Shakespeare and the Language of Translation: Revised Edition 9781904271451, 9781408179741, 9781408179734, 9781408179710

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Series statement
Preface
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I: WORDS AND CULTURES
1 ‘If I know the letters and the language’: translation as a dramatic device in Shakespeare’s plays
2 Engendering anew: Shakespeare, gender and translation
3 ‘Our language of love’: Shakespeare in Japanese translation
4 Translating Shakespeare under Communism: Bulgaria and beyond
5 A mirror up to ‘human’ nature: the case of the Chinese translator Liang Shi Qiu
6 The feast and the scraps: translating Love’s Labour’s Lost into Portuguese
PART II: THE TRANSLATOR AT WORK
7 Translating Shakespeare’s stagecraft
8 Translating and copyright
9 The translator as editor: the Quartos of Hamlet
10 Think-along edition: the bilingual Studienausgabe of Shakespeare
11 Interpreting Shakespeare’s plays into British Sign Language
PART III: POST-COLONIAL TRANSLATION, TRADAPTATION AND ADAPTATION
12 Scots for Shakespeare
13 ‘A double tongue within your mask’: translating Shakespeare in/to Spanish-speaking Latin America
14 ‘Cette belle langue’: the ‘tradaptation’ of Shakespeare in Quebec
15 ‘I am the tusk of an elephant’ – Macbeth, Titus and Caesar in Johannesburg
PART IV: FURTHER READING
16 Shakespeare and translation: a guide to further reading
Abbreviations and references
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
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W
Y
Z

Citation preview

Shakespeare and the Language of Translation

v

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE

SHAKESPEARE AND LANGUAGE GENERAL EDITORS

Lynette Hunter, Lynne Magnusson and Ann Thompson Shakespeare, Language and the Stage: The Fifth Wall Lynette Hunter and Peter Lichtenfels (editors)

Shakespeare and the Language of Translation Revised edition

v Edited by Ton Hoenselaars

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This edition of Shakespeare and the Language of Translation published 2012 by the Arden Shakespeare Editorial matter and selection © Ton Hoenselaars, 2004 The general editors of the Arden Shakespeare have been W.J. Craig and R.H. Case (first series 1899–1944) Una Ellis-Fermor, Harold F. Brooks, Harold Jenkins and Brian Morris (second series 1946–82) Present general editors (third series) Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, David Scott Kastan and H.R. Woudhuysen All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-9042-7145-1 978-1-4081-7974-1 978-1-4081-7971-0 978-1-4081-7972-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Contents

Series statement Preface List of contributors Acknowledgements

vii ix xi xiii

Introduction Ton Hoenselaars

1

P A R T I : W O R D S A N D CU L T U R E S

1 ‘If I know the letters and the language’: translation as a dramatic device in Shakespeare’s plays Dirk Delabastita 2 Engendering anew: Shakespeare, gender and translation Susan Bassnett 3 ‘Our language of love’: Shakespeare in Japanese translation Tetsuo Kishi 4 Translating Shakespeare under Communism: Bulgaria and beyond Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova 5 A mirror up to ‘human’ nature: the case of the Chinese translator Liang Shi Qiu Shen Lin 6 The feast and the scraps: translating Love’s Labour’s Lost into Portuguese Rui Carvalho Homem

vvv

31 53 68

82 98 114

vi

Contents

PART II: THE TRANSLATOR AT WORK

7 Translating Shakespeare’s stagecraft Jean-Michel De´prats

133

8 Translating and copyright

148

Maik Hamburger

9 The translator as editor: the Quartos of Hamlet Alessandro Serpieri

167

10 Think-along edition: the bilingual Studienausgabe of Shakespeare Werner Bro¨nnimann

184

11 Interpreting Shakespeare’s plays into British Sign Language Peter Llewellyn-Jones

199

PART III: POST-COLONIAL TRANSLATION, TRADAPTATION AND ADAPTATION

12 Scots for Shakespeare J. Derrick McClure

217

13 ‘A double tongue within your mask’: translating Shakespeare in/to Spanish-speaking Latin America Alfredo Michel Modenessi

240

14 ‘Cette belle langue’: the ‘tradaptation’ of Shakespeare in Quebec Leanore Lieblein 15 ‘I am the tusk of an elephant’ – Macbeth, Titus and Caesar in Johannesburg Martin Orkin

255 270

PART IV: FURTHER READING

16 Shakespeare and translation: a guide to further reading Dirk Delabastita

289

Abbreviations and references Index

317 343

Shakespeare and Language Series Statement

Building on the Arden Shakespeare editions and, more specifically, Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language (2001), this series aims to provide focused studies of Shakespeare’s language in relation to particular contexts and methodologies in which it has yet to be fully explored. Individual volumes address topics such as the language of translation, theatre language, the language of film, language and society, language and history, and the language of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. A renewed investigation of Shakespeare’s achievements in relation to such topics is timely because the various materialist and historicist approaches of recent criticism have broadened our understanding of the range of cultural contexts pertinent to Shakespeare’s works but have largely neglected the details and artistry of the language. Without wishing to deny the important achievements of materialist and historicist criticism, this series aims to bridge the gap between Shakespeare’s language and its cultural contexts. It includes both single-authored and collaborative volumes, and authors are drawn from the international scholarly and theatre communities; some volumes involve an interdisciplinary approach, using, for example, methods from linguistics and film studies. The readership envisaged is similar to that for the Arden Shakespeare editions, ranging from those studying Shakespeare in their final years at secondary school through teachers, undergraduates and postgraduates, scholars, theatre practitioners and general readers with an interest in Shakespeare and/or language. v vii v

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Series statement

The aim of each volume is to illuminate how a specific context or approach opens up fresh perspectives on Shakespeare’s language in a way which is accessible and gives the reader a clearer understanding or a new way of thinking about the verbal achievement or impact of Shakespeare’s texts. The series aims to publish one volume per year – and the General Editors would be pleased to hear from people with appropriate proposals. Lynette Hunter, Lynne Magnusson and Ann Thompson General Editors

preface

Our twenty-first century world is becoming increasingly global. As part of this process, the English language seems to be developing more rapidly than ever, feverishly adapting itself to new media and modes of communication. This dynamic may be deceptive. The fascinating vigour with which the English language reinvents itself and expands, but also the scale on which this occurs, could create a false impression of hegemonic dominance. In terms of its number of native speakers English is only the third or fourth language in the world, after Chinese and Hindi and possibly Spanish, and there are still between six and seven thousand other languages in which people communicate on a daily basis. In numerous countries English, or one of its varieties, is not the official tongue, nor is it spoken fluently as a second language. Here, and even in cultures where English is used as a lingua franca, the language’s literary culture, including the work of Shakespeare, can only enter in translation. Although Shakespeare’s plays and poems have been translated into languages other than English for over 400 years – first on the European Continent and soon also further afield – there has long been a sense that the plays and poems were ‘lost’ in translation. This view is now slowly but surely making way for the conviction that to study Shakespeare in translation is just another way to find him. To be receptive to the reading and rewriting of Shakespeare by others, regardless of their nation or their language, boosts the dialogue between cultures whose several identities it is considered vital to acknowledge, and whose interaction, it is believed, whether it be confirmatory or contestatory, can only yield a mutual profit of understanding. v ix v

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Preface

This philosophy underlies the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival in England, which has the Royal Shakespeare Company, together with the British Museum, the National Theatre, the British Council and Tate Modern – in a Cultural Olympiad that complements the London Olympics – exploring the influence of Shakespeare in classrooms and rehearsal rooms across the world. It also informs the programme at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (London) with all 37 plays by Shakespeare performed in a different language, all uniquely flanked by an educational agenda that focuses on ‘Shakespeare Found in Translation.’ Significantly, the major stages in England are reaching out for Shakespeare in an idiom other than English, speaking to them from beyond the proverbial language barrier. For over a decade now they have clearly been seeking to explore and develop new modes of communication through Shakespeare, in terms of sound, image, gesture and reference, to achieve new levels of intercultural understanding. And this burst of activity in 2012 will surely be a preliminary to even more worldwide celebrations in 2016, the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, with its full-scale reappraisal of the poems’ and plays’ multilingual heritage. Translation often takes place invisibly and is therefore easily taken for granted but this does not make it a simple activity to undertake, or to research for that matter. The translation of Shakespeare is an art in itself, and our study of those translations is a serious and demanding interdisciplinary field with challenges all its own. The essays in this collection, written by Shakespearean translators, theatre makers and scholars, introduce an area of interest with a complex history and – as Dirk Delabastita’s state of the art ‘Guide to Further Reading’ here reveals – a highly dynamic present. If the current signs in the theatre world are anything to go by, it is bound also to have a splendid future. Naturally, in order successfully to reap the multiple unimagined benefits of Shakespeare in translation, it is fair to remember that what drives both the translator and the student of translation is not just his or her interest in a single language, Shakespeare’s, but a fascination with two or even more languages as they generate vital creative exchanges between them. Let us not, not knowing other languages, make ourselves believe that they, therefore, do not exist. Ton Hoenselaars

contributors

Susan Bassnett, Professor of Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK Werner Brönnimann, Titular Professor of English Literature, Universities of St Gallen and Basel, Switzerland Dirk Delabastita, Professor of English and general literature at the University of Namur, Belgium Jean-Michel Déprats, Senior Lecturer, Department of AngloAmerican Studies, University of Nanterre (Paris X), France Maik Hamburger, retired, formerly Dramaturg at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin, Germany Ton Hoenselaars, Professor of English Literature, English Department, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Rui Carvalho Homem, Professor of English Literature, Department of Anglo-American Studies, University of Oporto, Portugal Tetsuo Kishi, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, Kyoto University, Japan Leanore Lieblein, Associate Professor of English, McGill University, Montreal, Canada Shen Lin, Director of the Institute for Studies in Theatre Art, The Central Academy of Drama, Beijing, China v xi v

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Contributors

Peter Llewellyn-Jones, Director of Learning Programmes, Sign Language International, and Course Leader at University of Central Lancashire J. Derrick McClure, Senior Lecturer, English Department, School of English & Film Studies, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland Alfredo Michel Modenessi, Professor of English Literature, Comparative Studies and Translation, Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico, Mexico Martin Orkin, Professor Haver and Head, Department of Theatre, University of Haifa, Israel Alessandro Serpieri, Professor of English Literature, University of Florence, Italy Alexander Shurbanov, Professor of English Literature, University of Sofia, Bulgaria Boika Sokolova, Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, School of English and Humanities, University of London, UK

acknowledgements

Preparing this collection of essays, I have enjoyed the generous support of many colleagues and friends worldwide. They include Matthijs Bakker (Utrecht University), David Bellwood (Shakespeare’s Globe, London), Timothy Billings (Middlebury College, Vermont), Liz Oakley-Brown (Lancaster University, UK), Michael Dobson (The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK), Gabriel Egan (Shakespeare’s Globe, London), Keir Elam (University of Bologna), Lukas Erne (University of Geneva), Paul Franssen (Utrecht University), Jim Harner (Texas A&M University), Lisa Hippins (Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival), Peter Holland (University of Notre Dame), Alexander Huang (George Washington University, Washington, D.C.), Russell Jackson (The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK), John Joughin (University of Central Lancaster, UK), Cees Koster (Utrecht University), Priscilla J. Lorimer (Pitlochry, Scotland), Ann Mills-Baker (University of Amsterdam), Ton Naaijkens (Utrecht University), Michael Neill (University of Auckland, New Zealand), J. Roberto O’Shea (University of Florianópolis, Brazil), A. Luis Pujante (University of Murcia), David Purves (Edinburgh), Carol Rutter (Warwick University), Jim Shaw (Shakespeare Institute Library), and Kristine Steenbergh (Utrecht University). Particularly helpful and supportive have been the participants to the translation seminar at the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-upon-Avon (August 2000), as well as the members of the seminar at the frosty but fruitful congress of the v xiii v

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Acknowledgements

Shakespeare Association of America in Minneapolis (March 2002). I also owe a special debt of thanks to Dirk Delabastita (University of Namur, Belgium) without whose encouragement and expertise this book would have looked rather different. Finally, I wish to thank Jessica Hodge and Margaret Bartley for guiding this project from its early stages towards its completion. Lynette Hunter, Lynne Magnusson and Ann Thompson deserve full credit for their fine vision and their continuing confidence in Shakespeare and the Language of Translation. Ton Hoenselaars Utrecht, March 2012

Introduction Ton Hoenselaars

Shakespeare’s fame is based on worldwide esteem for his plays and poems. It seems fair to assume that this reputation also rests, at least in part, on his masterful use of the English language. More often than not, however, people’s familiarity with Shakespeare around the globe comes via translations of his plays and poems into languages other than the playwright’s own Early Modern English. The present-day status of English as a lingua franca tends to obscure this fact. In many educational contexts Shakespeare may indeed be taught in English, but beyond the privileged space of the classroom, in the theatre for example, his words are generally conveyed in translation. Translations of the Shakespearean original come in many guises: as plain texts to read on the traditional page, but also as sub- and supertitles in the cinema or on our home entertainment screens; as the words spoken in synchronized versions of the plays, but also as stage images, paintings, cartoons and graphic novels; as the sounds of Shakespeare-inspired music, including songs, choral works, symphonies and operas; as the physical movements of the actor or the dancer, and as sign language gestures for special audiences. Shakespeare and the Language of Translation devotes attention to this major field of Shakespearean practice, exploring a territory that has, for a variety of reasons, retained the status of terra incognita for many anglophone students and scholars of Shakespeare. Yet it is the common view of the authors here represented, including both practitioners of the art of translation v1v

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and observers, that the field of Shakespearean translation is neglected at one’s own peril. Translation is not simply another subdiscipline within Shakespeare Studies, a field of study practised by aliens for aliens. As the essays in this collection show, translation marks an area of interest which overlaps with nearly every imaginable Shakespearean subdiscipline, thus deserving the status of an equal partner in the academic debate.

A multitude of virtues The term translation covers a multitude of virtues. The meanings of translation, which have a tendency also to vary across time, include, first of all, the following three language-oriented modes, defined by Roman Jakobson (232–9).1 They are endolinguistic or intralingual translation (which refers to the rewording or paraphrasing of a text within the same language to produce, for example, a modernized Shakespeare in English), interlingual translation (the more familiar act of rewording between two languages), and intersemiotic translation (the process, also known as transmutation, whereby the source-text signs appertaining to a verbal system are converted into the signs of a nonverbal sign system, like words into images, or speech into gesture, as in the rare case of ‘signing’ Shakespeare, described in this collection by British Sign Language specialist Peter Llewellyn-Jones). The definition of translation, however, is not limited to these three more or less traditional options. As Michael Neill (400) astutely reminds us, translation also entails ‘trading between cultures, between diVerent ways of imagining the world, involving both diachronic shifts and delicate synchronic adjustments’.2 Neill’s discussion of colonialism and/as translation in the work of Shakespeare deftly illustrates what Peter Burke – who has long occupied himself both with early modern translating cultures and with cultural translation – would identify as the ‘encounter model’. This model also accommodates phenomena such as Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism, travel and translation, and the phenomenon of the go-between (Burke, 201–6). Finally, Jonathan Bate, echoing Willis Barnstone’s assertion (8) that ‘the

Introduction

3

transforming principle [is] at the heart of all literary activity’,3 has argued a convincing case for seeing ‘art’ as ‘a translation of life into special languages with codes of their own’, a process initiating further translations that take their life from a hermaphroditic mingling of multiple agencies – not only translators in the strict sense of bilingual talents, but also all writers, actors and directors, readers and interpreters, who are bold enough to ‘in’ the very imagination and the true conceit of the authors they admire. (Bate, ‘Elizabethan’, 50–1)

Of course, ironically, due to the numerous and increasing applications of the term, the meaning of translation has really, by analogy to Terry Eagleton’s remark about culture (131), ‘expanded to the point of meaninglessness’. To counter this tendency, this volume sets out from the linguistic experience of translation and – recognizing that translation crosses more than just the conspicuous frontiers of language and negotiates less obvious distinctions of gender, class, race and nation – also reserves appropriate space for the broader processes of cultural exchange.

Renaissance translation Translation was part of the core business of sixteenth-century culture. One of the great debates of the period concerned the reformation of religious dogma and practice. Appropriately, this complex controversy over the possible merits of denominational and institutional ‘translation’ was accompanied by the more linguistically-oriented debate over the translation and retranslation of the Bible.4 Translation, however, also played a vital role in the dissemination of non-religious texts. Much of what was printed and read in early modern England had been translated from Hebrew, Greek, and especially Latin. In a progressive movement, the newly rediscovered texts were rendered into the various emancipating vernaculars of Europe, thus eVecting also a ‘translation of empire’. At the same time, a great flurry of translation activity furthered

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the exchange of ideas among the European tongues themselves. And finally there was, of course, that process by which the European vernaculars were translated into the supranational, Neo-Latin mode of Humanism.5 More than anything, it is early modern literature itself which testifies to the period’s preoccupation with translation and which warrants, even though more scholarly investigation into the phenomenon is still desirable, F.O. Matthiessen’s famous allegation that ‘[the] study of Elizabethan translation is a study of the means by which the Renaissance came to England’ (45).6 There is, perhaps, no clearer testimony to this phenomenon than the reception of Ovid, with its vast and complex network of borrowings, imitations, translations and instances of rewriting, including Arthur Golding’s 1567 rendering of the prophetically titled Metamorphoses, and the multiple appropriations of the classical myths in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.7 It is along broadly analogical and mythological, Ovidian lines that we must think when Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream exclaims to Bottom, wearing the ass-head, ‘Thou art translated’ (3.1.105). A comparable notion of metamorphosis also informs sonnet 96, where translation again is a transmutation of the species, occurring between two animals: ‘How many lambs might the stern wolf betray / If like a lamb he could his looks translate!’ (9–10). It seems rather unsurprising that when Shakespeare himself was first translated into another language, his work should have been confused with that of the Latin master. When the earliest Shakespearean translation in print, a Dutch rendering of the first 810 lines of Venus and Adonis, appeared in The Hague in 1621, the preface stated that the text presented had been ‘put by an English Poet, first into English and recently by an amateur into Dutch rime’. The assumed author of the original verse, the title page informs us, was Ovidius Nason (Arens, 421–30). Shakespeare, however, who used not only Golding’s idiosyncratic rendering of the Metamorphoses but also the English translations of Plutarch, the Geneva Bible and Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, was highly alert to the verbal process of translation as a means of countering the Babylonian curse.8 As

Introduction

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Dirk Delabastita shows in the essay that begins this collection, Shakespeare, in nearly every play, reveals a deep awareness of the language barrier, of man’s need to translate or to interpret, and of the pitfalls involved. The instances in Shakespeare range from Katherine of Aragon’s politically-charged preference of English to Latin (King Henry VIII, 3.1.40–5), via the pervasive disease of self-translation in Love’s Labour’s Lost which even aVects Moth – ‘Minime, honest master; or, rather, master, no’ (3.1.57) – to the representation of Owen Glendower’s Welsh-speaking daughter in King Henry IV Part 1, and the image of Princess Katherine of France in the famous language lesson and courtship scenes of King Henry V, with Alice as her interpreter.

