Shakespeare without borders

It makes sense that Shakespeare’s theatre was called the Globe. If all the world is a stage, his stage also takes a fair stab at being all the world. His imagination was deeply rooted in England (no other plays of his era have scenes set in Gloucestershire and Warwickshire) but blossomed all over the place. The forest of Arden is also the Ardennes. Ancient Athens is also the English countryside. 

Not least because he worked in a tyrannical state where direct references to contemporary England were dangerous, he gives us versions of Denmark, Illyria (roughly modern Croatia), Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), Cyprus, Vienna, Egypt, Antioch, Troy and a grand tour of Italy: Venice, Rome, Padua, Milan, Sicily. An even wider world seeps into his plots: Othello comes from Mauretania in North Africa; Caliban’s mother is Algerian; Shylock belongs to the great Jewish diaspora. Exotic objects hint at the burgeoning of global trade: “China dishes” in Measure for Measure; Mughal jewellery in Henry VIII, where English nobility, competing with the French, showed off their bling and “made Britain India”. Merchants come “from Muscovy” (Love’s Labour’s Lost); Ariel in The Tempest fetches dewdrops from “the still-vex’d Bermoothes” (Bermuda). 

It seems safe to assume, then, that Shakespeare would have been happy to discover himself, four centuries on from his death, a global playwright, staged not just in all the places he referred to but in many he had never heard of. Yet his delight would surely have been tempered by perplexity. He is the most meticulous of writers, attentive to every nuance of rhythm, sound and meaning (including double and treble meanings). And he doesn’t use language for its own sake: because he is so thoroughly a playwright (and an actor who knew the weight of every word on the tongue), every syllable is tuned to its dramatic moment and its emotional effect.

How on earth, he would surely have wondered, could his astonishingly complex weave be unravelled and then remade with a wholly different linguistic texture? When Shakespeare plays with foreign languages, it is usually to make a joke of the absurdity of translation. In Henry V, Pistol, confronted with a prisoner speaking French, resorts to some garbled gibberish: “Calmie custure me,” a nonsensical phonetic imitation of a song in Gaelic (Calen o custere me). Later, when the French princess, Catherine, is being taught English, the scene is an excuse for dirty jokes: her innocent mispronunciations can be heard by the audience as swear words. (“Gown” becomes “cown” which she says as “con” – the sniggering at the back by those  who recognise the word for female genitalia is very much intended.)

Shakespeare would probably have agreed with Daniel Hahn’s subtitle – translating him is indeed an unlikely art. And writing a brilliant book about this art would seem to go far beyond the unlikely into the realms of the impossible. No one can be sufficiently fluent in enough languages to split all the hairs of sound, rhythm and meaning in more than a few of them. But Hahn somehow manages to orchestrate a dazzling variety of notes from widely different cultures into a delightful praise-song for both the Bard and the geniuses who labour to give his “local habitation and a name” a new postal address and a novel appellation.

I’ve always rather lazily assumed that Shakespeare works so well in diverse cultures merely because he is, after all, a supreme storyteller. The vividness of his characters and the thrill of his plots somersault over the barriers of translation. This is true as far as it goes. Hahn, however, shows us how disrespectful this assumption is to the cleverness, creativity and infinite patience of those who try to make the poetry thrive in distant exile from its native English. 

Hahn is himself an acclaimed translator of fiction from Portuguese, Spanish and French. His book is a passionate rebuttal of Robert Frost’s dictum that poetry is what gets lost in translation. He is not trying to convince us that much of an original text does not disappear but rather to show us how it is brought back to life in a wholly new form.

One thing he is not arguing for is any simplistic idea of Shakespeare as universal: we all feel the same emotions so we can recognise them in Swahili or Icelandic just as easily as we can in English. But, as Hahn eloquently puts it: 

“In Shakespeare, people get sad with precision. King Lear dies and Desdemona dies and Falstaff dies and their experiences of death are entirely specific, and different from each other. Nobody dies generically. Cordelia and her intransigent father don’t have the same relationship as Celia and her intransigent father or Hermia and hers. And this precision of character and experience is located in its expression.”

