1193. Today, we talk to award-winning translator Daniel Hahn, author of "If This Be Magic," about what it really takes to translate Shakespeare, starting with the philosophical paradox at the heart of all translation: changing every single word while changing nothing at all. We look at the special challenges Shakespeare poses, including preserving rhyme and meter in languages that work completely differently.
1193. Today, we talk to award-winning translator Daniel Hahn, author of "If This Be Magic," about what it really takes to translate Shakespeare, starting with the philosophical paradox at the heart of all translation: changing every single word while changing nothing at all. We look at the special challenges Shakespeare poses, including preserving rhyme and meter in languages that work completely differently.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with award-winning translator Daniel Hahn. He is also the former chair of the British Translators Association and, important for us today, the author of "If This Be Magic," a fabulous new book about translating Shakespeare. Daniel, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Daniel Hahn: Thanks so much, Mignon. Really pleased to be with you.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, well, your book made me realize there is this big philosophical problem that underlies all translation, which is that, even if not Shakespeare, but like, you're changing all the words. And what is philosophically, like how are you experiencing a writer's work if you're not reading their actual words, especially given that Shakespeare is known so much for his elegant use of language and his wordplay?
Daniel Hahn: It's such an interesting one. And as you say, it kind of is at the heart of everything that we translators do. The challenge for a translator is to figure out how to change absolutely nothing about a piece of writing we're working on—preserve absolutely all of it, except all the words are changing. And so we want to keep, not just the meaning, we want to keep the register and the rhythms if we can, and the cadences and the tonal things, and all—I mean like everything that is happening in a piece of writing—but doing it, in the case of a novel, with 80,000 entirely transplanted words.
And that's both the challenge and I think the pleasure of translation. When you're dealing with someone like Shakespeare, who obviously is—this is not a very original thought, but Shakespeare who is very good, this is my massive original contribution to Shakespeare scholarship, as someone who's really good and therefore who is using language in a really precise way, in a really detailed way, that only increases what the job of the translator is, not just to work out what does Shakespeare mean and say it again in Danish or Dutch or Polish, but work out what are all of the tiny little things that are happening in a piece of writing, if the writer you're talking about is someone who really puts pressure on language, you know, really uses all of the things that English allows him to do, and then figure out how to replace the 25,000 or 30,000 words in "Hamlet" with 30,000 words in Swahili or Italian that are doing exactly the same thing. It's sort of—the paradox is we know it's impossible. We do it anyway, but we know that it is, in fact, impossible because languages are not interchangeable.
Mignon Fogarty: Right. How long does it take to translate a novel?
Daniel Hahn: It varies hugely. I mean, I work quite quickly. I translate, I don't know, four or five novels a year, in addition to doing other bits of work. But I think every translator works at a different pace, but every novel demands different things. There are some novels that, in my experience—I translate from three Western European languages mostly, Portuguese and Spanish, and a bit of French—and some writers kind of flow quite easily into English. There's something about the way in which the writers express themselves that work into English. And then there are some writers for whom I will just be staring at a sentence and dismantling it and, you know, reassembling it.
And bear in mind that, you know, I'm working with languages that are fairly close to English. If I were working with Turkish or almost any non-European language, this would be much more difficult. But I also have a slightly odd way of working, that I do a really really quick first draft, really bad first draft, for which I'll do, I don't know, 4,000 or 5,000 words a day. But then all of the work is revising and revising and revising, and trying to make something that has its own coherence and its own voice and that sort of works in English. So I'm not answering your question about how long it takes because I don't know the answer to that, but "it depends," is the answer.
Mignon Fogarty: Actually, the way you describe it, it sounds a lot like what I've heard it's like to write a novel from scratch. You know, it's different for different people, and you do the ugly first draft that a lot of writers do.
Daniel Hahn: Yeah, and I think people find their own way of doing it, and absolutely it is like—it is like writing, that there are moments where it feels like it sort of has a life of its own and it comes quickly. And there are moments where you just have to kind of sit down in front of it and figuratively or literally weep into your laptop until this thing does what you want it to do. So it's variable.
