In this week's bonus, we talk to Daniel Hahn about the cultural challenges of translating Shakespeare — including why "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" doesn't work everywhere, and why a Hungarian translator had to stop calling Prince Hal "Hal" (it means fish). We also look at how books get chosen for translation in the first place.
In this week's bonus, we talk to Daniel Hahn about the cultural challenges of translating Shakespeare — including why "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" doesn't work everywhere, and why a Hungarian translator had to stop calling Prince Hal "Hal" (it means fish). We also look at how books get chosen for translation in the first place.
Find Daniel's book "If This Be Magic"
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad-free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription. Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. We are here with Daniel Hahn, award-winning translator, former chair of the British Translators Association, and, importantly, author of "If This Be Magic," a new book about translating Shakespeare that I thought was fantastic. Daniel, thank you so much for being here.
Daniel Hahn: Thanks, Mignon. Really glad to be talking to you.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. So, I have heard that if you want to find a good book to read, pick a translation, because only the best books get translated. So, how do books get chosen to be translated?
Daniel Hahn: It's a really tricky one. The English-speaking market is quite—we're getting better, but we are still quite resistant to things that are not already in English. The proportion of international books, international language books, let's say, that are translated into English is tiny compared to what we export. We're really good cultural exporters in the English-speaking world and not very good cultural importers for reasons we can probably guess.
Things finally get translated in a number of different ways. Sometimes it's about a translator themselves finding a book because we read in our other languages, discover something that we think is great, and we kind of hit editors over the head with it until finally someone lets us translate it. It's quite a difficult proposition. I'm often, as a translator, trying to persuade an editor to acquire the rights to publish a book, which they aren't able to read. It requires quite a lot of trust; it requires quite a lot of risk. I'll be saying to them, "I think you should buy this book, I think you should pay me $5,000 to translate it," at which point you're going to discover if you like it or not, and editors don't like making that decision for reasons I completely understand.
But they learn whom they trust. Sometimes they hear about books from other editors in other countries, they go to book fairs, and that sort of thing. There isn't a single route through to publication, but certainly it's true that it's hard, often very hard, to get a book that might be a really brilliant, quite successful novel, say, in Brazil, in front of English-speaking audiences in America.
Mignon Fogarty: You mentioned that you will translate a book for a friend sometimes because you want them to read it so much. And is that like the translator's version of making a mixtape for someone?
Daniel Hahn: Totally. It isn't always for an individual. I feel like there is a kind of—a lot of what drives translators to translate, often there are many things, but one of them I think is reading a book and wanting other people to be able to read it. The first writer I translated is an Angolan writer called José Eduardo Agualusa. He's a brilliant writer and we've done nine or 10 books together now. And, I don't know if you can read Portuguese, but if you can't, you can still read him now. And I'm really excited at the fact that you can read this writer who's a great novelist, who's a great short story writer, who will give you pleasure and will give lots of other English language readers pleasure.
And so there is, I think, a sort of proselytizing aspect to it. You know, there's that thing which we all as readers do. You read a book that you love and then the next person you pass on the street, you grab them by the collar and say, "Oh my god, you have to read this." It's a thing that we do quite a lot as readers. Sometimes the book that I have read that I think absolutely everyone should read happens to be in Portuguese or in Spanish. And so I need to put in a bit more legwork to make other people able to read it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. sales like you got started sort of by happenstance, the way a lot of translators do because they're bilingual and then people want your help. But if someone wants to be a translator, I was wondering is there a starter book? Is there a book that a lot of translators might translate first to sort of get their feet wet or learn the trade, or is it just kind of all over the place?
Daniel Hahn: It is a bit all over the place, but I do think it's useful to translate anything. I think taking any opportunity that there is is worth doing. It's really hard to get started in translation; it's fairly hard to keep going in translation. There are a lot of people who want to be translators now; certainly the profession has changed in that way. I meet people who want to do the job. We mostly started by accident until relatively recently, but there are more people now who are quite deliberate about it.