Early translations of Shakespeare The practice of translating the Shakespearean text itself dates from the earliest times. Ever since the strolling players, during the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, toured the European continent – where they originally performed the London stage plays in English and entertained their audiences with spectacle, music, dance and acrobatics – translations of playtexts have not ceased to appear on stage, in print, or in the various other media. Still, we should not forget that Shakespeare was neither the first nor the most popular of the Early Modern English playwrights to be translated out of English. The Antwerp-born poet, playwright and ambassador, Theodore Rodenburgh, translated Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy into Dutch in 1617, and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy was translated into Dutch and German, as a whole or in part, a number of times between 1615 and 1660 (see Hoenselaars & Abrahamse, 324–39).9 Arguably the most popular Shakespeare play in translation during the early years was Titus Andronicus (see Braekman, 9:9–117; 10:9–65). Romantic Shakespeareans with a more or less clearly defined view of the master text have long tended to ignore the relevance of the earliest Shakespearean oVshoots, but anyone prepared to consult the play collections of Cohn (1865) or Brennecke (1964) will, though aware of a host of diVerences, be struck by the

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surprisingly narrow, near contemporaneous intertextual echoes between Hamlet and Der bestrafte Brudermord [The Fratricide Punished]. On occasion, as in the case of The Tempest and Jacob Ayer’s Die scho¨ne Sidea [The Beautiful Sidea] the diYculty of determining the respective dates of these two texts suYciently challenges our belief in Shakespeare’s primacy. To a certain extent, the tendency to underestimate the relevance of such plays as Der bestrafte Brudermord or Die scho¨ne Sidea is rooted in an attitude that accepts a hierarchical distinction between writing and translation. However, as Jonathan Goldberg has also suggested, the practice of translation should be recognized as a form of writing or rewriting in its own right. In this way, as he illustrates with great conviction, it becomes possible to read Renaissance translations as meaningful cultural interventions, rather than branding them as derivative, second-hand and second-rate products. In a culture where women were highly active precisely as translators, this redefinition of the art of translation, as Goldberg shows, creates valuable new research opportunities in the fields of early modern gender and subjectivity.10 Our present-day profit from historical translations, and translations of Shakespeare in particular, would come not from studying these in isolation but from engaging them as equal partners in a dialogue with the original. As Derrida argued, the translation is really ‘a child’ of the original ‘with the power to speak on its own which makes of a child something other than a product subjected to the law of reproduction’ (‘Tours’, 191).11 Reconstructing the instances of early modern exchange would put one in a position also to focus more clearly on the Shakespearean original in its immediate cultural contexts. In this way, Abraham Sybant’s Dutch version of The Taming of the Shrew – as De dolle bruyloft, or ‘The Mad Wedding’ (1654) – could well support a comparative analysis of marital habits in the contemporary English and Dutch religious traditions. Katherina’s final monologue, here translated back into English, might, for example, begin to shed light on the constrictions inherent in the Dutch brand of Protestantism, and the polysemantic richness of the Shakespearean original:

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I wish my sister well in her aVections, But to arrive at a desirable peace Obedience is a good law for you, Following whatever your husband proposes. Obedience never lessened a woman, But obstinacy has hindered many. Heaven dictates our true obedience, Not that we sinfully oppose man’s will: Anger and wrath lead the soul to perdition. One must be obedient if one wishes to inherit Heaven. Be not surprised to hear me speak thus: Until today I was a fool – I now speak what I know. It has pleased heaven to grieve my soul With the aim, from now on, to please Heaven. This then is a way to satisfy Heaven, My way of reconciling with my husband and friends. My father, please forgive me, and you, my sister, too, If sinfully I ever did you wrong. And you, my worthy half, whom I with will and heart Shall please, whichever way your will be drawn. (Sybant, 63, trans. Hoenselaars)12

Shakespeare in neoclassical and romantic traditions Studying these early foreign renderings of Shakespearean texts, where the name of the original author still remains unacknowledged, it would be wrong to expect the go-between to display the ‘ideal’ translator’s kind of ambition to produce the highest possible degree of equivalence between the text in the source language and that in the target language. The absence of Shakespeare’s name and authority on the one hand, and the apparently creative ambition of the early modern translator on the other, bring into focus the neoclassical, pre-Romantic view of translation as a creative labour conducted primarily with a view to serving not the historical author, but the contemporary audience.

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Normative neoclassical poetics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries recognized translation as a vital principle in the creative process, arguing that it inspired imitation and eventually also led on to an emulation of the original. Given a poetic system that conflated the Roman model of translation (which also had its roots in the educational system) with the investment of creative and emulative energies, and hence also associated the translation process with the target rather than the source, the intervention of the translator was bound to be more conspicuous, and the end result of the mediator’s labours likely to diVer more from the original.13 On the face of it, the European translator’s tendency during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to favour the target above the source language, as well as his concomitant crossing of the ever thin borderline between translation ‘proper’ and adaptation, could call to mind the present-day popularity of Shakespearean adaptation and rewriting, but the similarities are deceptive.14 Whereas the postmodern tendency to make Shakespeare ‘fit’ new cultural or political situations signals our ever more liberated intercourse with what we tend to experience as a stiflingly canonical Shakespeare, its historical precursor sought, by fitting Shakespeare into the straitjacket of existing neoclassical rules, precisely to make him more canonical (meaning ‘British’ for John Dryden, Sir William Davenant and David Garrick, and ‘French’ in the perception of a creative translator like Voltaire’s successor to the French Academy, Jean-Franc¸ois Ducis).15 Rewriting Shakespeare in this way, Fischlin and Fortier argue, paradoxically represented a show of respect (Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1; see n. 20). Only slowly did the indirect or second-hand use of neoclassical, target-oriented translation and its pandering to assumed audience sensibilities and taste, yield to the translation mode of the German Romantics. However, even as the latter began to develop their new and altogether more familiar views of Shakespearean translation towards the end of the eighteenth century, the impact of the neoclassical material produced by translators like Jean-Franc¸ois Ducis continued to be felt. Beyond the turn of the eighteenth

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century and well into the nineteenth, they curiously continued to serve as models for new translations into the various European vernaculars. Acknowledging the unique genius of the individual artist, and recognizing the merits of the Shakespearean text established by eighteenth-century editors in England, translators such as Chr. M. Wieland, J.J. Eschenburg, F.L. Schro¨der, Friedrich Schiller, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck gradually developed a tradition of source-oriented translation that would enable the translator accurately to capture the playwright’s exclusive genius by focusing, for his starting point, either on the word or on the spirit of the word. In this way, the divine Shakespeare became the champion of anti-classicism, first in Germany, but later also in France and other European countries. A number of the Romantic translations have since reached canonical status in their own right. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, the Schlegel-Tieck translation, which had done as much to communicate Shakespeare’s art as it had to expand the potential of and confidence in the German language, even helped to generate the German conviction that one could speak of such a distinct and unique phenomenon as unser Shakespeare, ‘our own Shakespeare’, a superior Shakespeare with Saxon rather than with Norman roots, the third German classic alongside Goethe and Schiller. Today, the Schlegel-Tieck text may no longer be advanced as the work of a German hero-aspoet, yet few translators will ignore it. But also the prose translation of the complete works produced by Franc¸ois-Victor Hugo between 1852 and 1865 is still reprinted and used after almost a century and a half. Yet, the fact remains that the status of these texts has not hampered the production of new translations. In the Romantic tradition, Shakespearean translation was long judged by the criterion of equivalence between the source and the target text. However, since every language represents a complex reality of its own and belongs to a separate socio-cultural system with its own historical specificities, absolute equivalence is really a fiction. Even the most devoted translator with his desk full of dictionaries, editions and earlier translations of Shakespeare to

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consult, would agree. A world in which absolute equivalence were a reality would by definition also be a world without the need for translation. The ultimate impossibility of equivalence lies at the heart of both the popular belief that a translation is a reduction or even an emasculation of the original, and the Italian proverb that the translator (traduttore) is also a deceiver (tradittore).

Living translation The present-day awareness that equivalence is only an elusive ghost has not kept translators from continuing to invest all their energy in a creative search for original means of expression that will evoke, even if only in part and/or by diVerent means, the polysemantic quality of the Shakespearean original for their own contemporary readers and audiences. Even though the semantic bandwidth of the original is not limitless, almost every translator will produce surprising new variants. This is illustrated by Ulrich Erckenbrecht’s eccentric edition of 132 German translations of sonnet 66. In his collection, Erckenbrecht brings together no fewer than eighty diVerent renderings of the English sonnet’s four opening words alone. There is no need to know German to intuit the proliferation since the eighteenth century of new words, phrases and grammar, of styles and registers, of allusions and nuances evoked by a phrase as simple as ‘Tired with all these’: ‘All dessen mu¨d’; ‘All dessen mu¨de’; ‘All Dessen satt’; ‘All dieses mu¨de’; ‘all dies zu sehn’; ‘Allmu¨de’; ‘All solcher Dinge leid’; ‘Angeekelt (mu¨de) von alledem’; ‘Bin all dies mu¨d’; ‘Bin alles leid’; ‘Bin dessen mu¨de’; ‘Bin mu¨d all dessen!’; ‘Bin mu¨d’ all dessen’; ‘Bin mu¨de dieser Welt’; ‘Bins mu¨de auf den Tod’; ‘Das qua¨lt zu Tode mich’; ‘Des ganzen Elends bin ich redlich mu¨de’; ‘Dies alles mu¨d’; ‘Doch nun genug’; ‘Elend von alledem’; ‘ermattet’; ‘Genug des Leids!’; ‘Hab’s herzlich satt’; ‘Ich bin das all’s so leid’; ‘ich bin der Erde mu¨d’; ‘Ich bin es leid’; ‘Ich bin es mu¨d’; ‘Ich bin’s so leid’; ‘Ich bin zu Tode mu¨d’; ‘ick habe allet satt’; ‘Ich hab’die Schnauze voll’; ‘ihr kotzt mich an’; ‘In all

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dem mu¨degeka¨mpft’; ‘lebensmu¨d’; ‘Mein Herz sprengt jedes ¨ berdruß’; ‘mu¨d’; ‘Mu¨d alldessen’; ‘Mu¨d all die Maß’; ‘mein U Not’; ‘Mu¨d all dies’; ‘mu¨d all dies zu sehn’; ‘Mu¨d aller Dinge’; ‘Mu¨d alles des’; ‘Mu¨d alles dessen’; ‘Mu¨d dessen all’; ‘Mu¨d mu¨d von all dem’; ‘Mu¨d solcher Unnatur’; ‘Mu¨d von all dem’; ‘Mu¨d von all’ dem’; ‘Mu¨d von alledem’; ‘Mu¨d von dem all’; ‘mu¨d zu sehen’; ‘Mu¨d’ alles des’; ‘Mu¨d’ alles dessen’; ‘Mu¨d’ dessen’; ‘Mu¨d’ von all’ dem’; ‘Mu¨d’ von dem allen’; ‘mu¨d’ zu sehen’; ‘mu¨de’; ‘Mu¨de all dessen’; ‘Mu¨de, alles leid’; ‘Mu¨de der Qual’; ‘Mu¨de von alldem’; ‘Mu¨de von alledem’; ‘Mu¨de von alle diesem’; ‘Satt bin ich’s’; ‘Satt dieses Schauspiels’; ‘Satt dieses nun’; ‘Satt dies zu sehn’; ‘Satt hab ich all das’; ‘Satt hab ich all dies’; ‘Satt hab ich dies’; ‘Scheiß drauf ’; ‘Schon Todesmu¨de’; ‘Von all dem angewidert’; ‘Von all dem mu¨d’; ‘Von all’dem mu¨d’; ‘Von all dem mu¨de’; ‘Von allen Dem ermu¨det’; ‘Von allen diesen Dingen ermu¨det’; ‘vor Ekel’; ‘wat bu¨n ick ma¨ud!’; ‘weil es mich empo¨rt’; ‘Wie bin ich’s mu¨de!’; ‘wunden Herzens’.16 On the one hand, the multiple versions of the phrase here rendered in German may reveal the widely acknowledged semantic complexity and richness of Shakespeare’s verse, much in the way each actor has his own personal rendering of ‘To be or not to be’ or ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’. On the other hand, the explanation for this rich harvest is the fact that, as Umberto Eco puts it, ‘translations age’ (22). After the first translation of sonnet 66 in the late eighteenth century, continuing development of the German language called for new renderings of the poem and, as later translations rejected German words and phrases that had become archaic or otherwise undesirable, it became apparent that Shakespeare’s sonnet was capable of generating new linguistic potential.17 The diachronic accumulation that we witness here brings into focus the continual task and endeavour of the translator to present the verse in the language of his own contemporary audience or readership. Once we recognize that translation is an ongoing process of ‘modernizing the source to some extent’ (Eco, 22), we

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also come to see that Shakespeare’s early modern work is really a fixed product in a ‘foreign’ language that no one speaks any more, except on the stage and other performance platforms, or in inverted commas. Seen in this way, one could argue that Shakespearean translation may hold its own alongside the original. One could go one step further even and argue that, given its purpose of communication, the translation may have the edge over the original Shakespearean text. For if there is a language barrier anywhere, it does not operate between Shakespeare and non-native readers or audiences of his work in translation, but rather separates native speakers of English from their own early modern writer. Serious translators have not ceased to exist and, even though they may now settle for feasible degrees of equivalence rather than any utopian absolute, they are still prepared to wage battle upon battle with each other over the choice of the appropriate word. It has also become common practice for modern translators to rethink their traditionally subservient role. As a consequence, they have assumed the role of cultural ambassador, setting out to explore and develop new expressive resources beyond the traditional, interlingual means of transfer at their disposal. A translator like Jean-Michel De´prats emphasizes the importance of translating Shakespeare in terms of the play’s intersemiotic potential on stage, enhancing the power of the word with that of other, non-verbal means of expression. With the appropriate intonation, diction and bodily gesture it is possible to develop attractive and convincing equivalents in French even of the multilingual courtship scene in the final act of Henry V.18 At such moments, one begins to doubt Derrida’s allegation (Ear, 99) to the eVect that whereas all languages may be translated into others, multilingual texts are by their very nature untranslatable.19 Jean-Michel De´prats’s recognition of an intersemiotic dimension to the art of translation, also developed in his contribution to this collection, owes much to Bertolt Brecht’s gestus-theory. Brecht’s concept is central also to the work of Maik Hamburger

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(73–83). By putting the gestus-theory into practice as a translator, Hamburger has significantly enhanced modern translation habits and, as a critic, he has been particularly eloquent in bringing this practice to the attention of the academic community. Hamburger has enabled us to appreciate how Brecht would read the playtext for its vocal energy and its cues for stage action. These gestic qualities of a word or a phrase were implicit suggestions, profound hints with regard to the actor’s gesture, his attitude towards others, his physical bearing, or bodily movement. The gestus-theory is widely adhered to, whether consciously or unconsciously. For example, it inspired Japanese theatre director Tetsuo Anzai’s view of theatrical translation (126) when he noted that the theatre maker’s primary goal is ‘not the communication of the literal meaning of the original text, but the re-creation of the theatrical experience embodied there’. In their work for the theatre, practitioners like De´prats, Hamburger and Anzai – arguing that Shakespeare was first and foremost a man of the theatre and his work meant to be spoken and acted eVectively on stage – seek to translate the text with a primary sense of its theatrical and physical purpose, thus yielding a Shakespeare who, translated intersemiotically, still succeeds in charming theatre audiences while silencing any disparaging purists.20 Since Shakespeare was first and foremost a man of the theatre, the argument about the text’s rich performance qualities and its eVectiveness when intersemiotically translated into the language of the stage makes good sense. However, we must not forget that the stage is perhaps only the most obvious of sites. Intersemiotic translation also occurs when the plays are accommodated for the cinema or our television screens in the form of film scripts, when the plots of the plays are transferred to new genres like the novel or the short story, for children or for adults, or when the Sonnets are set to music, or used to construct a new stage experience. Arguably, one of the more remarkable instances of intersemiotic translation is Hector Berlioz’s rendering of Romeo and Juliet as the choral symphony known as Rome´o et Juliette. Berlioz, already working with a version of the play that had first been adapted by David Garrick and then translated into French by Pierre Le

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Tourneur, himself rewrote the text to serve as the words for a vocal score. But the real translation did not end there. Berlioz preserved the character of Friar Laurence and introduced choral parts for the Montagues and the Capulets, but he gave neither Romeo nor Juliet a singing part, nor any words to express. It was impossible, Berlioz felt, to capture the ‘sublimity’ of the couple’s love in words (see Rushton, 87). As the lines of the air for contralto solo have it: What art, in its chosen language, Can do justice to your heavenly beauty? First love are you not higher than all poetry? (Rushton, 93)

The rhetorical question here also implied Shakespeare’s failure – ‘That very poetry / Of which Shakespeare alone knew the secret / . . . he took with him to heaven!’ (Rushton, 93). Shakespeare’s deficiency now legitimated a new attempt on the part of the composer whose inspiration, as Berlioz said on the occasion of the premie`re of Rome´o et Juliette in 1839, ‘should be allowed the scope which the exact sense of words restrains, but which is possible in such circumstances with instrumental music, richer, more varied, less restricted, and thanks to its very indefiniteness, incomparably more powerful’ (87–8). Reasoning thus, Berlioz achieved a unique and also highly impressive intersemiotic retranslation of Shakespeare as he expressed the love of Romeo and Juliet solely via the sound of music.21

Translation, tradaptation, adaptation Alongside the translators who have eVectively extended the translatable range of the Shakespearean text, relying on non-verbal means to express what simple words alone in another language cannot, a new school of practitioners has emerged who extend, once again, the privileges of the translator by claiming the right more freely to render the Shakespearean source text to fit certain targets. This new practice, as was noted above, only displays a

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superficial resemblance to that of Dryden and Davenant during the Restoration, or of Nahum Tate who reworked King Lear for eighteenth-century audiences, to make it less disturbing than Shakespeare’s own tragedy. Whereas seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury versions shaped Shakespeare in accordance with rules deriving their authority from antiquity, modern renderings create their own rules in accordance with the individual, social or local agenda that the new text – which may be a play, but also a poem, a novel, a short story or a cartoon – is to serve. The borderline between translation and adaptation is extremely diYcult to draw, certainly since, in recent years, translation itself has come to be looked upon as a form of adapting or rewriting. ‘The understanding of translation’, as Fischlin and Fortier summarize the argument in their introduction to Adaptations of Shakespeare (5), ‘moves from that of a faithful transformation of an original work to the processing, with inevitable critical diVerences, of a source text that is itself already a rewriting of prior cultural material’. If rewriting is inherent in translation and adaptation alike, and if we want to have a working distinction between these two practices, perhaps we ought to concentrate on the degree of rewriting and the alleged or implied objectives of the go-between. The fact that we need to allow for a sliding generic scale and be prepared, however cautiously, to re-introduce the vexed issue of intentionality is best illustrated by the Shakespearean translation activity in Quebec. This Canadian province’s attempt, since the 1960s, to achieve a sense of self-identity with regard to both the original English and the French majority cultures, has manifested itself in a combined process of translating and adapting Shakespeare. For this purpose, Shakespeare was not rendered either in Canadian English or oYcial French, but in the distinctive dialect of French Canada known as joual (after the pronunciation of the French word cheval in that dialect). But the process involved more than the translation of Shakespeare into another tongue. In fact, the new playtexts were consciously attuned to the immediate political climate in Quebec, occasioned by French president Charles de Gaulle’s astonishing call for a ‘Que´bec libre’ (made from the balcony of Montreal’s town hall).