I will say, however, that having done, you know, translated close to 100 books, I'm still unable to judge how long things will take, and I'm still constantly being approached by publishers and I say yes, three months, and then we get to the end of the three months and I'm thinking, "How on earth did I think this was going to be a three-month job rather than a one-month job or a six-month job?" So I have no idea. I continue to have no idea even after all these years, is my answer really.
Mignon Fogarty: And so what are the big decisions you have to make before you begin versus sort of the smaller decisions you have to make along the way?
Daniel Hahn: So it depends on the things you're translating. I tend to translate novels more than anything else, and I often make no decisions at all. To the extent that I will often start translating a book without having read it. I will discover the book in the first draft. I will read it in the first draft.
I think it's different if you're working with something like Shakespeare. So for my book, I interviewed a lot of translators, people who have themselves translated Shakespeare, which I have not done. And they often talked about a sort of policy decisions, if you like, that they had to make up front because there are formal issues. If you're doing Shakespeare, you have to decide up front, am I going to replicate the verse as verse? Am I going to use iambic pentameter as he does? Am I going to use a different form? Am I going to keep this formal property or that formal property? Then, of course, it comes down to the really small details. But there are often these sort of, yeah, I think of them as sort of policy decisions. I can't start a translation of Shakespeare, they will say, until I know what I'm going to be doing with the verse. Am I going to be trying to preserve the rhyme? Am I going to be replacing his iambic pentameter with my Alexandrine or whatever it is? For me it's different because I'm translating mostly prose fiction and things like it, and so I don't really have to decide anything usually.
Mignon Fogarty: And for Shakespeare, it's weird to think of it not being in rhyme.
Daniel Hahn: It is, and it's—but it's a thing that is funny that Shakespeare does things that he does because English allows them, or English encourages them. English is a language in which it is possible to rhyme. English is a stress-timed language, so he can do things like iambic pentameter. French is not a stress-timed language. You just have to think differently. Japanese is not a language that uses rhyme very much.
So you have as a translator to think about, yes, Shakespeare does these things, but he does these things because English does these things. And so what is the thing that I can do in my language that will allow me to create the effect that he's creating, maybe, but using a completely different set of tools? You know, he jumps between Germanic Anglo-Saxon words and Latinate words, as we do in English, but only because English happens to be made principally of those two strands. Those are the kind of two etymologies of English. If you're translating into Turkish, which does not have those two strands, you have to think differently. So yes, on the one hand you think, "Well, how can you not do these things that Shakespeare does?" But he's only doing them because English happens to do them, and all these languages that happen to do other things, that's what you have to do.
Mignon Fogarty: And you talked about how French it would be sort of bad or overwhelming if you tried to rhyme so much. It wouldn't feel natural.
Daniel Hahn: Well, I think so. The French translator I talked to, Jean-Michel Déprats, who's done about 30-ish of the Shakespeare plays into French, he said that there is a risk of, you know, if you try always to rhyme where Shakespeare rhymes—because French also rhymes, lots of French poetry rhymes—but if you try to rhyme absolutely in every instance where Shakespeare rhymes, there is a risk of making it feel forced and making it feel, I think his phrase was, "make Shakespeare into a talented versifier rather than the brilliant poet and other things that he is." But again, because Shakespeare is taking advantage of the fact that certain things happen to rhyme in English, if you try to make them rhyme in another language, you might end up with something which is more forced and more conspicuous.
There's an example I use in the book, which is I guess an obvious one, the last speech in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" begins, "If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended." And Shakespeare rhymes "offended" and "mended," which are the kind of—there's a reason those are the two words that are rhyming. They kind of match each other in the meaning. Those probably aren't going to be the words that rhyme in your language, and so you have to decide, am I going to change the rhyme? Am I going to maybe drop the rhyme here because I would really have to force it and it would be more conspicuous than it is in English? So you have a number of choices, but it will rarely be a matter of just, "I'm just going to keep everything he does," because he does those things because English happens to do those things and Turkish or Tamil or whichever language will have entirely different properties.
Mignon Fogarty: You told a funny story about, there's a play where the rhyme is meant to be bad. And so then you, in a way, would have to proverb that, preserve that or the sense of that in some other way to show sort of how ridiculous the players are.