But there is a kind of, you know, we have a supply-demand problem. We have more people who want to do it than there is work. For every translator to be able to do five books a year, which is what it will cost to pay your mortgage or pay your rent, we would need to be publishing 10 times what we're publishing. So I do think that when you're starting out, you kind of have to do anything that's available. You have to do a story, try and find a writer you love, pitch a single story to a magazine, an online journal, or whatever. I think you have to be kind of opportunistic and flexible. I think if you decide, "I am going to be a full-time literary translator and I'm only going to translate great poetry by this one poet I love for the rest of my life," you will go hungry really soon.
Mignon Fogarty: Starve.
Daniel Hahn: Exactly that.
Mignon Fogarty: When did Shakespeare start to be translated?
Daniel Hahn: Well, he was certainly translated relatively soon after he was writing. I don't think we know exactly when he was first translated. The earliest translation that we have surviving was 35-ish years after he died, early 1650s, and it's a sort of translation—they're all kind of adaptations of it—a sort of translation of "Taming of the Shrew." Called "The Mad Wedding," in Dutch.
There may be earlier things. Certainly he was being toured around Europe in English and in translation earlier, but that's the earliest one that we have. It's also a little bit blurry because there is something that some people consider a translation a bit earlier than that one, which is a version of "Titus Andronicus," which you could argue is an adaptation—like these are not hard lines. In my head, the "Titus Andronicus" thing is an adaptation and the "Taming of the Shrew" one is a translation, and so I consider that the first. But that's just in my head and that doesn't mean anything.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, in the main segment, we talked a lot about the words in the translation, but there are also all these cultural issues you raised that are so interesting. You know, you say, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Well, in some places, summer is way too hot and everyone hates it, so, you know, what are some of the other issues that the translators have to deal with that come up like that?
Daniel Hahn: Well, I thought that was a really nice one, partly because there are a couple of things going on. First of all, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate." I mentioned this to a Japanese friend and she said, "In Tokyo, everyone hates summer. It's horrible." And there are translations I found into Arabic and into Bengali where the first line is basically, "Shall I compare thee to a day of spring?" Which is really nice, because actually in most places where Bengali and Arabic are spoken, summer is hotter than you would want it.
But there is also an issue—the next line of that sonnet, Sonnet 18, is, "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May." And we have a problem there too, because things bud in May only in the Northern Hemisphere. Like things bud in, you know, we get buds of May in Stratford-upon-Avon and London and other places in the Northern Hemisphere, but actually that's nonsense in lots of places. So I talked to a—I was in Aotearoa New Zealand a couple of years ago and talked to a Māori woman who is translating bits of Shakespeare into Te Reo Māori. And she had to figure out like, "Am I going to translate that as rough winds do shake the darling buds of November?" Which, I don't know what that rhymes with, God knows, we'll have to work out that separately.
There's almost like a philosophical question. It's like to what extent am I repositioning the sonnet or this play or whatever it is in the place where the audience is or the readers are? Or am I just going to say to the audience and the readers, for the next 2.5 hours, we're going to be in Verona, which is in Italy? We could decide that Verona is in, you know, Santiago, but in this version, Verona is going to continue to be in Italy and it will have Italian cultural references and flowers will bud in April and May, and you're just going to have to accept that even though that is not the time of year that flowers bud in Santiago.
You can also do something which is what Te Haumihiata Mason ended up doing, the Māori translator with that Shakespeare sonnet, which is blur it a little bit, and she refers to the first buds of spring rather than the buds of May, which means you're not specifically positioning it in the Southern Hemisphere with her readers, but you're also not giving them that extra kind of confusion.
Mignon Fogarty: One thing that really surprised me is that sometimes the translators will change the name of a character.
Daniel Hahn: Yes, you often have to do that because names like any other words have lots of different properties, which are not just that they're names, but they also have sounds and they also suggest other things. One of the examples, there's an amazing Hungarian translator I talked to called Ádám Nádasdy, who was translating "Henry IV, Part 1." And the prince in that play is Prince Henry, is referred to as Hal normally. But Hal, unfortunately, is the Hungarian word for fish. And that is not a deliberate joke because Shakespeare, as far as we know, didn't know any Hungarian. That is an accidental bit of interference.
And so Ádám needed to figure out how to rename this character so that the audience wouldn't keep hearing—it's also, he said, a very difficult word for Hungarians to say because there aren't kind of hard consonants to get your teeth into. So he wanted to figure out what he could call Hal in this play that wasn't going to create this interference for his audience. But he also can't completely change the name because this is an actual person, this is Prince, you know, Henry IV's son, who's going to go on to become Henry V.