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This led the local playwright Robert Gurik to produce his famous Hamlet, prince du Que´bec (1968), which, though not written in joual itself, was an unmistakable call for self-determination with the eponymous hero voicing the now politically charged question: ‘Eˆtre ou ne pas eˆtre libre’ [To be or not to be independent]. The practice of joual, said Michel Garneau, who produced a Quebec Macbeth in 1978, ought to be recognized not as the ‘translation’ but as the ‘tradaptation’ of Shakespeare (quoted in Brisset). He thus chose a new term which established a flexible midway stage between translation and adaptation, both acknowledging an allegiance to the Shakespearean text and asserting a desire to define a political sense of self-identity for Quebec, precisely by subordinating extraneous discourse like Shakespeare’s. Garneau’s Quebec version of Macbeth displays a highly conscious political practice that is deftly coupled with a careful positioning of its status on the sliding scale between translation and adaptation.22 The post-colonial interest that plays such an important role in joual Shakespeare may also be recognized as a major incentive for new translations and adaptations elsewhere in the world. Garneau’s political objective of appropriating Macbeth in his Quebec dialect is not at such a great remove from David Purves’s and Robin L.C. Lorimer’s independent eVorts during the 1990s to translate Macbeth into Scots, thus reappropriating the Scottish history that English Shakespeare himself appropriated nearly four hundred years ago.23 But other examples abound, in Africa and Asia where native responses are developed to the playwright who is associated with centuries of British rule, or in Latin America with the culture of the Iberian colonizers.24 In quite a number of cases, though, the translation-cumadaptation of Shakespeare is not so easily measured against any explicit political predicament past or present, and it is then best appreciated in the light of the daunting cultural position that Shakespeare has acquired worldwide. In these cases, adaptation primarily subverts the canonical status of Shakespeare. The translation-cum-adaptation that the Flemish writer Tom Lanoye produced of the two tetralogies of history plays as Ten Oorlog (Into Battle) (1997) may serve to illustrate this.

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One of the striking traits of Ten Oorlog is the cycle’s multilingualism, which increases as Shakespeare’s history of England develops. The elegant, somewhat archaic Dutch of the Richard II sequence at the opening gradually disintegrates into an amalgam of French and broken French, and slowly also into the pervasive Tarantino-like, American hiphop lingo used by the sons of York, including Richard III himself: ‘Gimme a break! / Spreek niet dooreen [do not speak all at once] and show me some respect! / You’re talking here to God’s numero uno’ (Lanoye & Perceval, III, 99).25 If Lanoye shows Shakespeare’s characters at war, he himself is also engaged in a war with Shakespeare. It is a paradoxical battle in which the Fleming simultaneously vents his destructive, iconoclastic urge and must acknowledge the creative energies that are released by killing Shakespeare. The following macaronic couplet self-consciously addressed to the audience by Richard (Modderfucker) the Third, captures the very ambivalence of Lanoye’s rewriting project: ‘One thing I’ll teach de wereld, willens nillens: / There is tremendous poetry in killings’ (III, 74). Ten Oorlog is representative of many a modern revision of Shakespeare, violently yoking together, on the one hand, a desire for cultural identification with one of western literature’s most popular icons, and, on the other hand, a profound urge to subvert the playwright’s almost inescapable hegemony in order to find a personal voice.26

Stepchild of Shakespeare studies Across the world, in all countries where Shakespeare has been rendered in the native tongue, translation is seen as both an art and a craft of considerable distinction. This also explains why many translations have been produced by people with literary reputations in their own right, like Goethe, Schiller, Alfred de Vigny, Paul Celan and Tsubouchi Sho¯yo¯.27 Statesmen, too, have displayed an active interest in the art of translation. Politicians of note include Queen Victoria’s cousin King D. Luı´s de Braganc¸a of Portugal (who translated King Richard III, The Merchant of Venice,

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Hamlet and Othello), Oxford graduate King Rama VI of Siam (Thailand), and Julius K. Nyerere, President of the United Republic of Tanzania (translator of Julius Caesar as well as The Merchant of Venice into Swahili).28 Given the high international status of Shakespeare in translation, it may come as a surprise that this mode of transmission has not attracted more scholarly attention. Translation Studies specialists may display a strong tendency to test their theoretical models against the available translations of Shakespeare, but as Inga-Stina Ewbank and Dirk Delabastita have rightly said, translation remains the ‘stepchild’ or ‘Cinderella’ of Shakespeare Studies.29 To a degree, the relative lack of interest displayed by anglophone readers and scholars would seem to be due to the very language barrier that necessitates the art of translation in the first place. But if this were so, why should there be such a great anglophone investment in Translation Studies, or in monitoring the translation of foreign literature into English?30 The current interest manifested in Translation Studies in English-speaking areas is inversely proportional to the attention there to translations of Shakespeare. This state of aVairs warrants the assumption that Shakespeare may well continue to be the national poet who embodies the Romantic ideal of authorship, activating the concomitant notions of untranslatability, degradation and debasement.31 Such persistent Romantic attitudes as described above become particularly rampant when suggestions are voiced to translate Shakespeare into English. It has proved possible to translate Shakespeare into almost every imaginable national or regional tongue, as well as into a range of such unlikely languages as NeoLatin: ‘An similem aestivae pingam te, care, diei?’ (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’), and one of the languages of Star Trek, Klingon: ‘taH pagh taHbe’. DaH mu’tlheghvam vIqelnIS’ (‘To be or not to be. That is the question’), yet it remains anathema to reproduce Shakespeare’s Early Modern English in modern English.32 Even the mere allusion to the possibility of an endolinguistic or intralingual translation of Shakespeare is suYcient to spark oV a fierce debate each time it is made.

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A few years ago, when Susan Bassnett broached the issue in the Independent, it marked, among other things, the beginning of an extended controversy with Tom Deveson in Around the Globe. Bassnett argued that in order to achieve instant intelligibility in the theatre, Shakespeare directors with diYcult lines to interpret in, say, the comedies, should not automatically need to consider having Malvolio step into a dog mess as the next best alternative to generate laughter. Whereas Bassnett argued that it was ‘time we translated Shakespeare into good modern English’, Tom Deveson reasoned that ‘[i]f we break the verbal links to the usages we inherit, we lose contact with a vital dimension of ourselves’.33 At around the same time, Stanley Wells, too, experienced how solidly the Romantic anti-translation league is still entrenched in its ancient position. In his case, it was the novelist A.S. Byatt who attacked him for even raising ‘the question of Shakespeare translated into modern English’.34 Byatt’s was more than a mere concern with the nation’s cultural heritage, as in Deveson’s case; her stance was rooted in what had every appearance of xenophobic anglocentrism. Wells, she argued, ‘even suggests that foreigners who have good translations have easier access to the master than his compatriots’. There is little doubt that Wells’s liberal views are rooted in the very cosmopolitanism that he has brought to Shakespeare Studies over the years, and in his conviction that there can be no talk of a text on the page without reference also to the complex representation of that text on the live stage. Shakespearean performance in the theatre and its precondition of instant intelligibility seem to be of no interest to Byatt, the novelist. Instead, presupposing, as Russ McDonald succinctly has it, that ‘Shakespeare in other words is not Shakespeare’ (36), Byatt argues that ‘Shakespeare needs passionate, imaginative teachers and curious readers, prepared to forage in etymological dictionaries’. What is typical about this conservative attitude which prefers to ignore the page-and-stage debate – and which is echoed even in the contribution to the controversy by Paul Edmondson, Head of Education at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford35 – is

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its emphasis on literate ‘readers’ to the exclusion of general ‘audiences’. It need not come as a surprise that the more enlightened views of Shakespeare in English translation have emerged in theatreoriented quarters. After all, it is in performance that the failure of Early Modern English to communicate is most apparent. This explains why it was precisely Dennis Kennedy, John Russell Brown and Michael Billington who, with a considerable following, championed a multicultural approach to Shakespeare which, among other things, oversteps the perennial translation barrier. In the early 1990s, Kennedy set out to enhance the Anglo-centric and Anglo-centred approach to Shakespeare in Theatre Studies by concentrating on Shakespeare ‘performed outside of the Englishspeaking theatre’, on Shakespeare performed ‘without his language’ (Foreign, xvii).36 This timely initiative – pursued in the conviction that, as Michael Billington (28) put it, we ‘cannot help but see Shakespeare in terms of our own language, history and culture’ and ‘need urgently to widen that definition of culture’ – marked the introduction of a new line in Shakespeare Studies now generally known as ‘foreign’ Shakespeare.37 Research conducted under this banner shares Kennedy’s contention that Shakespeare in languages other than English, beyond the immediate British context from which he has emerged with the status of a high-culture superscribe, is practised under markedly liberated circumstances which foster experiment and innovation of the kind associated with Bertolt Brecht and Jan Kott. In terms of language, this research recognizes that rather than hampering Shakespeare, the flow of foreign translations over the centuries has set a tradition of Shakespeare in up-to-date speech, making Shakespeare into a contemporary interlocutor capable of addressing the issues that concern us today. In a sense, Kennedy has eVectively demonstrated how over the last fifty years ‘foreign’ Shakespeare – at one remove from his native culture, in the contemporary language of the audience, and conveyed with the assistance of new modes of representation – has really functioned as the lifeline of the native Shakespeare industry. No doubt the ultimate paradox which the ‘foreign’

Introduction

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Shakespeare initiative exposed was that, by desperately clutching the ‘original’ Shakespeare like a household god, the English had really become alienated from his work, written in a language that ceased to be spoken almost 350 years ago, and hence (accepting the metaphor that the past is another country) really a foreign language, in need, like all other languages, of translation.

‘A new patina of meaning’ Gradually readers and audiences of Shakespeare are beginning to appreciate the merits of the plays in translation. Such interest may strengthen when a Shakespeare play is translated into the very foreign culture that is portrayed within it. The translation of Othello into Arabic activates many unexpected issues that are both verbally and culturally relevant, as does the translation of The Merchant of Venice into Hebrew, or of Henry V into French.38 However, translations along broader lines have also begun to fascinate readers who find that plays that have been taken out of their dialect and out of their native cultural contexts unexpectedly yield valuable insights into numerous processes of cultural transfer, between texts and between cultures. As Michael Billington has noted with regard to this appreciation of the rare and often unsuspected riches that the art of translation may reveal about the original text: aspects of a play we [as an English audience] would overlook shine out more clearly when transmitted through the prism of another language, culture, and history . . . I am not trying to suggest that Shakespeare is better in translation. I am simply suggesting that the plays acquire a diVerent resonance and richness – a new patina of meaning – when seen through foreign eyes. (Billington, 23–5)39

But Derrida, too, has captured the nature of this sensation in a recent paper devoted to translation in The Merchant of Venice. Here, Derrida describes his own lifelong passion for translation, and expresses this fascination by playing on the etymological

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proximity of ‘language’ and ‘tongue’. In the course of translation, Derrida argues, ‘one language licks another, like a flame or a caress’ (‘Relevant’, 175). By learning to relish as an inspiring kiss the interaction between two languages in the process of translation, we should eventually succeed in attracting the participation of the broader field of Shakespeare Studies, leading to a fairer appreciation and a greater enjoyment of the excitement generated by such intimate intercourse of languages, both in the narrow linguistic and in the broader cultural sense.

Translating futures In recent years, we have seen the gradual emancipation of Shakespeare in translation. As practitioners of Translation Studies have developed a tendency to turn to Shakespeare to expound their arguments, Shakespeareans interested also in the textual transfer of the poet increasingly tend to search for a more theoretical framework in the field of Translation Studies. Within the context of the larger Shakespeare industry, translation, though one of the main pillars of worldwide Shakespeare, has not yet suYciently entered into a creative dialogue with the other subdisciplines, and something of the Cinderella complex remains. Shakespeare, in the words of Inga-Stina Ewbank, has remained ‘an interesting but harmless occupation for researchers abroad’. One way of overcoming this predicament would seem to be to establish sites, like this collection of essays, to convey the attractions as well as the challenges inherent in the practice of translation. However, with its status as an equal partner in the academic debate, the subdiscipline of Shakespearean translation would also have its distinct responsibilities. One of the most important of these is its duty to engage, across more or less clearly defined limits, with the issues at stake in other Shakespearean subdisciplines, using the existing terms of the trade, but also continually developing and sharing theoretical reflections of its own to fuel a discussion that is relevant to all. Since in recent years cultural exchange has been more or less metaphorically defined as a process of translation, and translation itself has come to be recognized as a profession at

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the cutting edge of cultural exchange, any attention devoted to ubiquitous Shakespeare from this dual perspective should profit both the field of Shakespearean translation and the larger industry in which it is so deeply embedded. v This volume is divided into three parts. The first of these concentrates on a variety of general themes and issues. Dirk Delabastita provides a survey of the many instances of translation in the plays of Shakespeare. Susan Bassnett draws attention to the fact that each time we translate the Shakespearean playtexts, not into any foreign language but into stage productions, we inevitably make the playwright our contemporary, and engender the plays anew. Gendering plays a vital role in Tetsuo Kishi’s essay on translation and sociolinguistics. Kishi signals the vast diVerences between the various forms of address in Elizabethan and Japanese culture. Because Shakespearean markers of gender, for example, refuse to be converted into Japanese, the Japanese translator is faced with a number of vital decisions of a sociolinguistic nature that, in turn, make us see a play like Twelfth Night in a rather new light. Any translation, however, will inevitably bear the fingerprints not only of the prevailing gender notions, but also of the broader political context within which it is first produced. In the first section, therefore, Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova show how the translation of Shakespeare in Bulgaria has curiously been able to profit from the long monopoly and manipulation by the communist regime. Conversely, Shen Lin focuses on the fortunes of the word ‘nature’ in a series of Chinese Hamlets, and illustrates how in retrospect these translations may help to lay bare some profound ideological divisions in the Asian version of communism. Finally, Rui Carvalho Homem’s essay on his own Portuguese translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost illustrates how one may indeed read Shakespearean translation simultaneously as a decisive intervention in a nation’s cultural history and national self-identity without ignoring the relevance of minute verbal and bibliographical detail of the play in question.

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In the second section of this collection, the Shakespeare translators themselves speak about their work. Alessandro Serpieri and Werner Bro¨nnimann illustrate how the translator of a Shakespeare play is also its editor who decides on issues of bibliography and interpretation, thus making a valuable contribution to editorial and footnoting practices in the wider Shakespeare industry.40 As Maik Hamburger demonstrates, with telling examples from personal experience on the German stage, the phenomenon of translation raises fundamental questions about authorship and copyright. These questions challenge the general belief that Shakespeare is so popular worldwide because his texts are out of copyright, and consequently initiate a discussion about the status of the increasing number of Shakespearean adaptations by aspiring authors. In his contribution to this collection, theatre translator Jean-Michel De´prats explains how, when translating Shakespeare’s plays for performance, one does not just translate for the theatre; one translates theatre, translating words into new words, but also into movement, light and sound. Peter Llewellyn-Jones writes about signing Shakespeare, as he provides a vivid account of the way in which Shakespeare is interpreted to theatre audiences with hearing problems. The final section of this volume is devoted to translation as an activity that energizes the post-colonial debate. J. Derrick McClure writes on translating Macbeth and a number of other Shakespearean materials into Scots, and translator-cum-scholar Alfredo Modenessi provides a riveting account of the diYculties of translating the most canonical British playwright for the postcolonial stage in Mexico. There, one of the major concerns is that Shakespeare should not speak the European colonizer’s Spanish, but a recognizable native Latin American idiom. Post-colonial rewriting also occupies Leanore Lieblein, who writes on the typical tradition of Shakespearean ‘tradaptation’ in francophone Quebec, and Martin Orkin, who concentrates on African appropriations of Shakespeare, including Welcome Msomi’s Zulu translation of Macbeth, known as uMabatha, and Yael Farber’s Africanized version of Julius Caesar, entitled SeZar.