Daniel Hahn: Right. So there are a few places. So one, one of the examples I think is that there's a moment in "As You Like It," where Orlando, who's in love with Rosalind, is writing little love poems to her and pinning them to the tree. And they-- Each of them is a couplet that rhymes with her name. "Sweet as nut hath sourest rind, such a nut as Rosalind," something, "Winter garments must be lined." And there are lots of poems that he has written that are quite forced, and there are also another character who mocks him by creating kind of parodies of his poems, who kind of teases him. But obviously we know because the second character, Jaques, comes in and creates these kind of parodies of, you know, "Winter garments must be lined." We know that we're not supposed to look at this and go, "Gosh, Orlando's such a great poet." And it does sort of go on and on and on, and you do kind of keep thinking like, "Surely you're not gonna try and find yet another word that you're gonna kind of twist to, to rhyme with Rosalind's name." But then I would argue that if you're doing-- If you're translating that into another language and you're suddenly making Orlando into a brilliant poet, that probably is not the best translation because the effect is supposed to be, you know, someone comes in and sees Orlando's poems and goes, "Oh my God, this is so terrible. This is so embarrassing." And he kind of, you know, wants to tease him. So yes, those things are different. And there are a couple of other examples in Shakespeare, but the, the places where the rhyme, you know, in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Pyramus and Thisbe, the play that the mechanicals do at the end is full of quite forced rhyme and kind of... It's full of bad writing. And it's very deliberately bad writing. It's supposed to be a bad play. And the translation would then need to continue to be bad writing, ideally in the same way, with bad rhymes and too much alliteration and weirdly heightened language. And that is offset against the bit where Shakespeare is writing good writing, which he does quite a lot, and where you want every rhyme to be, to feel, you know, not predictable, but sort of inevitable, perfect.
Mignon Fogarty: So how have you seen translators handle it when the rhyme doesn't work in their language? How do they compensate?
Daniel Hahn: So there are different things you can do. In some cases, what they've done is they've kept rhyme, but done it to a slightly little-- a slightly less degree. So just for example, there's a Japanese translator, Shojiro Kawai, whom I interviewed, who was basically translating Shakespeare plays without keeping any of the rhymes. And then he got to this point in "Midsummer Night's Dream" where the lovers are all kind of playing around in the forest, and Helena thinks that she's being teased, and the whole scene has been in rhyme, and suddenly it goes into not rhyme. And this is the moment when there is a kind of change of mood. I think of it as being like going from a major key to a minor key. Suddenly, there's, you know, there's like a bit of a chill, and it moves from rhyming to not rhyming when Helena thinks, "Even my best friend is now trying to play this trick on me." And this was the point at which the translator said, "Well, I can't not have any rhyme at all because I need rhyme in order to stop rhyming. I need rhyme in order to have something to compare the non-rhyming bits with." At which point he went back to his very first translation of "Hamlet" and kind of reinstated all of the rhymes. But because rhyming is much less common in Japanese, and therefore feels a bit more heavy-handed and more conspicuous, there is much less of it. So he doesn't have rhyme in every place, but he has some rhyme where he needs it and, and slightly less. But there are other things that you can do to do with sound, to do with, you know, echoing sound. There are ways of conveying rhyme in sign languages, which are not the same way we think of rhyme, but which are kind of with sort of echoed movement. So there are things that you can do to give a sense of harmony, to connect words to each other, to give a sense of closure, which won't always be, "Give me your hand if we be friends, and Robin shall restore romance." Full stop, end of scene, play closes, you know?