The challenge for translators, then, is how to take an expression constructed by perhaps the greatest precision engineer of all time, wrench it violently out of all the soundscapes that make it so exact, and then recreate with an equivalent sense of nuance what they judge to be its intended effect. The nature of this task varies greatly according to the resources available (or not) in each particular language.

Hahn engages with a dozen practitioners in tongues ranging from Bangla to Brazilian Portuguese and from Japanese to te reo Māori and, in doing so, gives us dazzling insights, not just into Shakespeare but into the workings of language itself. Each translation has to confront both an astonishing richness of choices and a varying range of constraints.

The first constraint is iambic pentameter, the line of ten syllables broken into five units in which the first syllable is stressed and the second unstressed. This “da DUM/ da DUM” is the living pulse beneath the skin of Shakespeare’s lines: “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” It tells the actors what to emphasise. It can, as Hahn discovers in his dialogues with the translator Niels Brunse, fit quite well into Danish. But it doesn’t work at all in, say, French. So the French end up using a 12-syllable line – other languages may favour as many as 14 syllables. 

This means, though, losing the purposeful shape of Shakespeare’s lines, altering where thoughts run on, and where they stop. Translators can recast the same thoughts into fewer lines of greater length. Or they can add extra words to fill out the lines. As Hahn remarks: “Alternatively you keep it line for line, replacing half a dozen 10-syllable lines with half a dozen 14-syllable lines, but this has its problems, too. Because while I do love Hamlet, truly, I have never wished it 40% longer than it is.”

These rhythmic complications have a lot to do with the abundance of monosyllables that English inherits from the Anglo-Saxon word-hoard. (This shared Scandinavian heritage is the reason why Niels Brunse can keep iambic pentameter in Danish.) 

We tend to use “monosyllabic” as a synonym for inarticulacy, but just think of what Shakespeare can do with this spareness: for example, some of the most heartbreaking lines in the language come when King Lear discovers Cordelia dead:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life

And thou no breath at all? O thou’lt come no more…

Monosyllables all.

In wonderfully nerdish mode, Hahn buys books called My First Hundred Words in eight different languages. He notes that, in English, 75 of the words are monosyllables but Greek and Italian offer only one apiece. A rose by any other name might smell as sweetly but it sure doesn’t scan as neatly: the Greek is triandáphilo.

Or consider the percussive “now” that is so crucial to Shakespeare’s introduction of the evil but electrifyingly energetic Richard III that he breaks the iambic pattern to begin on a hard stress: “Now is the winter of our discontent…” What do you do with the three-syllable French maintenant? Hahn’s French interlocutor Jean-Michel Déprats disinters ores, a half-forgotten equivalent. “Ores voici l’hiver de notre déplaisir…” doesn’t exactly reproduce the opening smack of sound but it is suitably short and propulsive.

It had not occurred to me that some things in Shakespeare might actually be better in translation. Alongside the constraints, there are freedoms. Sometimes jokes that probably had the groundlings wetting themselves leave us dry because the double entendres have become inaudible to us. Translators can follow Hahn’s own practice with hollowed-out jokes, which is “to dismantle them entirely, look at the moving parts, then reassemble them into what might be a quite different joke. It’s a question of priority. I want to be as faithful as I can. Sometimes, I’m being faithful to the laugh.”

Paradoxically, too, a translation can sometimes get closer to Shakespeare’s original intent. Much of what is misleading to us wasn’t meant to be – the audience in the Globe would have understood that tax meant to assign blame, that mated meant bewildered, rivals were companions and to be extravagant was to wander around. No sane translator will seek to reproduce these unwanted obscurities. Thus, as Hahn writes, “today’s English audiences might find Shakespeare more distant than an audience in another language, for whom he has been revived fresher, more immediate”. 

John Falstaff, in Henry IV, Part 2, boasts:  “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.” Shakespeare, who took so many existing works and remade them in his own fabulous language, would surely be pleased that he has been the cause of so much brilliance in others over the centuries. In the brave and not so brave new worlds he tried to imagine, he continues to provoke invention and ingenuity. If This Be Magic is not just a glorious tribute to this endless vitality, it takes its place among the liveliest examples of the wit that Shakespeare continues to spark. 

If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation by Daniel Hahn is published by Canongate (£25). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £22.50 (10% off RRP)

Photograph by Bettman Archive via Getty Images