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Dirk Delabastita ends this volume with an annotated bibliography which, it is hoped, will serve as a guide to those readers who wish to know more about the major points of intersection between Shakespearean translation and the larger field of Shakespeare Studies. If this collection succeeds in generating such curiosity, it may one day turn out to have made a contribution to eVectively putting on the map what is very likely to be the oldest as well as the most severely neglected of ‘alternative’ Shakespeares.41

Notes 1 This essay is also included in Venuti, Reader (113–18). 2 The ‘cultural turn’ has also left its imprint on Translation Studies and has been dealt with most programmatically by Susan Bassnett and Andre´ Lefevere. 3 Quoted also in the editors’ fine introduction, Chew & Stead (1–14). 4 For an accessible illustration of this process in the English-speaking world, see McGrath. Due to the historical coincidence of the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare, it may not come as a surprise that fictional attempts have been made to argue that Shakespeare might have had a hand in the translation of the Authorized Version. For a detailed discussion, see Franssen (106–17). 5 For a succinct survey and bibliography, see Brown, Sarah Annes (1265–8). 6 See also Bassnett (42). 7 See Martindale; Martindale, Charles & Michelle; and Bate, Ovid. 8 See Miola for a concise survey of Shakespeare’s various sources. 9 For a survey of the literature on The Spanish Tragedy, see Fleming. 10 In his argument Goldberg counters the hierarchical view held by Tina Krontiris. For a modern ‘translatress’, see Simon, Oxford. For a broader theoretical perspective, see also Simon, Gender. 11 Choosing this metaphor, Derrida develops Walter Benjamin’s view (1923) that a translation should not be perceived as secondary or subservient to the original. See Benjamin, ‘Task’; his seminal paper is included in Venuti, Reader (15–23). 12 See also Hoenselaars & van Dijkhuizen (53–70). 13 For a brief survey, see Bassnett (50–3). 14 See Cohn, Ruby; Hodgdon; Fischlin & Fortier. 15 See Monaco; Dobson; Marsden; Clark. 16 For the broader politico-cultural history of sonnet 66 in translation, especially on the European continent, see Pfister (70–88).

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17 Werner Bro¨nnimann notes that since World War II it has become rather problematic to translate Shakespeare’s ‘hail’ – as in ‘All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!’ (Mac 1.3.48) – into German as ‘heil’. He quotes the German translator Frank Gu¨nther who added in a footnote to his translation of the tyrant play: ‘hail should really be rendered as “Heil dir” – words to which the translator has an insuperable aversion’ (Bro¨nnimann, 12). 18 See De´prats, ‘Traduire’, l:lxxix-cxxi. Also, entirely devoted to the translator’s problem with the multilingualism in H5 is De´prats, ‘Feast’. 19 As Derrida argues with respect to the translation into French of James Joyce’s babylonian novel, Finnegans Wake: ‘Even if by some miracle one could translate all of the virtual impulses at work . . . one thing remains that could never be translated: the fact that there are two tongues here, or at least more than one. By transplanting everything into French, at best one would translate all of the virtual or actual content, but one could not translate the event which consists in grafting several tongues into a single body’. See Derrida, Ear (99). 20 A discussion of these issues in a broader theoretical context may be found in Pavis. 21 For a sensitive appreciation, see also Bate, Genius (278–85). 22 For a full discussion of this Canadian phenomenon, see Brisset. 23 See McClure (29–51); Kinloch (73–100). 24 See Loomba & Orkin; Bassnett & Trivedi; Brown, Sites; Kennedy, ‘Worldwide’ (251–64); Fischlin & Fortier (11–16); Modenessi (152–64). 25 For a detailed discussion of Ten Oorlog, see Reichert (100–14); Hoenselaars, ‘War’. 26 Creative iconoclasm, like Lanoye’s, is of course only one of the many motives for rewriting Shakespeare. For a survey, see the splendid introduction to Fischlin & Fortier. 27 The list of writers-as-translators also includes the following. Germany: Chr. M. Wieland, A.W. Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Stefan George and Karl Kraus. France: Marcel Schwob, Marcel Pagnol, Andre´ Gide, Jean Anouilh and Yves Bonnefoy. Russia: Boris Pasternak. Italy: G. Ungaretti and Eduardo de Filippo. Spain: Ramo´n de la Cruz, Leandro Ferna´ndes de Moratı´n and Jose´ Maria Valverde. Sweden: Per Hallstro¨m. Low Countries: Adriaan Roland Holst, Martinus NijhoV and Hugo Claus. 28 See Homem, 19–42; Mazrui, 64–79; Dobson & Wells (121 and 322). 29 See Ewbank (1); Delabastita, ‘Alternative’ (126). 30 See Baker, Encyclopedia; Classe; France. 31 Lawrence Venuti argues for a comparable tendency in English literary culture, which extends beyond Shakespeare. See Venuti, Scandals (31–4). 32 See The Sonnets of William Shakespeare with a Latin Translation by Alfred T. Barton (London, 1923); also The Atheneum (December 1913), 747. The Klingon Language

Introduction

27

Institute website, specializing in the language that Mark Okrand invented for the Star Trek film and television series, may be found at . 33 Tom Deveson and Susan Bassnett, ‘Modernizing Shakespeare’, Around the Globe 20 (Winter 2001/2002), 32–3. 34 See A.S. Byatt’s review in the Guardian (22 June, 2002) of David Crystal and Ben Crystal, Words: A Glossary and Language Companion (London, 2002). 35 Edmondson (5) seemed to support Byatt by claiming that Shakespeare ‘actually deserves better and more informed readers rather than modernisation and translation’ (italics added). 36 See also Brown, ‘Foreign’ (21–35). 37 As Michael Billington put it (28), ‘Shakespeare is too elusive, shifting, variable and pluralistic to be the property of any single language or country’. 38 See Ghazoul (1–30); Scolnicov (182–90); Hoenselaars, ‘People’ (243–52); Delabastita, ‘Feast’ (303–40). 39 See also Scolnicov & Holland; Banham & Jones (121–36); Morse (126–30). 40 In this connection, it is worth considering also Timothy Billings’s view of translation as ‘a radical form of glossing – one that inverts the conventional hierarchy between text and commentary while oVering the temptation of eVacing that process of inversion by reconstructing a new primary text out of its supplement’. See Billings, ‘Caterwauling’ (17). 41 Dirk Delabastita (‘Alternative’, 113–32) argues a compelling case for the recognition of ‘translation’ as one of the ‘alternative Shakespeares’.

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Pa r t I Words and Cultures

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1 ‘If I Know The Letters and the Language’ Translation as a Drama tic Device in Shakespeare’s Plays

Dirk Delabastita Most of the writing on Shakespeare and translation deals with the translation of Shakespeare’s works, casting the Bard in the role of translated author. But there are other ways in which ‘Shakespeare’ is involved with ‘translation’. One could, for example, shift the focus to Shakespeare himself as a translating author, or as a voracious user and adapter of existing translations. We shall here follow a third path by considering translation in Shakespeare. Translation was very much part of Shakespeare’s culture and many of his plays are set abroad or somehow stage encounters with foreigners. Shakespeare was definitely aware of the dramatic mileage there was to be got out of translation, as is shown by several interesting cross-language situations in his plays. This essay surveys those dramatic situations and explores the crucial issues they raise.1

Translation and non-translation Defined in a narrowly instrumental and utilitarian sense, translation springs from the practical communicative needs created by the Babylonian confusion of languages. Language as a system for organizing, storing and sharing knowledge about the world lets us down when our interlocutor uses a language we do not know: CASSIUS

Did Cicero say anything? v 31 v

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CASCA

Ay, he spoke Greek. CASSIUS

To what eVect? CASCA

[. . .] those that understood him smil’d at one another, and shook their heads; but for mine own part, it was Greek to me. (JC 1.2.274–80)

Being proficient in the two languages involved, the translator can reformulate the same message in the addressee’s diVerent linguistic medium. This fascinating dialectic of ‘sameness’ and ‘diVerence’ lies at the heart of translation and of the debates that surround it – for how should the translator negotiate the contradictory demands that follow from it? While wishing to preserve the ‘sameness’ of the original message as much as possible, the translator also feels the pressure to acknowledge the ‘diVerence’ of the ultimate receivers, making the original text meaningful to them by adjusting it to their knowledge and domestic values. Thus, it may well be their protean adaptability to local sensibilities, styles and beliefs that enables rumours and prayers to travel so well across linguistic and other barriers: RUMOUR

Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, The which in every language I pronounce, StuYng the ears of men with false reports. (2H4 Induction 6–8) LUCIO

I think thou never wast where grace was said. 2 GENTLEMAN

No? A dozen times at least. 1 GENTLEMAN

What, in metre? LUCIO

In any proportion, or in any language.

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1 GENTLEMAN

I think, or in any religion. LUCIO

Ay, why not? Grace is grace. (MM 1.2.18–24)

Conversely, overzealous subservience to the original’s wording may defeat the translator’s purpose and even lead to semantic subversion. For the exposed traitor Aumerle in King Richard II, son of the Duke and Duchess of York, the diVerence between English ‘pardon’ (forgive him) and its all too literal French translation ‘pardonne moi’ (sorry, no) amounts to a question of life or death: DUCHESS OF YORK

Say ‘pardon’, king, let pity teach thee how; The word is short, but not so short as sweet; No word like ‘pardon’ for kings’ mouths so meet. YORK

Speak it in French, king, say ‘pardonne moy’. (R2 5.3.114–17)

But then, excesses of literalism do not necessarily justify excesses of translational freedom and few would recommend translators to give in to the human impulse to ‘construe things, after their fashion / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves’ (Julius Caesar, 1.3.34–5). Such absolute freedom is used by Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew with erotic intent (and comic eVect) in the following rendering of Ovid: LUCENTIO

Hic ibat, as I told you before – Simois, I am Lucentio – hic est, son unto Vincentio of Pisa – Sigeia tellus, disguised thus to get your love – Hic steterat, and that Lucentio that comes a-wooing – Priami, is my man Tranio – regia, bearing my port – celsa senis, that we might beguile the old pantaloon. (TS 3.1.31–6)

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Lucentio’s pupil Bianca goes on to answer him with an alternative translation of the same lines (‘Now let me see if I can construe it’, 3.1.40) that owes just as little to Ovid. However, it is crucial to note that much more is at stake in translation than just semantic equivalence. For a start, the instrumental definition of language is too narrow. Besides communicating meaning, language also shapes individual and collective identities. In King Richard II the truth of this comes home to Mowbray, who realizes that his banishment is tantamount to self-estrangement and spiritual death: The language I have learnt these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo . . . What is thy sentence then but speechless death, Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath? (R2 1.3.159–60 and 172–3)

Our focus here is on the role of language in creating group identities and in regulating relationships within and between social groups. It is largely through its varieties (national language, dialect) and variations (register, style) that language is invested with the values and norms of society and gets implicated in its endless interactions and struggles. Using a certain language, or using it in a certain way, will place you inside or outside a social group and earn you a relative position of status and superiority, or one of vulnerability. History is littered with victims of the exclusion policy that eliminates people for speaking the wrong language or with the wrong accent. Lord Say in King Henry VI Part 2 finds out that in the wrong sort of company the sheer knowledge of foreign languages may suYce to cast fatal suspicions on your loyalty: CADE

He can speak French; and therefore he is a traitor . . . can he that speaks with the tongue of an enemy be a good counsellor, or no? ALL

No, no; and therefore we’ll have his head. (2H6 4.2.161–7)

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CADE

Away with him! away with him! he speaks Latin. (2H6 4.7.55)

Whatever the ambivalence of its political stance, no Shakespearean play highlights the profound complicity between power and language as clearly as King Henry V. This play shows England trying to justify its claim to all of Britain by characterizing the English language as the most natural expression of manliness, simple virtue and ordered civilization. English is spoken by King Henry’s four valiant captains Gower, Jamy, Macmorris and Fluellen, even though the last three are Scottish, Irish and Welsh respectively. Their collective use of English – and thus the absence of translation – symbolizes the inevitable process of national integration that is supposed to be taking place. But then, the Englishman Gower is the only one of the four to speak English ‘normally’. Embodying the norm of correctness, his English proclaims a naturalness and a neutrality which make the regional speech varieties of the three other captains stand out as comically aberrant. The broad accents of the three non-English captains suggest a lingering otherness, which inspires amusement but also menace: the suppression of barbarism and the entry of Scotland, Ireland and even Wales into ordered civilization are far from completed. On the larger international scene, the play depicts the successful French campaign of King Henry V, culminating in the victory of Agincourt. At this level, too, linguistic diVerence is a measure of otherness and inferiority. The French of the enemies is represented as a distinctly foreign language whose artificial and eVeminate sophistication throws into relief the opposite virtues of the English tongue and of the nation that speaks it. It is hardly surprising that Henry V has more translation scenes than any other Shakespearean play.2 In the first of these, Katherine uses translation as a way to learn the English words for the various parts of the body. Here is a short sample: KATHERINE

Comment appelez-vous le col?

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ALICE

De nick, madame. KATHERINE

De nick. Et le menton? ALICE

De chin. KATHERINE

De sin. Le col, de nick; le menton, de sin . . . Comment appelez-vous le pied et la robe? ALICE

De foot, madame, et de coun. KATHERINE

De foot, et de coun? O Seigneur Dieu, ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d’honneur d’user . . . Foh! De foot et de coun! (H5 3.4.29–51)

Both pupil and teacher make a comic mess of the English language, but critics have also stressed the serious undertone of the scene. The English have in the previous scene conquered the French town of Harfleur: it is as if Katherine is here ‘Englishing’ her already disintegrating body in anticipation of her own forced surrender to Henry in Act 5. Linguistic asymmetry reflects the process of military and later sexual conquest. A second translation scene in Henry V occurs when the swaggering Pistol has captured a French soldier and needs a boy’s interpreting services to make the Frenchman part with his money: FRENCH SOLDIER

O pardonnez-moi! PISTOL

Say’st thou me so? Is that a ton of moys? Come hither, boy; Ask me this slave in French what is his name. BOY

E´coutez. Comment ˆetes-vous appele´?

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FRENCH SOLDIER

Monsieur le Fer. BOY

He says his name is Master Fer. PISTOL

Master Fer? I’ll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him. Discuss the same in French unto him. BOY

I do not know the French for fer, and ferret and firk. PISTOL

Bid him prepare, for I will cut his throat. FRENCH SOLDIER

Que dit-il, monsieur? BOY

Il me commande a` vous dire que vous faites vous preˆt, car ce soldat ici est dispose´ tout a` cette heure de couper votre gorge. PISTOL

Owy, cuppele gorge, permafoy. (H5 4.4.20–36)

Here too, the comic relief has its grimmer side, since Pistol’s ignoble threat (‘cuppele gorge’) is about to be repeated by the King and fulfilled on a collective scale (‘we’ll cut the throats of those [prisoners] we have’, 4.7.62). Also, Pistol’s show of power and extortion against a defenceless French-speaking victim enables the scene to be read as a prefiguration of the play’s third translation scene, the wooing scene, where Henry’s gallantry and the good-humoured verbal comedy can barely disguise the brutal opportunism driving Henry’s conquest of Katherine. Two brief excerpts: KING

O fair Katherine, if you will love me soundly with your French heart I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English tongue. Do you like me, Kate? KATHERINE

Pardonnez-moi, I cannot tell vat is ‘like me’.

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KING

An angel is like you, Kate, and you are like an angel. KATHERINE

Que dit-il, que je suis semblable a` les anges? ALICE

Oui, vraiment, sauf votre graˆce, ainsi dit-il. KING

I said so, dear Katherine, and I must not blush to aYrm it. KATHERINE

O bon Dieu, les langues des hommes sont pleines de tromperies! KING

What says she, fair one? That the tongues of men are full of deceits? ALICE

Oui, dat de tongues of de mans is be full of deceits: dat is de Princess. (H5 5.2.104–20) KING

Upon that I kiss your hand, and I call you my Queen. KATHERINE

Laissez, mon seigneur, laissez, laissez! . . . Excusez-moi, je vous supplie, mon tre`s-puissant seigneur. KING

Then I will kiss your lips, Kate. KATHERINE

Les dames et demoiselles pour eˆtre baise´es devant leurs noces, il n’est pas la coutume de France. KING

Madam my interpreter, what says she? ALICE

Dat it is not de fashion pour les ladies of France – I cannot tell vat is baiser en Anglish. KING

To kiss.