Mignon Fogarty: There's some really interesting things going on with the words. You know, for example, you point out that, you know, in English we can say we love our friends and we love pizza. Like, we use love so expansively in English, and other languages use it in so many different ways, and, and the translators, when they pick the word, they're be- forced to make interpretations
Daniel Hahn: That's right. And I think in a way, you can see the benefit of both. So English can be flexible and other languages can be precise in the case of this particular word, and it vice versa with other words. In the case of a Shakespeare play where a character talks about, "My love to you," they don't always need to testify precisely. They can. They can-- There are other words they could use in English, but they don't need to testify precisely to what the nature of that love is. There are ways of doing it with, with other words if they wanted to. Other languages can be much more precise, but it's also to do with... I mean, love is a really interesting one because in English it's a verb, but it's also a noun. It's a word that we attach to other things. You know, we can use it to modify other nouns. And so there is a kind of flexibility that comes with that word, which isn't just to do with meaning. Yes, I love pizza and ice cream and my friends and family. It's also to do with the way the word fits into the linguistic structures, which you can't do in lots of other, in lots of other languages. If you say... I think I give the example of, you know, half a dozen lines in "Two Gentlemen of Verona" in which the word love appears, and in Spanish translations they're all different. They're related. Even if you don't think about the meaning as different, one of them is amor, which is the noun. One is amar, which is the infinitive. One is ama, which is the third person singular. Yes, third person singular. You're testing my memory now. And so English happens to be able to make certain connections. There's a line in "Richard III" where he talks about, "I for thy love did kill thy love," meaning for thy love the thing-- in order to win your love, did kill thy love, meaning the person whom you loved. In English, those happen to be the same word, and so Richard III, who likes showing off, can do a little play on that, "I for thy love did kill thy love," but only because the word happens to have these particular properties. It means what it means, but also it functions in different ways depending on where you put it in a sentence.
Mignon Fogarty: I'm sitting here thinking about puns and ambiguity and, you know, hidden meanings, like what do you find to be the hardest part when you're trying to translate? What do you stumble on most often?
Daniel Hahn: I think ambiguity. For me, it's always the most difficult thing. In a way, a pun is a thing like—you can—humor is difficult and, you know, jokes are difficult, but you can sort of dismantle them and build a new one. You know, you need to make a joke work and it's not going to work, and you take it apart, use the similar moving parts and you build a new joke.
Ambiguity is difficult because if you imagine, you know, if you think about any word in any other language you know, there will be an English equivalent to it in terms of the really basic meaning of it usually. The likelihood of there being an English equivalent that means two really particular things—so an example I came across in a novel not that long ago, the Spanish word muñeca, which means wrist, the thing connecting your hand to your arm, and it also means doll. Now we have the word "doll," for muñeca, and we have the word "wrist" for muñeca. We do not have one word that does double duty for both of those things. And so something where you're trying to find, you know, because ambiguity is always going to be to do with a kind of concision as well. The point is that we can within a single word convey two or more different things, which is to do with how individual words work.
But sometimes it's also to do with how the language functions. It's possible in Spanish to use a verb without a pronoun, so you don't have to specify he said or she said. You can use the word "said" in a way that we can't in English. And if a writer is doing that deliberately, if a writer is starting a scene with someone saying something with that verb "said," dijo, in English it's really hard to get around—I have the option of he said, I have the option of she said, I don't have the option of just saying "said" without assigning it to a person. So for me, ambiguity in a way that is controlled and deliberate is always the most difficult thing to translate. It's the thing I complain about all the time. And I find myself writing to the writers I'm translating and saying, which one of these two things do you mean? And they then write back trying to be helpful and say, "Oh no, it's both."
Mignon Fogarty: It's nice with a living writer that you can ask.
Daniel Hahn: It is often nice. And actually, one of the things that's really nice about that is I feel like I can get permission. I've translated fewer dead writers, but I feel like in a way I'm—and this might seem paradoxical—in a way I'm more cautious with the dead writers because with the living ones I can write and say, listen, this joke isn't going to work, but English gives me the possibility of building this completely different joke, how do you feel about that? Like it doesn't—it's not the same as the original, but it's funny and, you know, you're going to laugh in a way that you get a laugh in Portuguese or whatever. And so weirdly the living authors I ask them information and ask them explanations, but I also ask for permission quite a lot, which is harder to do with Shakespeare, who is not on WhatsApp, as far as I'm aware.
Mignon Fogarty: Right, and you know, you talk about getting a laugh for Shakespeare. Does it matter how you translate it that it's really meant to be seen on the stage, that it's a play? Does that change things?
