say does all the same things, I don't just mean it means the same as the source, because translating meaning is easy. I mean all of the things. So Shakespeare is using rhythm and sound and the structure of lines and rhyme and as well as cultural references and wordplay and various things. And what you want is the translator is to keep all of those things, because Shakespeare without those things is diminished. I think you're absolutely right. It's an interesting thing to think about if you're used to Shakespeare being, why do we love Shakespeare? Well, it's the language. And so what happens if you like take away all the language? What are you left with? But the way I think of it as a translator myself is that when you're a translator, you're not taking away the language, you're doing something in which the language is also active. You're producing 25,000 words of French or Swahili or Italian, that are also a dynamic set of words that is kinetic, where the rhythm is doing something, where all those things are doing something.

So I think it's an easy misunderstanding. I think to go, well, Shakespearean translation means Shakespeare without the language. If you're a translator, language is the thing that you're interested in producing as much as anything.

Philip Rowe (4:10)

Yeah, as I said there, that's a horribly difficult concept for those of us who don't speak foreign languages very well to get to get hold of.

Daniel Hahn (4:19)

It's a good example then maybe. There's a moment in Hamlet where Hamlet sees his father's ghost for the first time.

The whole scene, not the whole scene, but a big chunk of the scene has been happening in fairly regular iambic pantameter.

What we get in English is something along the lines of de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum de dum. He goes on like that for a little while. Then Hamlet sees his father's ghost, and his first line, first thing that comes out of his mouth is, angels and ministers of grace defend us. Angels in English, he doesn't say angelic ministers of grace, which he could have done. Angelic would have been a nice iambic opening. But he says angels and ministers. There's a kind of jolt, and he does this because he's giving the actor a line to say, and the actor is whether they are aware of it or not. There's a kind of jolt at the beginning of that line. There's a kind of twitch, which then means the audience are aware of this being something abrupt, there being a kind of bang at the beginning of the line. When you're a translator, you're not just thinking what does angels and ministers of grace mean, and then figuring out how to convey that meaning in French. You're also making a line of French that also does that, a line of French that also makes the audience kind of gasp, or the actor jolt. So you're producing something with your language that does what Shakespeare is doing, not just means what Shakespeare is meaning.