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ALICE

Your majesty entend bettre que moi. (H5 5.2.248–62)

Translation is always carried out within and for specific groups, which are in positions of relative strength or weakness and which have interests and agendas of their own. It is the interplay of these factors which will largely determine both the amount of translation that will take place – How much? – and its practical modalities – From which language into which language? Source-oriented rather than target-oriented? How visible? Just like the languages between which it mediates, translation is as much engaged in the construction of and interaction between social identities as in the communication of meanings. In fact, translation may occur when comprehension of the original text is not an issue at all. To explain this, it is worth briefly to shift our focus from translation in Shakespeare to the translation of Shakespeare, more specifically to the recent translations of Macbeth into Scots, a language whose speakers also have direct access to the original play.3 Any concern about the audience’s understanding of Shakespeare’s original is secondary here to the political objective of lifting Scots above the status of a dialect or bastard oVshoot of English and making it into a ‘real’ language that accommodates Shakespeare’s tragedy as comfortably as English, indeed finally giving its Scottish heroes their true voices. Such translations are more to do with nationalistic cultural policies than with the decoding and recoding of linguistically opaque meanings. Conversely, where interlinguistic gaps do entail mutual unintelligibility and cause communicative disruptions, translations are not always forthcoming. Here, too, the presence or absence of translation is a question of cultural politics. When linguistic diVerence creates a communication gap between two speakers or groups of speakers (say, Speaker 1 [S1] and Speaker 2 [S2], speakers of Language 1 [L1] and Language 2 [L2] respectively), other options are available as well, including:

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æ S1 subjects S2 to a policy of ethnic and linguistic cleansing; æ S1 is forced, or volunteers to learn L2; æ S1 and S2 agree to acquire a passive knowledge of each

other’s language; æ S1 and S2 resort to a third language for intercultural

purposes (lingua franca); æ S1 develops a hybrid language out of L1 and L2 (pidgin,

creole). Various factors may influence your preference for one interlingual policy rather than another, including the frequency of contacts between S1 and S2, the number of speakers involved on either side of the language barrier, the language skills already available, and so forth. Such are the factors it would be wise to consider if we were involved in a rationally based language planning project. But history tells us that in reality any such rational considerations are often overridden by the more or less ruthless eVect of power relations, understood in political, economic and/or military terms, or in terms of prestige and symbolical power. Many glaring examples of this correlation are provided by the history of Western colonialism and its attendant language policies. As Edmund Spenser stated in A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), ‘it hath been ever the use of the conqueror to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his’ (see Blank, 126). Spenser is referring to the second non-translational strategy in our list above. In The Tempest, a play often read as an allegory of colonial relations, Shakespeare hints at it through Caliban: You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! (Tem 1.2.365–7)

Like Caliban, the three ‘eccentrics’ Fluellen, Jamie and Macmorris in Henry V have suYciently absorbed the language of their English masters to be beyond the practical need for

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41

translation. As we have just seen, Katherine has not quite reached that stage yet, but her eVorts to learn English are rewarded with significant progress. Shakespeare’s Henry, on the contrary, cannot be bothered to improve his French and it is easy to see why. From early in the wooing scene onwards, he calls the Princess ‘Kate’, translating her French name Catherine – already partly anglicized by the spelling ‘Katherine’ in the First Quarto text from 1600 – into a homely English one. She will become his wife on his conditions and therefore in his language. Given the fact that the play subtly genders English as a masculine language and French as feminine, given also the explicit analogy between Henry’s and Katherine’s domestic arrangements and the ‘spousal’ between their kingdoms (5.2.354), the play’s dramatic logic suggests that, if Fortune had continued to smile on Henry and his dynasty, France as a nation would in the longer run have had to adopt the language of her new lord and husband. But, of course, the play’s prospect of such a powerful Anglo-French union in which the dominance of English would ultimately obviate the need for translation, was to be shattered soon enough by the events dramatized in the Henry VI plays. The translation scene in the third act of Henry IV Part 1 shows that the colonial situation can also produce a radically diVerent configuration. Mortimer is married to the Welshman Glendower’s daughter: he speaks no Welsh and his wife has no English, so that his bilingual father-in-law has to interpret between the two: MORTIMER

Good father, tell her that she and my aunt Percy Shall follow in your conduct speedily. [Glendower speaks to her in Welsh, and she answers him in the same.] (1H4 3.1.190–1)

The play’s text contains none of the Welsh out of which and into which the translation takes place. Welsh was meant to remain a totally opaque language, resistant to scripting and impervious to understanding – a language associated with the devil himself:

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HOTSPUR

Now I perceive the devil understands Welsh.4 (1H4 3.1.224)

In that respect, as well as in their absurd incomprehensibility, Welsh would have resembled Caliban’s native gabbling. But unlike Caliban’s (or Katherine’s) new master, Mortimer shows little interest in imposing his own English, but wants to learn her Welsh instead! With her mysterious and sensual untranslated Welsh speeches and songs, his wife becomes a siren whose magic charms Mortimer cannot resist, illustrating the scary scenario of the colonial master being alienated from his own Englishness and manliness, and finally getting sucked into the world of the Other.5 Imperialism helped to make English into the world language and lingua franca that it is today. In Shakespeare’s days it was Latin that performed a similar role within the European context. Its widespread use and enormous prestige gave Latin an aura of universality and therefore of neutrality, helping to sustain its long-standing position as the international language of the law. Old legal texts may therefore be quoted in Latin: CANTERBURY

In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant, ‘No woman shall succeed in Salic land’. (H5 1.2.38–9)

But also new legal arrangements required translation into Latin to be fully validated: EXETER

. . . the King of France . . . shall name your highness in this form and with this addition: [Reads.] in French, Notre tre`s cher fils Henri, roi d’Angleterre, he´ritier de France; and thus in Latin, Praeclarissimus filius noster Henricus, rex Angliae et haeres Franciae. (H5 5.2.328–34)

Translation into Latin had a rhetorical capacity for giving a statement a finality that places it above the petty interests and

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rivalries that find their natural expression in the national vernaculars. But by the same token, translation into Latin also introduces a cold formality that disconnects language from the reality of our lives. That is the reason why Queen Katherine in King Henry VIII objects to Wolsey’s use of Latin when he launches into a speech that she knows will closely aVect her: WOLSEY

Tanta est erga te mentis integritas Regina serenissima – KATHERINE

O, good my lord, no Latin. I am not such a truant since my coming As not to know the language I have liv’d in; A strange tongue makes my cause more strange, suspicious: Pray speak in English. (H8 3.1.40–5)

Universality of a totally diVerent nature has often been ascribed to the language of physical expression. The ‘translation’ of words into bodily action and of action into words is of course a current concern to a dramatist like Shakespeare. Here is one of his many explicit references to the process: FALSTAFF

I can construe the action of her familiar style, and the hardest voice of her behaviour, to be Englished rightly, is, ‘I am Sir John FalstaV’s’. PISTOL

He hath studied her well, and translated her will – out of honesty into English. (MW 1.3.43–8)

What translation scholars call intersemiotic translation (or translation between sign systems) is the very stuV of the theatre, whose art is all about ‘translating’ the written verbal script into the multimedia language of performance. Shakespeare highlighted his awareness of it in many moments of metadramatic self-reference, but nowhere more hilariously than in the play-within-the-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here, the artisans give a somewhat

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less than faithful stage translation of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, indeed a translation which rather brings to mind Bottom’s earlier partial transformation into an ass: ‘Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated’ (MND 3.1.112–13).6

Translation in Shakespeare’s London and in the plays: reality and mimesis Translation must have been very visible in Renaissance England, at least in cosmopolitan centres like London. The two great intellectual forces of the period both mobilized translation: humanism, as the Italian-inspired revival of Greek and Latin antiquity, and the Reformation, with its many European ramifications and its huge investment in Bible translation. Meanwhile, explorers were adding new lands and continents to the world map, opening up ever further imaginative vistas. Translators helped in the building of a national heritage by importing the much needed cultural materials from the past and from abroad, and by consolidating the still fluid vernacular language. Increased trade contacts, the influx of political refugees from overseas and the growing importance of travel in the formation of aspiring young Englishmen further contributed to the multiplication of cross-language contacts, expanding the space for translation and foreign-language teaching to develop.7 Responding to this situation of increased physical and intellectual mobility and to the fascinations and anxieties that came with it, Shakespeare set most of his plays in historically and/or geographically remote contexts. For example, one third of his plays are located in the ancient world; half a dozen of the comedies and tragedies take place in Renaissance Italy; and France provides part or all of the context for another half-dozen comedies and history plays. Even the play which is closest to the everyday world of the Elizabethans – The Merry Wives of Windsor – provides a distinctly exotic touch in the characters of Sir Hugh Evans (a Welsh parson and schoolmaster), Dr Caius (a French physician) and a fake German Duke. Much critical attention has been lavished on the representation of the ‘foreign’ in the drama and literature of Shakespeare’s time.8

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Thus, one may wonder to what extent the historically and geographically exotic settings, themes and conflicts in Shakespeare’s works are truly ‘foreign’, or only a disguised version of domestic realities, enabling playwrights and spectators to discuss the state of contemporary England without getting into trouble with the authorities, and with the visionary attractions of exoticism added as a bonus. Arguing along those lines, a play like Troilus and Cressida would be more a critical examination of Shakespeare’s England than an outward-reaching exploration of ancient Greece. To be sure, the cognitive mechanism of analogy is so pervasive and powerful that the potential relevance of such allegorical transpositions should never be downplayed. But a second line of critical inquiry has rather stressed the intrinsic foreignness of Shakespeare’s foreigners and foreign places, the argument being that their diVerence played a crucial role in probing the questions of self-definition that the period, with its multiplying new contacts and disturbing changes, was throwing up with such urgency. Viewed in terms of this second logic, Shakespeare’s Africans, Romans, Frenchmen, Irishmen, and so on, were not merely there for the sake of local colour or as a dramatic safeguard against censorship. Their multiple cultural diVerences were instrumental in defining ex negativo what it meant to be a Christian, to be European and, most of all, to be English. One would assume interlingual contacts and translational exchanges to be very much part of these Shakespearean negotiations of selfhood and diVerence, but that expectation does not quite materialize. In most of the plays Shakespeare adroitly exploits intralingual diVerence, with variations depending on regional or social provenance, profession, register or situation. But the presence of foreign languages and thus of translation remains fairly limited. The interlinguistic diVerences that we know to exist ‘objectively’ within Shakespeare’s fictional worlds are more often than not neutralized in their dramatic representation. In an interesting discussion of language representation in fictional texts, Meir Sternberg calls this the homogenizing convention (222–39). For example, the two eponymous lovers in Antony and Cleopatra come from diVerent linguistic communities, but in Shakespeare’s version

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of their story both speak the same language and no interlingual mediation is needed. Similarly, in the majority of situations the French characters in Shakespeare’s most polyglot play – Henry V – simply speak the English of their enemies. We are dealing here with a non-mimetic policy, which may entail a credibility problem, but that risk is usually neutralized by the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. John Gower – revived to serve as Chorus in Pericles – voices Shakespeare’s awareness of this convention as follows: By you being pardon’d, we commit no crime To use one language in each several clime Where our scene seems to live. (Per 4.4.5–7)

This mechanism frequently has to come to the rescue in matters of language representation. Few filmgoers raise an eyebrow when they hear Ben Hur expressing himself in accent-free modern English. In such a situation, English stops being a language and becomes language, functioning as a supposedly universal means of self-expression and communication. Meir Sternberg opposes the homogenizing convention to three other techniques: æ vehicular matching, meaning the allotment of specific

languages and language varieties to characters in accordance with the requirements of geolinguistic realism (Italians speak Italian, Frenchmen speak French); æ referential restriction, meaning that the entire text is monolingual because the social milieu of the fictional world is monolingual (all characters are from the same linguistic community); æ vehicular promiscuity, in the sense that shifts of linguistic medium are mimetically gratuitous, with multilingual means being used to express monolingual realities (the textual representation harnesses diVerent languages even though only one is used within the fictional world). Sternberg aptly observes that literary practice tends to be marked ‘by the spirit of mimetic compromise, manifesting itself in various mixtures, combinations and contextual adjustments’ of the basic

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possibilities (Sternberg, 224). In Shakespeare’s plays, linguistic homogenization seems to be the norm, inevitably pushing translation down the list of viable dramatic options. Vehicular matching also occurs, but it tends to be restricted to isolated and short fragments having token value: for instance, foreign place names and character names, greetings, titles, exclamations or other short stretches of text phrased in the foreign language which mimetically agrees with character and context. It is unfortunately very hard to reconstruct to what extent Shakespeare would have relied on the actor’s skill in producing an appropriate foreign stage accent as a means of exoticizing (for instance, frenchifying) lines which are otherwise in idiomatic English. Perhaps metrical analysis might be of help here: for example, certain prosodic irregularities in the Henry VI plays may well have been intended as cues instructing actors to give a French accent to the relevant speeches (see Hopkins, 5–10). One reason why linguistic homogenization appears to be the norm in Shakespeare’s plays is that he worked for a predominantly monolingual audience, with the poorly educated spectators largely outnumbering the more erudite ones. Most spectators would have been more familiar with the existence of foreign languages than with the languages themselves, somewhat like the ordinary soldier at the end of Timon of Athens, who cannot handle the Latin of Timon’s epigraph: SOLDIER

What’s on this tomb I cannot read. The character I’ll take with wax; Our captain hath in every figure skill, An ag’d interpreter, though young in days. (Tim 5.3.5–8)

Therefore, an excess of foreign languages would have put Shakespeare out of favour with the rank and file of his audience. Conversely, playgoers would definitely have savoured any cut at those who gave themselves airs on account of their superior education. It is significant that there is a satirical edge to several of the scenes where characters do display their knowledge of

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foreign languages and skill at translation. Pedants and schoolmasters who want to show oV their humanistic training are a ready target for this type of satire: HOLOFERNES

The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood; ripe as the pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of coelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven; and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth. (LLL 4.2.3–7)

The rhetorical translation from Latin into English is spinning totally out of control here. The lower end of the social scale provides equal opportunities for linguistic satire involving translation. For example, Hugh Evans’s eVorts in The Merry Wives of Windsor to jog his pupil’s Latin morphology is quite subverted by the flippancy and grossness of Quickly’s sound-translations. Translation here takes the form of interlingual punning: EVANS

What is your genitive case plural, William? . . . WILLIAM

Genitive horum, harum, horum. QUICKLY

Vengeance of Ginny’s case; fie on her! Never name her, child, if she be a whore. (MW 4.1.52–7)

Poor knowledge of the English target language too is a rich source of humour. For example, the English of Dr Caius in the same play is full of French chunks that got stuck halfway through the translation process: CAIUS

Vat is you sing? I do not like des toys. Pray you go and vetch me in my closet une boitine verde – a box, a green-a box. Do intend vat I speak? A green-a box. (MW 1.4.40–2)

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That the foreign-language skills of Shakespeare’s audience were limited is also borne out by the fact that translations of foreign phrases are sometimes provided not so much out of dramatic necessity as to assist the public’s understanding. Consider the following example from the King Henry VI Part 1: WATCH

[within] Qui la`? PUCELLE

Paysans, la pauvre gens de France: Poor market folks that come to sell their corn. (1H6 3.2.13–15)

The opening French sentence is followed by an amplified English translation, added as an intratextual gloss for the sake of the audience. Several of the examples from Henry V quoted above may serve here as well: the extract from the Salic law (a short piece of text, but crucial for the plot since it furnishes the legal pretext for Henry’s French campaign), the capture scene (where the boy’s interpreting serves the audience’s needs quite as much as Pistol’s) and the vocabulary scene (where simultaneous gestural translation probably accompanied the largely monolingual French dialogue). True, there are quite a few foreign-language words and phrases in Shakespeare’s plays that remain untranslated. But then, many of them were well-known quotes, or phrases from language textbooks. Also, being isolated and short stretches of texts, they would have gratified the more understanding members of the audience without distracting the less linguistically gifted. Dramatic pace is what counts here, of course, and at this point we may have hit upon a second important reason why translation scenes are not found more often. Indeed, having to quote both an original text, incomprehensible to many, and its translation always entails the risk of slowing down the play’s dramatic momentum. That Shakespeare was aware of this diYculty – and of a possible way to circumvent it – is demonstrated by the double translation scene in Act 4 of All’s Well that Ends Well. In order to unmask Parolles and to show him for the cowardly braggart that he is, the Lords dress up as enemy soldiers and

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capture him, speaking a strange gibberish. One of them pretends to serve as interpreter: 1 SOLDIER

Boskos vauvado. I understand thee, and can speak thy tongue. Kerelybonto. Sir, betake thee to thy faith, for seventeen poniards are at thy bosom. PAROLLES

O! 1 SOLDIER

O, pray, pray, pray! Manka revania dulche. 1 LORD

Oscorbidulchos volivorco. 1 SOLDIER

The general is content to spare thee yet, And, hoodwink’d as thou art, will lead thee on To gather from thee. Haply thou may’st inform Something to save thy life. (AW 4.1.74–83)

The questioning itself takes place in scene 4.3 where, interestingly, Shakespeare soon abandons the Lords’ mumbo jumbo: PAROLLES

I will confess what I know without constraint. If ye pinch me like a pasty I can say no more. 1 SOLDIER

Bosko chimurcho. 1 LORD

Boblibindo chicurmurco. 1 SOLDIER

You are a merciful general. Our general bids you answer to what I shall ask you out of a note. (AW 4.3.120–6)

From this point onwards, the interview is conducted entirely in English, with the interpreter ‘translating’ the general’s questions directly oV a piece of paper:

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1 SOLDIER

[Reads.] First, demand of him, how many horse the duke is strong. What say you to that? (AW 4.3.128–9)

The questioning goes on for another 200 lines. Clearly, after exploiting the comic potential of the Lords’ jabberwocky and its nonsensical translation for as far as it would go, Shakespeare understood that a less overt and more economical mode of linguistic mediation was needed to keep up the scene’s dramatic pace. The scene just discussed is one of those cases where translation is part of a disguise assumed to get to the truth of somebody or something. The Shakespearean canon has more examples of this, the most complex being ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, the playwithin-the play in Hamlet. It is allegedly an Italian story translated into a play, rendered first as a dumb-show and then as a spoken performance, with a speech inserted at Hamlet’s instruction to make sure that this sequence of translations serves its purpose of unmasking Claudius. Other translation scenes that fulfil a similar purpose in the plot are to be found in Titus Andronicus, King Henry VIII and Cymbeline. In scene 4.1 of Titus Andronicus, Lavinia, raped and mutilated, can explain her ordeal only by making a double translational detour, first pointing to a similar tale of treason and rape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (in Golding’s 1567 translation?), then writing a few Latin words in the sand for the others to interpret (after translation?). In scene 1.4 of Henry VIII, it is under the cover of being ‘a noble troop of strangers’ who ‘speak no English’, thus requiring the Chamberlain’s interlinguistic mediation, that the King and his followers get access to the banquet where he falls in love with his future wife Anne Boleyn. At the end of Cymbeline, it takes a double translation into Latin (a ‘lion’s whelp’ into ‘Leo-natus’; ‘tender air’ into ‘mollis aer’ and from there to ‘mulier’) to reveal the truth of an earlier prophecy and thus to enable the play’s happy ending (5.5.444–9). The amount of text that gets translated here is as small as it can get, but it does provide a crucial pivot for the plot to hinge on.

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To a certain extent, the same could be said about the many names of Shakespearean characters whose deeper truth or prophetic quality depends on translation: Benedictus (Much Ado about Nothing), John Cade and Walter Whitmore (both in 2 Henry VI), Perdita (The Winter’s Tale), and so forth. Given this wealth of evidence, it takes plenty of guts to pay no heed to names and translations: TALBOT

Puzzel or Pucelle, dolphin or dogfish, Your hearts I’ll stamp out with my horse’s heels And make a quagmire of your mingled brains. (1H6 1.4.106–8)

But then, Talbot gets killed three acts later at the hands of the French. Shakespeare himself, even though he exploited it sparingly, was more alert to the power of translation.

Notes 1 For the various meanings and implications carried by the word translate or translation in Shakespeare’s works, see Anderson (231–67) and Parker. 2 For helpful critical discussions, see Ostovich (147–61); Pugliatti (235–53); Wilcox (61–76); and Uman. For a discussion of the unusual diYculties encountered by translators of H5, see Hoenselaars, ‘People’ (243–52); and Delabastita, ‘Feast’ (303–40). 3 See also J. Derrick McClure’s contribution to this collection, ‘Scots for Shakespeare’. 4 Focusing on Shakespeare’s representations of Welshness, Hawkes examines the nexus between power, language, identity and translation (269–90). For an Irish perspective, see Cronin (193–212); and Neill, ‘Broken’ (1–32). 5 An excellent analysis of this mechanism is provided by Neill, ‘World’ (290–308). 6 See also Wells (15–32). 7 See Moisan (100–19); Simonini (319–29); and Williams, Deanne (233–42). 8 See especially Hoenselaars, Images; Maquerlot & Willems; and Marrapodi, Hoenselaars, et al.