Daniel Hahn: I think it's incredibly important. I think every translator I talked to, every Shakespeare translator I talked to, even if they were sort of notionally translating for a published edition, they were thinking about the plays, the scripts as a sort of like a score to be performed. So they were thinking about what things would sound like, they were thinking about what would work for an actor, you know, to come out of an actor's mouth. And they're thinking about what is the effect then on the audience. Jokes are not there just to combine units of information in a certain sequence. Jokes are there to make an audience laugh. And so you have to be thinking about often the effect of something, you have to be thinking about what it does as much as or sometimes more than what it means.
Meaning is like one of the things we think about in translation, of course, but it's not the only thing, and often what is the effect this thing has, what does it make an actor do? How does it make an actor breathe, how does it make an actor move? And does it make an audience laugh, does it make an audience cry, does it surprise an audience, does it change the rhythm, you know? These things are not done just as literary flourishes on the page, they're done because we're all going to be in a room on Thursday night and someone is going to speak these things and the audience is going to laugh.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, and you talk about English being almost a canon of monosyllables sometimes, the word "havoc" when the actor shouts out "havoc," that can be hard to do in other languages that are more multisyllabic.
Daniel Hahn: Right. So that I really like that example. I talked to a Brazilian translator called Chico Buarque, who was translating "Julius Caesar." And there's that line, "Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war." And Chico was figuring out what to do with that line, he watched the Marlon Brando movie and Brando kind of shouts that word, cry havoc, it's a kind of battle cry. And Chico went, "Right, this is a battle cry. I have to give the actor something he can shout to, you know, get his troops excited."
But when he was thinking about the meaning of havoc, like the first word that came to him was devastação, which is a four-syllable word with the stress on the last syllable. And as Chico said it, like your soldiers aren't going to wait for you to shout that. Like a four-syllable word with a stress on the last syllable, that's way too long to be a kind of punchy battle cry. And so he decided that, you know, precise meaning is not the most important thing here. He has his character shout matança, which is only three syllables and the stress is on the second syllable. And so it's a much punchier thing for someone to be shouting. It means something slightly different. It means killing, so it would be like "cry 'Slaughter!' and let slip the dogs of war," which would also be quite a good line, I think.
But he's making a determination of priority. The precise, you know, the semantic, the absolutely precise semantic meaning is less important than giving an actor something that is shoutable. And again, Shakespeare used the word havoc because English happens to have the word havoc, which happens to be a two-syllable word, happens to be stressed on the first syllable, and therefore happens to fit into this metrical line that he has built. In Portuguese you build something different, so in Brazil, in a production of "Julius Caesar," the as it were Marlon Brando equivalent will shout the word matança.
Mignon Fogarty: Another thing you talked about is dialects. So Shakespeare will present actors with different accents or using different dialects that, you know, his audience would have known, even sometimes using eye dialect, the spelling the words to be pronounced in a dialect kind of way. How do translators handle that in another language?
Daniel Hahn: It depends to some extent on what the language pair is. So I'll give you an example from "The Merry Wives of Windsor." Everyone speaks English, but at least one of the characters is French-accented, one of the characters is Welsh-accented. And it's written, there are little phonetic clues in the way their parts are written, so that the actors reading the play in English will know that they are supposed to do this in a French accent or a Welsh accent, and the audiences will immediately identify this character is French and this character is Welsh.
When Niels Brunse translated the play into Danish, he had to figure out how you create a French-accented Danish and a Welsh-accented Danish. French-accented Danish, he said, was quite easy because a lot of people in Denmark have heard the French accent. They had a crown prince, I think at one point maybe. Was it a crown prince? Anyway, they had someone in the royal family was French and so they'd heard a lot of, you know, French-accented Danish. And so it was quite easy to put little markers into his spelling to make it clear for the actor playing the French part in Denmark—it's very complicated, obviously a French-accented person and the audience picked it up.
It's much more difficult with Welsh because in England we share a border with Wales, it's part of the same country, and we all know Welsh speakers, we all hear Welsh accents. I'm not sure whether every Danish person would immediately be able to identify Welsh-accented Danish on the page. I'm not sure whether every person in Korea would know what Welsh-accented Korean would look like on the page. And you're in a bit of trouble as a translator because you have a number of options, all of which are slightly unsatisfactory. One, you know, Niels tried at one point to put like—to maybe you make the Welsh character make him Norwegian. Like maybe the Danish-Norwegian relationship can replicate the English-Welsh relationship. But then he said, the audiences were all thinking like, "Why is there suddenly a Norwegian pastor wandering around Elizabethan Windsor?" This seems like a peculiar thing. These sort of equivalents are things that translators try and never seem quite to work.