And so he does a very clever thing. He has Falstaff, the other character, refer to the prince as Ricky. But Ricky is not short for Richard. Ricky is short for Henrik. So Henrik, which is Henry, becomes Ricky. So he is Henrik formally and Ricky informally, rather than Hal, which would make Hungarian people think of fish.
Mignon Fogarty: Any added emphasis so that the audience would sort of get the connection.
Daniel Hahn: Exactly. So the first time the name appears in that scene in Act 1, Scene 2, Falstaff says, "Ricky, Henrik," there's something like that. So you know exactly—so the audience can kind of position themselves and they know what we're talking about.
Mignon Fogarty: And you pointed out that Shakespeare took liberties too, like sometimes he was domesticating things so that he wasn't always true to, like he didn't use Greek names for characters in Athens, for example.
Daniel Hahn: Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny because I think we forget that, you know, when we go, "Oh my god, I can't believe a translator is changing this and giving these people Italian names or French currencies or whatever," of course Shakespeare is doing that all the time. So "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is set in Athens. But is it really Athens? Like it's Athens in some respects, there are some cultural things and place names, like names and also things, there are some things that are Athens and some characters. But also there are people who are quite clearly English workers, tradespeople, who say things like, "he would have got sixpence a day," and sixpence is not an ancient Athenian currency.
So Shakespeare is creating a sort of pretend Athens that is also recognizable to a groundling audience in London, you know, an audience standing at the Globe in London in the 1590s, 1600s. And it's all a little bit sleight of hand. I don't think you're supposed to stop and think and notice. But there's no sense in which you have to be absolutely pure about the culture you're presenting because what we're doing is creating dramatic effect, we're not creating a documentary about the life of Theseus.
Mignon Fogarty: I love a good thou joke.
Daniel Hahn: Yeah. I mean, I think any—and he draws attention to it all the time, right? There's a lot of that. And that's a thing that will work better in some respects in translation than it will for a contemporary English audience who won't be completely attuned to the difference between you and thou. And Shakespeare can do those things, could do those things 400 years ago. What he can't do quite so easily is modulate the tone of a conversation with the first person pronouns.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, the book is called "If This Be Magic" by Daniel Hahn. It's fabulous. I think you should all read it. I think you'll love it. Daniel, thank you so much for being here.
Daniel Hahn: Thank you. Great talking to you.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And then after you're done reading Daniel's book, we need your book recommendations, because we need to know what to read next that you would recommend.
Daniel Hahn: Sure. This is really difficult. It took a while. So I'm going to suggest three things. A novel called "Tomb of Sand," which won the International Booker Prize three years ago. It's by an Indian writer called Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell. And it is kind of off-puttingly huge, but it is such a pleasure to read and it's such a kind of enjoyable read that the fact that it's quite long shouldn't put people off. A story about an old woman in Northern India whose husband dies and she has a kind of new lease of life. Great novel.
There's a collection of short stories by a Brazilian writer called Geovani Martins called "The Sun on My Head," translated by Julia Sanches. And this is a very slim book, a very small short story collection, set in favelas in Rio, and it's incredibly dynamic and energetic, and the translation is amazing. It's one of those books where you really feel the relish of the translator in what she can do with language. Julia Sanches is a great translator. Padma Viswanathan and I have just been putting together the Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories, so we were just re-reading this collection, and so I am reminded of how brilliant it is.
And the third one is a book that everyone will know, which is "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak. And I mention that partly, even though everyone knows it, I think despite the fact that everyone knows it, I don't think many adults read it for themselves. I'm recommending this as an adult book, by the way. Everyone's read it to kids, but I think adults should read it after the kids have gone to bed, read it to themselves anyway, because I think it's, in addition to being amazing storytelling and the pictures and everything, I think as a book that in a few hundred words does how parenting works and how love is expressed and sort of how we deal with emotions and child development and the quality of the writing, the prose and the rhyme and stuff, there's so much going on. So, it's very nice that the children have it, but I recommend "Where the Wild Things Are" to adults.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. Well, thank you so much again, Daniel Hahn. Thank you for being here.
Daniel Hahn: Thank you. Great talking to you.