2 Engendering Anew Shakespeare, Gender and Translation

Susan Bassnett

One of the least theorized areas of research in Translation Studies is theatre translation, a fact that has frequently been pointed out by scholars from diverse countries.1 One explanation for this lies in the particular diYculties posed by theatre translation, which lead translators to find pragmatic solutions rather than to seek to formulate a more systematic approach. There are countless publications that endeavour to establish parameters for the translation of poetry or prose, but the multi-dimensionality of theatre appears to present too many problems.2 Discussion is further complicated by a tendency to refer to the performance as the ‘translation’ of the written text, which suggests that a play can only be fully realized in performance, hence a translation of that play into another language will somehow always be incomplete. Yet plays are translated, often to great acclaim. Indeed, in contrast to the history of poetry and the novel in translation, there are many playwrights whose work has been transposed from one context to another so successfully that they have become canonical figures in more than one literature. We need only think of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov or Brecht or, earlier, of Molie`re and Goldoni. Above all, though, we find Shakespeare as a canonical figure in literatures across the world, a situation that has come into existence through successful translation. Translation is a complex activity that takes place on three levels. The first, most obvious, is the interlinguistic level, as a text in one language is transferred into another language. This transfer v 53 v

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process always involves a second level, the intertemporal dimension, since a text produced at one point in time can only be reproduced in another. Thirdly, that interlingual and intertemporal transfer takes place across cultures. Language, as the heart in the body of culture, is inseparable from the culture that adopts it, hence translation is also always a process of intercultural exchange. What happens during translation is that a text is decoded on various diVerent levels and re-encoded in another language, at another moment in time, somewhere else. Walter Benjamin famously depicted translation as a lifeenhancing activity that ensures the survival of a text. The life of a text is prolonged through translation, as a whole new generation of readers is empowered to read something that might otherwise fade into obscurity as tastes change. It is the translator’s task, Benjamin suggests, ‘to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work’ (Benjamin, ‘Task’, 80–1). Translation is therefore a process of textual continuity, and this view of it is far more useful than the popular view of translation as an endless story of loss. Textual transfer will, of course, involve loss, since what can be said in one language cannot be rendered in exactly the same way in another, but it also involves gain, not only on account of new readers but also because each language context adds something unique to itself. As Edward Sapir noted, ‘no two languages are ever suYciently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality’ (69). He adds that diVerent societies live in distinct worlds, not the same world with diVerent labels attached, a view reinforced a few years later by CliVord Geertz, who points out that ‘a culture is a system of symbols by which man confers significance upon his own experience’ (280). DiVerence is therefore likely to be accentuated by translation, for it is through translation that we can see most clearly the distinctions between one cultural and linguistic context and another. This essay is not principally concerned with interlingual translation, but rather with translation across time and cultural boundaries within the same language. The problems of translation,

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however, remain the same. Shakespeare’s world is a diVerent world and any rendering of Shakespeare’s plays, whether in some written form of translation or in terms of staging, involves the negotiation of diVerence. Writing about eighteenth-century France, Robert Darnton reminds us of the dangers of assuming sameness across time: other people are other. They do not think the way we do . . . nothing is easier than to slip into the comfortable assumption that Europeans thought and felt two centuries ago just as we do today – allowing for the wigs and wooden shoes. We constantly need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity with the past to be administered doses of culture shock. (Darnton, 4)

The context in which Shakespeare wrote his plays needs to be borne in mind, particularly when we encounter ideological diYculties such as the anti-semitic elements in The Merchant of Venice or the anti-women elements in The Taming of the Shrew or the sadistic misogyny of The Winter’s Tale. The gap between what might be considered acceptable at diVerent points in time cannot be ignored, which is the point Darnton was seeking to make when he endeavoured to get inside the minds of eighteenthcentury French apprentices who found it hilariously funny to torture cats to death. If we take The Taming of the Shrew as a starting point, we have to contend directly with the problem of a diVerent horizon of expectations between Shakespeare’s audience and an audience in our own time.3 What is clear is that Katherina’s final speech, in which she appears to be advocating subservience to a husband as a model of behaviour for all wives to follow is highly problematic in the twenty-first century. Contemporary audiences have no grasp of the misogynistic pamphleteering of the late sixteenth century, and view with distaste the hierarchical social model that underpins such lines as: Such duty as the subject owes the prince Even such a woman oweth to her husband.

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And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour, And not obedient to his honest will, What is she but a foul contending rebel, And graceless traitor to her loving lord? (TS 5.2.156–61)

What troubles readers today is the ending, which appears to reinforce the patriarchal status quo, despite the entertaining battle of wits between Katherina and Petruchio. Directors and actors have struggled with this ending in diVerent ways. Reviewing Michael Bogdanov’s modern-dress production of the play at Stratford-upon-Avon in the Guardian in 1978, the critic Michael Billington asked whether there was any need to revive ‘a play that seems totally oVensive to our age and our society’ (Gay, 102). Yet Bogdanov claimed that his strategy had been to emphasize the more brutal aspects of the ‘taming’, not to demonstrate that Shakespeare disliked women, but rather to suggest that Shakespeare was a feminist: ‘There is no question of it, his sympathy is with the women, and his purpose, to expose the cruelty of a society that allows these things to happen’ (Gay, 104). Four years later, in 1982 Barry Kyle declared that his vision of the play was not only feminist but also romantic. Katherina, he claimed, was ‘a wild, wonderful, free woman who is shackled by a barbarian’ (Gay, 111). This, of course, is similar to the representation in the movie version performed by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, where the taming of Katherina is read as a love story and two larger-than-life characters come to an accord. Katherina’s resignation speech can then be seen as both ironic and tongue-in-cheek, and hints strongly at a bond between her and Petruchio, implying that they have concluded another kind of contract that is hidden from the rest of the world. In her book, Ms-directing Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare, Elizabeth Schafer discusses three productions by feminist directors: Di Trevis’s 1985 Stratford production, Jude Kelly’s 1993 version for the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and Gale Edwards’s Stratford production of 1995. After considering diVerences between the three, Schafer concludes that ‘as the wretched play

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is still good box oYce, it might be preferable to have women, or those with a sensitivity to gender issues, directing it’. She also comments that it is ‘a very dangerous play’ (Schafer, 71). What emerges from all these perspectives is the diYculty directors, actors and critics have with a play that so patently originated in a diVerent cultural moment. The persecution of Katherina by her husband is hard for contemporary audiences to take, hence the various devices employed by directors and actors who seek to oVer alternative readings, in which Katherina is empowered through irony, or through love. The only reading that is not acceptable is the one that probably accords most with that of Shakespeare’s world – that it is not only good, but also highly entertaining to see a sharp-tongued woman humiliated and forced into public submission. We have problems with this today because it clashes with acceptable notions of behaviour and with contemporary belief in gender equality. Translating the play for the modern stage involves re-interpreting it in the light of contemporary sensibilities and ideologies. The task of translating Shakespeare, whether interlinguistically or intertemporally, is further complicated by his canonical status. It is well known in Translation Studies that norms governing translation vary according to the status of the original author. In the case of Shakespeare, the steady process of canonization that has taken place in the English literary system since the eighteenth century means that there is a strong belief that his works should not be tampered with, since they are said to contain some special essential quality that puts them on a higher level. Shakespeare is the only named writer that English schoolchildren are required to study, and any attempts to modernize the language of the plays or any productions that appear too controversial are subject to harsh criticism.4 It is therefore much easier for directors working in languages other than English to experiment with Shakespeare’s plays, because they are not bound by the canonical status attributed to the texts in English. Not, of course, that there is a consensus about the texts, quite the reverse. Shakespeare has been variously proclaimed as a radical, as a conservative, as a religious writer, as a great humanist,

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as a philosopher, as a feminist. As New Historicism has shown, the plays produce contradictory, plural meanings and those meanings change over time. The process of rereading and hence rewriting or translating Shakespeare continues alongside the insistence on his canonical status, creating interesting tensions and endlessly exposing gaps in our understanding of Shakespeare’s world and our own. As Catherine Belsey argues in her essay on meaning and gender in Shakespeare’s comedies, meaning ‘depends on diVerence’, and new meanings as they emerge ‘release the possibility of new practices’ (171). Obviously, each generation will produce its own versions of Shakespeare or of any other writer, but it is important to bear in mind that always, in translation, there are two poles: the point of departure and the finishing point. In the case of Shakespeare, the starting point is always the end of the sixteenth century, a world of uncertainty and uneasiness, a time when the same audiences who went to see a play at the Globe would also enjoy the spectacle of a public execution or share Queen Elizabeth’s liking for bear-baiting. And no discussion of gender in Shakespeare’s plays can ignore the fact that his audiences were watching a highly stylized form of performance where all the female roles were played by males. Once we remember this, then the tone of Katherina’s speech changes. Lines such as the following, spoken by a performer such as Edith Evans or Fiona Shaw, take on a very diVerent significance when we imagine them spoken by a boy actor: Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth, Unapt to toil and trouble in the world, But that our soft conditions and our hearts Should well agree with our external parts? (TS 5.2.166–9)

Elsewhere, in plays involving disguise such as As You Like It or Twelfth Night, or in the courtship sequence in King Henry V, or in the mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the audience is consciously reminded of the gender gap between actors and their roles. Today, in a theatre that has been shaped by psychological realism, a theatre where women have performed

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alongside men for centuries, the layers of gendered meaning that an Elizabethan audience would have read into performances have disappeared, to be replaced with a diVerent kind of gendered consciousness that renders aspects of the plays more problematic than they might have been in their own time. A case in point is All’s Well that Ends Well, one of the less frequently performed comedies, generally referred to as a ‘problem play’. What makes it problematic is the ambiguity of the depiction of the central characters, the virtuous Helena and her despicable husband, Bertram. Dr Johnson summed up the problem at the heart of the play when he described Bertram in the following terms: A man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward and leaves her as a profligate; when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness. (Wimsatt, 113)

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw Helena as one of Shakespeare’s finest heroines. Coleridge famously praised her as Shakespeare’s loveliest creation (Bate, Romantics, 210–11). Helena’s suVering, her willingness to endure any humiliation in order to win the love of the reluctant Bertram struck a chord with audiences in the age when the ideal of femininity was the Angel of the House. The angelic qualities of Helena, in contrast with the diabolic qualities demonstrated by her husband, reflected the norms of a society that had established rigid codes of behaviour for women. The fairy tale of the virtuous poor woman who wins the heart of the nobleman after years of suVering appealed to audiences throughout the nineteenth century. The power of that fairy tale can be seen clearly in Edward Burne-Jones’s famous painting of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884), in which the poor woman is presented as the incarnation of virtue and the monarch kneels adoringly at her feet. Today, the myth has lost its power and All’s Well that Ends Well does not have a place in the popular Shakespearean repertoire.

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Helena Kaut-Howson is one of the few women directors who has returned on several occasions to the play. Her explanation of the attraction she feels for All’s Well that Ends Well is that it can be read as a play about double standards, hence it has a particular resonance in our highly commercialized age. Her production in Regent’s Park, London, in 1997 took on another dimension during the run with the death of Princess Diana, a woman widely perceived as having lived out her own version of a tragic fairy tale. Reviews of the production were not favourable, and the director herself claims to have no faith in Shakespeare’s supposed happy ending: I believe that what Helena learns about herself and about Bertram is unspeakable really. You know that they won’t be happy, that they’ll break up after a year; but the seduction of the theatrical moment of the ‘happy end’ is such that you believe, for a little while, they are in love. (Schafer, 115)

Changes in social behaviour, ideology and taste condition responses to texts, and if we look at the history of responses to Shakespeare in terms of gender representation, then the popularity or otherwise of many plays varies considerably, as does the desirability for actors of playing certain roles. The role of Katherine of Aragon, another wronged wife in King Henry VIII, was a popular vehicle for some of the great nineteenth-century actresses, as was the role of Constance in a play we rarely see today, King John. Both plays oVered opportunities for spectacle, but more importantly for strong dramatic situations involving women in desperate situations. Better-known plays have also undergone transformations in terms of gendered readings. If we take the role of Ophelia, for example, the variations of interpretation reflect gendered social attitudes towards daughters. In Jean-Franc¸ois Ducis’s French translation of Hamlet, published in 1770, the structure of the play was revised in accordance with norms of good taste prevalent at the time. Ophelia is Claudius’ daughter, hence the love between Ophelia and Prince Hamlet represents the classic conflict between love and duty, as

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Hamlet faces up to the dilemma of loving the woman who is related to his arch-rival for the throne of Denmark. Ophelia tries to intervene with her father, but fails and eventually Hamlet kills Claudius, though not before Claudius has killed Gertrude. The lovers are then free to marry and to rule Denmark happily.5 Such a translation rewrites the play not only according to norms of taste and acceptability, but also in terms of gendered behaviour. Ducis’s version of the play mirrors social attitudes in lateeighteenth-century France, so it is hardly surprising that we find vastly diVerent Ophelias in nineteenth-century England. The figure of Ophelia was a source of inspiration to several painters, most notably John Everett Millais, whose 1852 portrait of Elizabeth Siddall as the drowning Ophelia floating in an idyllic English stream became one of the best-known Pre-Raphaelite paintings. In the same year, Arthur Hughes depicted a very young, child-like Ophelia throwing flowers into the water, while J.W. Waterhouse made three portraits of Ophelia, in 1889, 1894 and 1910. What fascinated readers in the nineteenth century was the theme of a woman driven mad for love, and performances emphasized the tragedy of Ophelia’s madness. Ellen Terry went so far as to visit a madhouse in order to acquire first-hand knowledge of the symptoms of madness before she first played Ophelia. As the paintings also show, there was a strong visual quality to nineteenth-century perceptions of Ophelia, which meant that the role appealed to actresses with a strong pictorial style of performance. One of the central and most problematic questions in Translation Studies concerns the notion of equivalence. Definitions of equivalence abound, some premised on a belief in sameness – meaning that whatever appears in the source text can be transferred into its direct equivalent in the target language – but most assuming that equivalence must be based on a more dynamic model of equivalent function. The skopos theory of Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiss, for example, stresses the objective of a translation in any formulation of equivalence.6 Translation becomes the creation of a target text that is functional and appropriate to the target audience, and it is the translator’s

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responsibility to determine what the role of that source text should be. This concept of translation gives the translator a great deal of freedom, and if we broaden the definition of a translator to include both actors and directors, then we can see that a theatrical production is always a form of translation that endeavours to be functionally appropriate. Luigi Pirandello, in his essay ‘Illustrators, actors and translators’ made the parallels explicit, writing ironically about how all these three were engaged in betraying the original writer’s work in one way or another. Pirandello’s extreme position is that the play is always the property of the playwright, but that the process of translating that play onto the stage necessarily involves traducing the playwright’s intentions, because inevitably the actors and the director will re-interpret the text in their own way. Betrayal is therefore part of the process of interpretation: How many times does some poor dramatic writer not shout ‘No, not like that!’ when he is attending rehearsals and writhing in agony, contempt, rage and pain because the translation into material reality (which, perforce, is someone else’s) does not correspond to the ideal conception and execution that had begun with him and belonged to him alone. (Pirandello, 23–4)

Just as theories of equivalence have tended to focus more on the function a translation is expected to fulfil in the target system, so theories that centre on the translation of theatre texts have come to stress the inevitability of acculturation, something that distinguishes theatre translation from the translation of other genres. Sirkku Aaltonen sums this up neatly: A theatre production is always closely tied to its own specific audience in a particular place and at a particular point in time . . . The translation process always involves an eVort to adjust . . . to the aesthetics of the receiving theatre and the social discourse of the target society. (Aaltonen, Time-Sharing, 8)

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It is therefore unsurprising to note the popularity of some Shakespeare plays in this post-feminist era, notably the comedies that oVer strong roles for clever women. On stage and in the cinema, there are today a number of strong women performers who aspire to some of the Shakespearean comic roles. As You Like It, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure all fit this pattern, as does Love’s Labour’s Lost, which has undergone something of a revival in recent years. Interestingly, although once seen as one of the lesser plays in the comic repertoire, it was chosen for staging by Eliza Vestris, one of the few successful women theatre managers of the early nineteenth century, when she took over Covent Garden. Love’s Labour’s Lost, a courtly comedy often compared to its detriment with the extremely popular Much Ado about Nothing, oVers strong female roles and an ending that shows women triumphing over men. Earlier generations had found the comedies appealing because of the possibility so many of them oVered for cross-dressing, and the appearance of a popular actress on stage disguised as a man and wearing breeches as a necessary part of the role was both titillatory and liberating. Roles that are more problematic for contemporary actors and audiences include Volumnia, mother of Coriolanus, and Cleopatra. In an early feminist essay that explores sexist criticism of Antony and Cleopatra, Linda Fitz points out that the play has never been considered one of the ‘great’ tragedies, and suggests that critics have constructed this hierarchy based on the belief that the theme of sexual passion is somehow less noble than the grander, more public themes of King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth (Fitz, 182–211). A.C. Bradley, of course, took this view in his Oxford lecture on the play in 1909. Fitz also argues that a double standard applies in assessment of the behaviour of Antony and Cleopatra in the play. Sexual passion has made critics from Coleridge onwards feel slightly uncomfortable. In the age of imperialism, Antony’s decision to flee from the battle of Actium was viewed as totally reprehensible, George Bernard Shaw famously remarking that if he knew anyone who had behaved like that, he would spit in his face.