But it depends on the language, it depends on what sort of awareness the new culture might have of this language that is coming in. And it's made worse also because Shakespeare doesn't just use accents, he uses other languages in his plays. So you have characters actually speaking French in things like "Henry V." In "Julius Caesar," his last words, "Julius Caesar" himself, his last words are in Latin, Et tu, Brute? But when you're translating "Henry V" into French or translating "Julius Caesar" into Latin, which somebody did, believe it or not, you then have to figure out how you're going to mark Latin words in a text that is now all Latin or French words in a text that is now all French. And so you're thinking about the sort of particular like the frictions at those points, I suppose.
Mignon Fogarty: How did they do it?
Daniel Hahn: The Latin one was really smart. So this is a guy called Henry Denison, who in 1856 I feel this begins to explain a lot. In 1856, he produced an entire Latin translation of "Julius Caesar." And he has Caesar use the words when he is stabbed, everyone is talking Latin to each other, completely normal, and then Caesar is stabbed and he says, Kai su, teknon?, which is Greek, and is ancient Greek and it means, "and you too, and you boy" or "and you child," which I think is clever for two reasons. One of them is in various tellings, like early tellings of the story of the murder of Julius Caesar, actually those were the words that he is given, he is not given Latin words, he's given that phrase in Greek, Kai su, teknon?, which the audience may or may not understand, the other speakers, the other characters may or may not understand.
But the other thing that I think that I really love about that is shortly before this scene in the play, there is a conversation about did you meet Cicero on the road? Yes, I talked to him. What did he say? To which the answer is, "I didn't understand a word he said, it was Greek to me." So first of all, we have that very familiar the thing that we still use, the idiom we still use, "it was Greek to me." But that is then setting up Julius Caesar actually having these three little Greek words as his dying words.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. I have to confess that when I had to read Shakespeare in, you know, junior high, I really struggled with it. It was very hard for me to understand. And you point out that people reading Shakespeare in translation, in some ways it's easier for them. We have the 400-year-old version, it's harder for us in many ways to read Shakespeare in the original English than it is for people who get it in translation. I mean do you consider the modernized versions of Shakespeare, do you consider those to be translations or are they something else?
Daniel Hahn: I think they could be. I mean I think you're absolutely right. I think we have this funny situation where if you watch Shakespeare in the theater in Paris, you will be watching a translation, usually a translation that is relatively new. Occasionally they use older ones, but usually it's something that's been done in the last few years, and that doesn't mean it's kind of anachronistic, but it means that a bit of the kind of fuzziness that is between us and our 400-year-old playwright has disappeared, and things rhyme in French as they would have rhymed, and just as a really quick example, when Juliet comes out onto the balcony and says, "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" Like even if we know that wherefore means why, it's not a word that—I don't maybe you use the word wherefore, I don't use the word wherefore, but it means that there is a little gap and there's a little bit of work we have to do, even if we know.
If you go and see Shakespeare, if you go and see Romeo and Juliet in Spanish, she comes out on the balcony and says, ¿Por qué? And if she comes out on the balcony in French, she says, Pourquoi? There is that little, it's brought slightly closer to the audience. And so it is in some ways easier. The thing, the jokes that don't really work for us anymore, certain kinds of cultural jokes or wordplay that don't work for us anymore, will work again if they are remade in a new language.
The issue I have with a lot of the kind of updatings of Shakespeare, I don't object in principle, I do often object in practice because what I find is often happening is that you're being given essentially a translation of the meaning, which I don't think is adequate to what he is doing. I think, you know, if you get a sort of "Shakespeare Made Easy" or "Shakespeare for Dummies" or whatever these various options, they might be useful in conveying what the really basic semantic stuff, like what does this mean?