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The great age of Cleopatra was the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the myth of the femme fatale was at its height. If the gentle, long-suVering Angel of the House represented an ideal for Victorian womanhood, the aggressively sexual female predator was her antithesis. The demonic women drawn by Aubrey Beardsley with their serpentine hair and heavily painted eyes are archetypical representations of the vampiric figures that haunted the European imagination. Salome, Cleopatra, Medea, Lucrezia Borgia, Clytemnestra were all roles much sought-after by leading actresses of the age, and characters that provided material for painters, musicians and writers. These powerful women were to find a new lease of life in the twentieth century with the advent of cinema, and there is no shortage of film Cleopatras. But just as the long-suVering woman-as-victim figure is less appealing today, so also is the femme fatale, for both in diVerent ways have their existence in relation to men, rather than on their own terms. Moreover, the role of the mythical femme fatale sits uncomfortably with realist performance. Productions of Antony and Cleopatra in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries stressed the spectacular elements that are reinforced in the language of the play, but fashions have changed. We can discern the first signs of the demise of the fin de sie`cle Cleopatra in William Archer’s excoriating review of Eleonora Duse’s portrayal in 1893. Duse was already famous in Italy and hailed as one of Europe’s finest and most original performers. The Italian version she used was by her lover, the writer Arrigo Boito, who cut Shakespeare’s play considerably to ensure greater prominence for Duse, reducing the role of Antony and making it eVectively a vehicle for Cleopatra. When he saw the production in London, Archer dismissed Boito’s version as ‘a badly-constructed domestic drama in outlandish costumes’, then went on to attack Duse for her playing of the role: ‘There is nothing in the least voluptuous, sensuous, langorous about her performance. Her very embraces are chilly and she kisses like a canary-bird’ (Stokes, Booth and Bassnett, 148). Archer’s choice of adjectives is revealing of how the role was envisioned by him and his contemporaries. Cleopatra should be

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‘voluptuous, sensuous, langorous’. Yet though the play is indeed full of sensuous language, it is also a play with a great deal of bawdy humour and at its core is a play about acting. In the final scene, Cleopatra calls for all the trappings of queendom so that she can stage her death triumphantly. Before she does so, she tells her maids Charmian and Iras how the victorious Roman masses will represent her: The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us and present Our Alexandrian revels; Antony Shall be brought drunken forth; and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’th’ posture of a whore. (AC 5.2.215–19)

The full impact of these lines in their original context cannot be translated, for ‘squeaking’ boys no longer play female roles on our stages. The irony here is doubled by the fact that a boy actor first spoke those lines, but despite what is inevitably lost in translation, the point Cleopatra is making comes across strongly. In choosing to die theatrically, selecting the place, the time, the costumes and the means to bring it about, Cleopatra takes control of both the stage and the world. She denies Rome its triumph and the play ends not with a carnival but with a solemn procession. Yvonne Brewster, a feminist director, staged the play in 1991, at the time of the Gulf War, with Dona Croll, a black performer, as Cleopatra. In this way, by highlighting ethnicity rather than gender conflicts, the play acquired a new dimension, for Antony and Cleopatra is not only a love story, but also a story of two diVerent world views, the Roman world and the Orient. By opening out the issues that run through the play beyond the personal, the text acquires a resonance that places it at the centre of contemporary consciousness. A major revival of the Cleopatra myth that moves beyond the now out-dated idea of the destructive femme fatale and explores the play in terms of culture clash seems long overdue.

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Translation, it has been argued, is a highly complex activity that takes place on several levels and involves much more than language. Any consideration of translation across time exposes great diVerences in translation practice, as well as similarities. For if translation is indeed the means whereby the survival of a text is ensured, it is also important to remember that what survives can never be the same as its source. Textual survival through translation means that changes have to be made to the text, and this is particularly clear in the case of theatre texts. The plays we read may bear a resemblance to texts first written by Shakespeare, give or take a few centuries of editing and the existence of more than single versions, but how we read them is another matter. The heroines of the nineteenth-century Shakespearean repertoire were products of their time, embodied by performers using techniques of that time, and must therefore be seen as translations of Shakespeare, just as productions of Shakespeare today are translations of our own time. Given also that acculturation seems to be the distinguishing feature of all theatre translation, it is only to be expected that gender priorities, along with a set of other factors that assume importance at particular moments, will be highlighted in translation. What this means is that Shakespeare, as Jan Kott proposed, is not only our contemporary, but the contemporary of all those actors, directors and readers who have discovered and created their own version of his plays through translation.

Notes 1 See Aaltonen, Finnish; Bassnett ‘Trapped’ (90–108); Lefevere; and Tornqvist. 2 For an overview of the diVerence between genres with regard to translation, see Bassnett. Particularly useful also is Pavis. 3 See also Rutter; and Wynne-Davies. 4 The question of whether to ‘translate’ Shakespeare into modern English is still highly contentious. The journal of the Globe theatre, Around the Globe, published a debate between Susan Bassnett and Tom Deveson in Issue 20 (Winter 2001–2), which followed an article by Bassnett in the Independent (15 November 2001)

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arguing the case for modernizing the language. The response to this article was extraordinary, generating discussions on local and national radio, considerable correspondence from members of the public, debates in schools, a debate in April 2002 at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford and in July at the Roundhouse. Opinion was roughly split with some 40 per cent in favour of modern versions of Shakespeare and (the more vociferous) 60 per cent rejecting translation entirely. 5 For a detailed account of Ham in French translations, see Heylen. 6 For a clear account of contemporary thinking about translation, see Gentzler, Contemporary.

3 ‘Our Language of Love’ Shakespeare in Japanese Translation

Tetsuo Kishi

‘I love you’ is unspoken / In our language of love. Song from Irma la Douce

I wonder how many readers remember the French musical of the 1950s, Irma la Douce, the story of Nestor, a young law student, and Irma, a tart with a heart of gold. They meet in a seedy district of Paris, fall in love almost at first sight and start living together. Unfortunately Nestor is penniless and so Irma has to work hard – even harder than before. Nestor is far from happy about this situation. He tries to find a solution by inventing a kindly old gentleman named Oscar who, he decides, should be Irma’s only customer and he himself plays the man, in disguise. Everything seems to go well for a while, but entertaining the same woman in two ostensibly diVerent male personages as well as earning a living for both as a manual labourer, turns out to be physically too demanding to the naive law student. When he realizes that Irma seems to care for Oscar more than for Nestor, he considers that it is just too much and takes recourse to what he thinks is the only possible action: he ‘murders’ Oscar by throwing the latter’s clothing into the river Seine. He is then arrested for a crime he never committed, and a series of totally implausible events follow, but as the audience expected and hoped all the while, Nestor and Irma are happily reunited in the end.1 The plot of Irma la Douce is downright silly and frivolous, but it is worth close analysis. What is crucial about it is that Irma v 68 v

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does not know what Nestor and the audience are well aware of, namely that Nestor and Oscar are really one and the same person. There are two diVerent levels of awareness and the discrepancy between the two contributes significantly to the comic eVect of the play. Seen in this way, Irma la Douce shares its plot structure with a number of first-rate comedies, including Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. v In Twelfth Night Viola (or rather a young woman, because we do not learn that her name is Viola until the final scene of the play) disguises herself as a man, calls herself – or should we say ‘himself’? – Cesario, and serves Orsino who has been courting Olivia unsuccessfully for some time. Neither Orsino nor Olivia is aware, but Viola herself and the audience know, that Cesario is in fact a woman. This produces an ironical eVect in a number of exchanges between Cesario-Viola and other characters. For instance in Act 2, scene 4, Orsino talks to Viola about love from a male point of view and Viola responds as a man, but since she is in fact a woman, Orsino’s remark about the shallowness of feminine passion could hurt Viola, which of course he does not realize. Similarly Viola’s apology for feminine love contains a hidden meaning which is never clear to Orsino, whereas the audience and Viola herself are more than conscious of it. No production of Twelfth Night can be successful unless it conveys the subtlety and complexity of the exchange. This, however, is not so easy to do when the play is performed in a Japanese translation. One thing to bear in mind is that from a sociolinguistic point of view Japanese is more complex and less neutral than English. There is, for instance, the problem of selecting the personal pronoun.2 Many modern European languages use two forms of the secondperson pronoun to refer to a single individual. Similarly, Early Modern English had thou and you, but the diVerence between the two may not be quite the same as the diVerence between du and sie in German, or tu and vous in French. I suppose German translators would use du and French translators tu for Shakespeare’s thou, but they would not automatically use sie or vous for Shakespeare’s you.

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They would have to decide which second-person pronoun to use, depending on the relation between the speaker and the person addressed and the situation both speaker and addressee are in. Essentially it is the same with Japanese, but the selection becomes far more complicated because one may have as many as twenty diVerent forms of the second-person pronoun to choose from. Some are extremely formal and polite, some archaic, while others are very intimate, or clearly derogatory. Some are used only by men and some only by women. Moreover, there are also as many or, perhaps, even more forms of the first-person pronoun, and so the combination of a first-person pronoun and a second-person pronoun can be varied almost infinitely. Another important type of selection the Japanese translator has to make is that of linguistic styles.3 At least two diVerent forms of verb suYxes are used in spoken Japanese: the polite and the familiar. The verb suYxes are often followed by a postpositional word. Some postpositional words are used primarily by women, some primarily by men, and if a member of one group uses a word that is supposed to belong to the other group, his or her sexual identity is likely to be seriously doubted by the listener. The selection of appropriate expressions also has to do with social status, age, and the like. In other words, Japanese people are frequently confronted with what linguists call ‘code-switching’.4 While there are no absolutely fixed rules about code-switching, there are certain generally accepted rules, and one ignores these at a considerable social risk. The relation between Orsino and Cesario, as master and servant, is fairly clearly defined and so the appropriate linguistic code to be followed here by a Japanese translator seems to be simple enough. To some extent this is true in the original version as well. Cesario sticks to ‘you’ when he (or rather she) speaks to Orsino. He also uses ‘my lord’, ‘your lordship’ and ‘sir’. Orsino uses ‘thou’ throughout.5 Sometimes he calls Cesario ‘boy’ or ‘my boy’. This expression could be somewhat insulting, but here it is more endearing, because by now we know that Orsino loves the new page whom he calls ‘good Cesario’. Clearly there is a certain degree of intimacy between them.

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In Japanese translations of Twelfth Night, it is blatantly obvious that the master is socially superior to the servant. The first- and second-person pronouns used by one are always diVerent from those used by the other, as is the case in the original version. Not only that, Cesario in Japanese versions always uses polite verb suYxes. In some Japanese translations this is reciprocated by Orsino, but his social superiority to Cesario is still clear because of the personal pronouns he uses. There are Japanese translations, however, in which Orsino uses familiar verb suYxes. This Orsino seems to feel that Cesario, being a servant, is not worth the kind of politeness which he would take for granted in his relation to Olivia, for instance. In other words, Orsino is too aloof for Cesario to approach him emotionally. The psychological distance between the two characters is larger than in the original and the kind of intimacy which we notice in Shakespeare is virtually lost. As a result, this scene is likely to become more demanding to the actress playing Viola-Cesario. Because of the short speech which closes Act 1, scene 4, ‘Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife’ (1.4.42), the audience are by now aware of the aVection that Viola harbours toward Orsino and therefore fully appreciate the complexity of the following exchange: ORSINO

My life upon’t, young though thou art, thine eye Hath stay’d upon some favour that it loves. Hath it not, boy? VIOLA

A little, by your favour.6 ORSINO

What kind of woman is’t? VIOLA

Of your complexion. ORSINO

She is not worth thee then. What years, i’faith? VIOLA

About your years, my lord. (TN 2.4.23–8)

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Although Viola tries to be polite, she is practically saying, ‘I love you’. But because the relation between Orsino and Viola in Japanese translation is defined not only by personal pronouns but by verb suYxes as well, and because the polite style of her speeches is so overwhelming, the Japanese audience may fail fully to grasp the hidden meaning of her remarks. Also, her remarks may sound a little too daring and presumptuous. Either way, there is a discrepancy between what Viola says and the way she says it. This discrepancy can be overcome, I think, only by an appropriate kind of acting. The actress ought to convey to the audience that the character she plays is not really so presumptuous, even if what she says may sound that way. Without such a corrective measure, the Japanese Viola might well become a less sympathetic character than she is in the Shakespearean original. Orsino and Viola are not strangers, but courtship can take place between strangers as well, and we note one such case in Act 3, scene 2 of The Comedy of Errors. Here Antipholus of Syracuse confesses his aVection to Luciana. Of course they have never met before – strictly speaking they have known each other since dinner time, which cannot be very long – but Luciana believes (wrongly) that the man is her brother-in-law, Antipholus of Ephesus, and Antipholus of Syracuse is not aware of her misunderstanding. Needless to say, perhaps, the two characters’ misconception is clear to the audience. How long have Luciana and Antipholus of Ephesus known each other? We do not know but, we can safely assume, at least since the time when Antipholus of Ephesus got married to Adriana. Probably they had already met even before that time. If so, how long have Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana been married? Again we do not know but there are indications that the husband is bored with married life. In fact, he is looking for consolation elsewhere. Unless he is a pathological philanderer – and there is no reason to think that he is – it generally takes a while before a husband begins to contemplate the prospect of an extramarital aVair. This will lead to only one conclusion: Antipholus of Ephesus and Luciana have known each other long enough and well enough. Therefore, it will be natural for them to

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speak to each other in an informal, familiar style, and this is exactly what happens in 3.2 of The Comedy of Errors. Of course it is not Antipholus of Ephesus but Antipholus of Syracuse who appears in this scene, but since Luciana thinks she is talking to Antipholus of Ephesus, we may analyse her speeches accordingly. More often than not she uses ‘you’ when she addresses Antipholus, but her speeches contain such expressions as ‘thy love-springs’, ‘thy tongue’ and ‘thy sister’ as well. On one occasion she calls Antipholus ‘Antipholus’. While her style is not too intimate, it is never formal. Antipholus of Syracuse begins with ‘you’ but soon shifts to ‘thou’ and uses it more or less consistently until the end of the exchange. The shift may strike us as odd since to him Luciana is a stranger, but perhaps it is significant that the shift occurs when his courtship becomes more vehement. Altogether their exchange is informal and familiar, if not casual. The situation is considerably diVerent in a Japanese translation. In Japan it is almost mandatory for strangers to speak to each other in a formal style with polite verb suYxes. Only an exceptionally rude person would deviate from this code. It is also possible that such deviation will be interpreted as the speaker’s mental immaturity, since it is not realistic to expect small children to master the more complicated formal style of speaking. As Antipholus of Syracuse seems to be an adult with common sense, it is only natural that a Japanese translator should make him speak to Luciana in a fairly formal style. He may be a passionate lover but he does not allow himself to break away from the socially appropriate manner of speaking. Luciana in Japanese translation, however, is an intriguing case. It is diYcult to generalize about the way a Japanese woman would speak to her brother-in-law. No doubt some women might adopt a familiar style and others a more polite style, but as far as the Japanese translations I have examined are concerned, Luciana always uses a polite style. There can be several explanations for this. It is not clear how old Antipholus is, but being the husband of Luciana’s elder sister he is her social senior. It is fairly common, though not obligatory, to adopt a polite style to address someone

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who is socially senior. Moreover, Luciana is a woman and there is considerable consensus among Japanese that it would make her more modest, more feminine, and so more sympathetic to use a polite style. As it happens there is no scene in The Comedy of Errors where Antipholus of Ephesus speaks directly and at length to Luciana. We can only imagine what kind of style he would have been using when he speaks to his sister-in-law, but it seems natural to think that the relation between the two characters would, after all these years, be a fairly intimate one. It would be odd if Antipholus of Ephesus adopted a formal and polite style, the kind of style which Antipholus of Syracuse uses in Japanese translation. It would be damaging to the fundamental premises of the play if Luciana at this stage noticed anything odd about Antipholus of Syracuse whom she firmly believes to be her brother-in-law. The man should be absolutely identical, in her eyes at any rate, to the real Antipholus of Ephesus. In dramatic terms, Antipholus of Syracuse is expected to speak in the same way as Antipholus of Ephesus. From an English perspective, this may seem only a whimsical conjecture, but the way Antipholus of Syracuse speaks in Japanese translation runs the risk of revealing the true identity of the man: something that is impossible in the original English version. Another case of courtship between total strangers is to be found in Romeo and Juliet. In a short exchange in Act 1, scene 5, where the star-crossed lovers meet for the first time, Juliet uses ‘you’. Romeo never uses a second-person pronoun except when he says ‘thine’ to refer to Juliet’s lips. The next time they speak to each other in the balcony scene, Juliet uses ‘thou’ not only in the speeches directed to Romeo but also in the soliloquy to which she does not realize Romeo is listening (2.2.33–6 and 38–49). Romeo, too, consistently uses ‘thou’. Already there is a considerable degree of intimacy between them. Then in Act 2, scene 6, there is a brief exchange before the wedding ceremony, which is not particularly important for the development of the plot. The final and extremely important exchange appears in Act 3, scene 5, in which Romeo leaves Verona after spending a night with his newly

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wedded wife. Both Romeo and Juliet use ‘thou’ throughout the scene, but Romeo’s last speech before his exit contains ‘you’. The only reason I can think of for this rather awkward intrusion is that the word rhymes with ‘adieu’. In spite of this, there is no tangible linguistic change in the relation between Romeo and Juliet in this scene. This is not the case with Japanese translations of the play. The relation between the star-crossed lovers changes psychologically and physically as well as linguistically after they spend the night together. At their first meeting, they are expected to speak and do speak formally, using polite verb suYxes. They retain these in the balcony scene. A shift to familiar verb suYxes at this stage would no doubt make them sound less than well-bred and alienate them from the Japanese audience. In Japanese translations the shift takes place after the marriage is consummated. Romeo and Juliet are not only man and wife but they have also slept together. Even in Japanese, which in terms of ethical standards can be more prudish than English, it would be ridiculous for Romeo and Juliet to retain the polite style of speaking. One of the questions I shall be concerned with is how far translations of Shakespearean plays should accommodate socially accepted codes of the language into which they are translated. To what degree is it possible to deviate from such codes and still produce translations that are faithful enough to the original? On the one hand, if Japanese translators tried meticulously to reproduce the linguistic codes of the source language, the result would sound odd and perhaps unacceptable to an audience accustomed to linguistic codes that are considerably diVerent. On the other hand, if translators only respected the codes of the target language, they would be likely almost irrevocably to distort Shakespeare. Code-switching according to the relation between the speaker and the addressee, the shift from a familiar style to a polite style and vice versa, is a relative act. In addition, speakers of Japanese have to be engaged in an absolute kind of code-switching, and one of the most obvious cases has to do with gender. The Japanese language has some personal pronouns which are used