But I don't think they are interested, on the whole, in all of the many dimensions in which Shakespeare is working, like why is this line that normally doesn't have a stressed syllable at the beginning, why does this line have a stressed syllable at the beginning? And for something to be a translation, because I am demanding of what translation is, I expect a translator not to be interested only in the traffic of meaning. So something that is elucidating meaning is a useful simplification maybe. It's taking one dimension of Shakespeare. But if you're only interested in meaning, I mean there are also easier ways of telling the story of Romeo and Juliet because it's on Wikipedia if you want it, you know, you can read it summary.
I think if you're a literary translator, particularly of someone like Shakespeare, you should be interested in detail. And there is a difference, I think there's a big difference between "To be, or not to be, that is the question," and "Being or not being, that is the question." I think those two things are different in English. As a translator, I would translate them differently. And one of them, yes, is sort of a maybe simplified, I don't know, modernized form of the other, I'm not quite sure. So I think there is a use in some cases, but I sort of don't think of them as translations because I want translation to work on more than one dimension.
Mignon Fogarty: Earlier you talked about Shakespeare using havoc because he had it available to him and it was a good word for the situation, and you said in the book, now we have "cap" which has, you know, a different meaning and maybe can be paired with the Capulets.
Daniel Hahn: Yes, exactly. I saw a really great sort of South London hip-hop Romeo and Juliet which changed a lot of the language but did it in a way that I thought was interesting and coherent and wasn't just simplifying it. It was like trying to find a coherent new language. It was translating into a really specific, particularly chosen English and had the line, you know, "I'm getting capped by a Capulet." But also translated, you know, "Do you bite your tongue at me, sir?" By translated it to, I think, "do you kiss your teeth at me, fam?" I think was the line, which it's not kind of simplifying something just in terms of what it mean. It's also figuring out a new language which happens to be South London hip-hop inflected, just as one might do it into Tamil or something.
I feel like I can't be a complete purist in the sense that I'm completely happy for someone to get rid of all 30,000 words and replace them with 30,000 Maori words or or Greek words, and so I can't be too precious about people changing things. But I think the aspiration of translation is quite a complex one.
Mignon Fogarty: It's a really revelatory book and a great read. I really enjoyed it. To finish up, why don’t you tell, where does the title come from, "If This Be Magic"?
Daniel Hahn: So the title is, it's a line from a play that I love, from "The Winter's Tale." And at the end of "The Winter's Tale," Leontes, who's the king, thinks that his wife has been dead for 16 years, as indeed we the audience do. And at the end of the play, the last act of the play, his queen's friend Paulina says to him, "I have a surprise for you. We have a statue of your queen downstairs in the basement, come and have a look." And we discover quite quickly that really the queen's been alive all along, Leontes is just being punished. And that she is going to pretend to be a statue. So Leontes walks in and sees what he thinks is a statue of his queen Hermione. And we work out before he does that it's really just Hermione pretending to be a statue, who's about to come back to life.
And he expects this thing to be a copy, but just a copy, something that is, you know, cold and dead and hard and doesn't have its own pulse, but resembles, you know, its outward appearance will resemble his queen. But then he touches it and it's warm and it has a pulse and it moves and it speaks. And he says, "If this be magic, let it be an art as lawful as eating."
I love the idea of sort of this metaphor, if you like, this thing that we assume is going to be just like a dead copy, it's just going to be a very superficial copy, but actually which has its own life and pulse and blood and muscle, just as the real Hermione does, and which I think is what we want from a translation. We don't want something that is an imitation of the other thing, we want something that is also alive. Leontes, it is not in fact magic as it turns out, this is a trick that is being played on him.
But that is true about translation as well. It is complicated, but it's also it's sleight of hand, it's trickery. You can work out how it's done. You can look at the moving parts. There is also I should say, this is a longer answer than you wanted, but there is also there was an amazing American literary translator called Gregory Rabassa, who translated "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and many other great things, and he wrote a book about translation called "If This Be Treason." So there is a little echo of Rabassa's book in the title. But it's "The Winter's Tale," and it's this sort of metaphor for a translation as a thing that is alive.
Mignon Fogarty: Delightful. Well, Daniel Hahn, again the book is "If This Be Magic." Thanks so much for being here today.
Daniel Hahn: Thanks. Great talking to you.