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only by men and some which are only employed by women. Similarly there are postpositional words which are used only by members of one gender category. Over the last two or three decades spoken Japanese has changed drastically, and today young Japanese tend to use a style of language which is more neutral than that used by their parents, but by and large it is still true that Japanese is a far more gender-conscious language than English. This phenomenon may result in a strange conflict when it comes to translating those plays of Shakespeare’s in which a particular character’s sexual identity is meant to be ambiguous.7 Viola in Twelfth Night, who disguises herself as a man, is such a character, but she is mainly involved with Orsino and Olivia, who think they are socially superior to her even though she is supposed to come from a good enough family. In her behaviour towards these characters it is the social relation between them rather than her sexual identity that counts. In other words, she is expected to be more concerned with a selection of appropriate verb suYxes (polite/familiar) than with a selection of appropriate personal pronouns (male/female). The characteristics of the language of Viola as a woman disguised as a man become really clear when we compare her speech to that of her twin brother Sebastian. In the original English version we note no diVerence between the two, but in Japanese translations, some of them at any rate, Sebastian uses considerably more masculine expressions such as male personal pronouns.8 It seems as if the translators felt that this device would make him more natural and convincing as a dramatic character. But we must bear in mind that it could also undermine the surprise eVect of the final scene of Twelfth Night where Viola and Sebastian are reunited. The exchange between Viola and Sebastian in this particular scene is almost hopelessly complicated. Apparently they are strangers, and apparently Cesario (Viola) is a man. Gradually Sebastian and Viola realize that they are brother and sister. Sebastian also realizes that the person he is speaking to is a woman. In the original version no shift is required from a polite style with polite verb suYxes to a familiar style with familiar verb suYxes. In the original version Viola does not change her personal

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pronouns. In some Japanese translations, however, the twins subtly change their linguistic styles. The reunion and recognition is expressed verbally as well, which could undermine the impact and, since it is too obvious, make this extraordinarily moving scene rather shallow. Another Shakespearean comedy that involves the heroine in disguise is As You Like It. Rosalind disguises herself as a man and calls herself Ganymede. Both as Rosalind and as Ganymede she uses ‘I’ when she refers to herself. There is absolutely nothing unusual about it. But everything changes when the play is translated into Japanese. There are several comparatively neutral first-person pronouns in Japanese, and Rosalind could use one of these throughout the play, but it would make the character rather bloodless and less real than Shakespeare would seem to have conceived her. So the Japanese Rosalind shifts from feminine personal pronouns to masculine personal pronouns when she becomes Ganymede. In Act 1 she is likely to adopt the feminine linguistic style with a host of feminine postpositional words, but in Act 2 she will discard them all, except in the company of her confidante, Celia. It is hard to say whether or not this is an advantage to the actress playing Rosalind. An English-speaking actress may modify her bodily movement and gesture and possibly the use of her voice as well once she starts playing a man. A Japanese actress can do the same, but we must not forget that she is given a text where more detailed and precise stage directions are implied. To express physically the masculinity that is already clearly indicated verbally could make her performance too obvious, redundant and superficial. An overwritten text tends to require a restrained performance, and I would not be surprised if the actress as a result were to feel frustrated. On the other hand, this text may be easier to play since what a performer may have to supply when she plays the English-language version is already there. In any case, it is clear that the translation leaves the actress less room for invention. Even so the role of Rosalind is diYcult enough. In Act 4, scene 1, Rosalind as Ganymede plays a game with Orlando and tells him to call her Rosalind. What matters here is the sexual ambiguity of

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the character. When Rosalind says, ‘And I am your Rosalind’ (4.1.61), she is telling the truth, although Orlando is not supposed to notice it. The Japanese Rosalind in this scene would revert to the feminine style she used in Act 1 and become decidedly more feminine than she was in some scenes in Acts 2 and 3. There is a clear distinction between the reality and the game, and the shift from one to the other is more obvious in the translation. This is not likely to be what Shakespeare intended. In the English version of As You Like It, Rosalind’s language is neither particularly feminine nor particularly masculine, and the ambiguity is retained throughout the play. The problem is not so serious when Rosalind is in control of the situation, but in Act 4, scene 3 she loses that control, at least briefly. When she faints at the sight of Orlando’s bloody napkin she reveals, if not irrevocably, her identity as a woman. Her first speech after her recovery is, ‘I would I were at home’ (4.3.161). Shakespeare gives us no clear clue as to whether she has regained her self-control as well. If she has, she will speak the line as Ganymede. If not, she will speak it as Rosalind – not the Rosalind as played by Ganymede, but Rosalind as her true self. Perhaps it is best to play the role ambiguously, and it is not impossible to do so even in a Japanese translation, because it can be feasible in Japanese to compose a sentence without a personal pronoun as the subject without there being any doubt about who is implied. This is exactly what some translators have opted for, and in their versions the line remains ambiguous. But other translators have adopted the feminine style for this one line. Of course this makes perfect sense as Rosalind is still somewhat feeble and feeling sick. Alternatively, the translator can use the masculine style to show that Rosalind has quickly regained her self-control, and that the apparently ‘weak’ statement ‘I would I were at home’ is actually part of what she calls ‘my counterfeiting’ (4.3.182). Japanese translators do not have to make a choice but, if they do, it will aVect the way in which the rest of the scene is played, subtly but decisively. For instance, the meaning of the following dialogue between Oliver and Rosalind changes depending on which of the two styles were to be chosen for the earlier speech of Rosalind:

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OLIVER

Be of good cheer, youth. You a man! You lack a man’s heart. ROSALIND

I do so, I confess it. Ah, sirrah, a body would think this was well counterfeited. I pray you tell your brother how well I counterfeited. Heigh-ho! OLIVER

This was not counterfeit, there is too great testimony in your complexion that it was a passion of earnest. ROSALIND

Counterfeit, I assure you. OLIVER

Well then, take a good heart, and counterfeit to be a man. ROSALIND

So I do. But i’faith, I should have been a woman by right. (AYL 4.3.164–76)

In this exchange, the Japanese Rosalind would have to revert to the masculine style, but if she spoke the earlier line as a woman, her words about counterfeiting would not sound convincing enough. Oliver would be a fool if he failed to realize that she was in fact a woman after he heard this line. What is more, she would know that he knew because, being a clever girl, she would be aware that she had made a fatal slip and revealed her true identity to Oliver. Alternatively, if she spoke the earlier line as a man, Oliver’s response would make him an exceptionally observant and shrewd person, because up to this point there has been absolutely no indication that Oliver suspects Rosalind’s sexual identity. The diVerence is relevant to the man’s entire characterization. He may not be a very likeable fellow, but if he were such a perceptive person, he would become considerably more interesting, if not altogether sympathetic. Whether or not Oliver learns the identity of Rosalind in this scene can remain fairly ambiguous in the original version, but in a Japanese translation one can make it quite clear that he does learn it. If this happens, one can oVer at least a tentative answer to that age-old question about the exchange between the two characters in Act 5,

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scene 2, where in response to Rosalind’s ‘God save you brother’, Oliver answers ‘And you fair sister’ (17–18).9 Of course it may simply be that Oliver is playing a game together with Orlando and Rosalind, as most commentators claim, but perhaps it need not be the source of anguish that it tends to be to editors of the play, especially if the situation is made as clear as it can be in a Japanese language version. v In the English version of the French musical Irma la Douce, on which this essay opened, the happily domesticated couple sing a song entitled ‘Our Language of Love’. The song they share contains the telling phrase, ‘“I love you” is unspoken / In our language of love’. Obviously it is meant to be a joke, because the moment the lovers have finished singing the phrase itself, they have actually uttered ‘I love you’. Shakespearean lovers in Japanese translations do say ‘I love you’, but what happens is far from simple. They have to have a very clear idea about who they are and what their relation to each other is like. Otherwise they cannot choose appropriate personal pronouns and appropriate verb suYxes and appropriate postpositional words to follow them, without all of which saying ‘I love you’ properly in Japanese is impossible. In our language of love ‘I love you’ is spoken only with a considerable amount of sociolinguistic awareness.

Notes 1 The original version, with books and lyrics by Alexandre BreVort and music by Marguerite Monnot, was first presented in Paris in 1956. The English version, with book and lyrics by David Heneker, Julian More and Monty Newman, and directed by Peter Brook, premiered in London in 1958. The film version (1963), directed by Billy Wilder, omitted the songs. 2 Trudgill is a short and useful introductory work on the subject. Chapter 5, ‘Language and Context’, is particularly relevant, containing a valuable discussion of personal pronoun selection (105–10). 3 Cf. Trudgill (109–10). 4 Cf. Trudgill (82).

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5 See also Abbott’s definition of the use of ‘thou’: ‘Thou in Shakespeare’s time was . . . the pronoun of (1) aVection towards friends, (2) good-humoured superiority to servants, and (3) contempt or anger to strangers. It had, however, already fallen somewhat into disuse, and, being regarded as archaic, was naturally adopted (4) in the higher poetic style and in the language of solemn prayer’ (153–4). ‘You’ was used more generally, so if both ‘you’ and ‘thou’ appear in the same dialogue it would be safe to assume that Shakespeare was conscious of the shift between the two and intended to show that something meaningful was happening. 6 See the note in TN (Ard2): ‘The repetition of “favour”, in a diVerent sense from l. 24, leads on to the dramatic irony of the following exchange, but the phrase cannot, without straining it, be made into a pun and interpreted as “like you in feature”’ (56). But it would be more accurate to say that the irony in Viola’s speech, which she herself is well aware of, as is the case with many of her speeches addressed to Orsino, is understood by the audience but not by Orsino. 7 Major translators of Shakespeare in Japan are Shoyo Tsubouchi (1859–1935), Tsuneari Fukuda (1912–94), Junji Kinoshita (1914–), Yushi Odashima (1930–) and Kazuko Matsuoka (1942–). Tsubouchi and Odashima translated the entire Shakespearean canon, whereas Fukuda and Kinoshita translated many but not all of the playwright’s works. Matsuoka is likely to be the third Japanese (and the first woman) to translate all of Shakespeare. Tsubouchi’s translations are now regarded as archaic. The translations of Fukuda and Kinoshita successfully retain the poetry and archaism of the original, but there are readers who feel the distance between them and everyday Japanese is too large. The translations of Odashima and Matsuoka are much closer to colloquial Japanese. In Matsuoka’s translations the diVerentiation according to gender, age or social class is less conspicuous than in earlier translations. 8 For example, in Yasuo Suga’s translation of the play (Tokyo, 1957), Sebastian’s soliloquy in Act 4, scene 3, sounds extremely masculine. It is in the kind of style that Viola would never dream of using. 9 See also the note by Agnes Latham in AYL (Ard2): ‘Oliver is joining in Orlando’s make-believe, which he knows about already’ (115). In AYL (Oxf1), Alan Brissenden notes: ‘Oliver’s calling Ganymede sister has caused anguish to some editors, who feel it shows he has seen through Rosalind’s disguise; others consider it evidence that indeed he has . . . and that therefore Orlando as well knows who Ganymede is. It is feasible, however, that Oliver does so because Orlando has just called “him” “Rosalind”, keeping up their pretence, and because Ganymede has just greeted Oliver as “brother”, owing to his match with Aliena, Ganymede’s sister . . . The situation is tricky, even alarming, and Rosalind quickly diverts Orlando’s attention to himself’ (210).

4 Translating Shakespeare Under Communism Bulgaria and Beyond

Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova

Early translations The first Bulgarian translation of a Shakespearean play to appear in print was Julius Caesar, produced from the original in the 1870s, though not published until 1882, three years after Bulgaria emerged as a nation state following five centuries of Ottoman occupation.1 Thus the country set out to catch up with mainstream European development by treating Shakespeare as cultural capital. This was one of many ways of crafting a new identity based on Christian, Western aesthetic and moral values, which the English Renaissance poet seemed to underpin. During the next six decades, until the invasion of Bulgaria by the Soviet Army in 1944 and the imposition of communist rule, twenty-four of the thirty-six canonical plays were published in something like 150 renditions by some fifty translators. These figures do not include translations solicited by theatres for specific productions and left unpublished. Although the appropriation of Shakespeare had started here several decades later than in other Balkan countries that had gained earlier political autonomy, by the time of the Second World War Bulgaria had overtaken them in number of Shakespearean translations and translators. As a matter of fact, in purely numerical terms it had caught up with the western Slavs, the Poles and the Czechs, in whose lands these developments had begun a whole century earlier (see Milanovic´). Some of the most popular plays were available in a large variety v 82 v

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of versions exemplifying diVerent aesthetic approaches and a wide spectrum of professional expertise. Macbeth held pride of place with twenty diVerent translations, Hamlet followed closely with fifteen, King Lear with eleven, Romeo and Juliet with nine, and a number of others with four to five each.2 The best of these renditions were based on the original and represented more or less faithfully its prosodic character, with an adequate combination of blank verse, rhymed verse and prose. However, a large number, especially the early ones, were avowedly or tacitly derived from intermediate translations in other European languages (predominantly Russian, French and German) and invariably presented prose texts. The degree of faithfulness to the original or to its derivative varied considerably, due to the diVerent linguistic and literary capacity of each individual translator rather than to divergent stylistic predilections: the common striving was towards an adequate reflection of Shakespeare’s dramatic quality, though, of course, some translators believed that the way to this goal lay in attempting an almost literal transposition of the text while others opted for the freedom of imaginative rendition. It must be said that the latter tendency was less salient and precision was an ideal pursued by the large majority, though attained by very few. Naturally, the margins of the process of translation teemed with free adaptations in prose, mainly for young readers. Such editions were so numerous and without doubt so popular, especially in the early period, that they can hardly be considered peripheral to the overall appropriation process. In this respect, Shakespearean appropriation in Bulgaria seems to have followed a similar curve of interest to that discernible in Russia and Slovakia, where the 1880s saw an explosion of such adaptations.3 In the midst of this completely chaotic but fairly vigorous accumulation of Shakespearean texts, in 1919 there appeared an unexpected achievement of the highest quality: a Hamlet, recreated with the flair of genius by the 24-year-old poet and critic Geo Milev (1895–1925), standing head and shoulders above the rest of the current translations. The tracts of land surrounding such towering artistic peaks inevitably look rather flat by comparison,

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although they are far from uniform and quite a few renditions of that period do not deserve a condescending critical attitude towards them. In spite of this avid acquisition of new versions, by the beginning of the Second World War Bulgaria did not possess the Bard’s complete works in translation, nor was such an ambitious project planned. Again, the history of Shakespeare’s appropriation elsewhere can oVer a clue as to the average speed of the processes involved. Russia needed about ninety years between Shakespeare’s first disguised appearance on the cultural scene and the emergence of Nikolay Ketcher’s ambitious project to recreate faithfully all the plays, which started in the 1840s. In Poland, a period of about eighty years of intense translation endeavours elapsed before Jo´sef Ignacy Kraszewski embarked on such an enterprise in the 1870s; and it took the Czechs no less time than this to arrive at Jozef Va´clav Sla´dek’s similar undertaking in the 1880s. The curve between Hungary’s first 1790 Hamlet and its first edition of the Complete Works (1864–78) is of the same order.4 Obviously, the Bulgarian appropriation of Shakespeare, barely sixty years in the making, was not yet ready for an ambitious eVort of this kind.

State sponsorship The blatantly disorganized, unbalanced but lively rush of pre-war translations was to be augmented by the creation of the post-war sociopolitical order which gave the state unprecedented power to plan and control all activities in the country, including the totality of culture. The appropriation of the classics as an important aspect of the legitimization of the World of Socialism formed a pivotal part of this policy, and in this context Shakespeare was coveted more than any other celebrity of the past.5 In 1948 the oYcial newspaper of the victorious communist party explained to the general public the now mandatory admiration for the Bard in the following glowing terms: Shakespeare’s work is a thorough and striking expression of the progressive tendencies characteristic of his age. For it

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happened to be created in an exceptional period of drastic revolutionary changes in world history. This was the time when the Middle Ages with their feudal brigandage and fragmentation, their restricted subsistence economy, their scholasticism and the superstitions of their ideology were finally sliding down into the grave. The new time ushered in on the shoulders of the bourgeoisie which had for the first time felt the rush of blood and strength in its muscles and was reaching out to the riches, the wonders and the mysteries of the world, was that of the initial progressive flowering of bourgeois society and bourgeois ideology, when the bourgeoisie was still a progressive class open to the world and its advancement . . . In every one of Shakespeare’s three dozen plays we can feel the vibrations of his passionate resentment of the Middle Ages and their scholasticism, of his hatred for the superstitions and the suppression of natural emotions and of his no less passionate love for a sound, brave, unadulterated humanity, for all pure, noble and humane emotions . . . Shakespeare is a man of genius and a man for all times, because he is progressive and he hates everything irrational and reactionary. That is precisely the reason why today his work resounds most clearly, most cheerfully – and most frequently too – in those countries where the people are marching onward again, towards democracy, towards socialism. (Ognyanov, 3)

The author of this slightly demented panegyric, the literary critic and journalist Lubomir Ognyanov, had already embarked on the honourable task of finally rendering the entire Shakespearean canon in Bulgarian. Written in the vehement style of party propaganda, this first solemn announcement of his grand project was further coupled with the following instructions for the benefit of his future audience: Until 9 September 1944 [the date of the instalment of a proSoviet government in Sofia, coinciding with the occupation

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of the country by the Red Army] only half of [Shakespeare’s] plays were translated into Bulgarian and these, for the most part derived from sources other than the original, were rendered in prose, very often in an abbreviated form or ‘adapted for children and adolescents’ . . . Now that the Narodna Kultura State Publishing House has undertaken the gradual publication of all Shakespeare in a complete, unadulterated verse translation, the Bulgarian readers should be fully aware – just as the translator is – that they owe this privilege exclusively to the Ninth of September and to the National Front [the ruling political coalition led by the Communist Party]. (Ognyanov, 3)

Three decades later, in 1980, a university teacher of literature began his appraisal of Ognyanov’s undertaking in an unequivocal way: The 1944 socialist revolution faced the Bulgarian translators with new, higher requirements. First of all, an end had to be put to the current anarchy in translation and publishing. The need to have all of Shakespeare’s plays translated and to entrust with this task a competent specialist became quite clear. (Filipov, 12)

This comment emphasizes two new important points of departure that were to mould the process of the appropriation of Shakespeare under the changed circumstances in Bulgaria and in the whole of eastern Europe after the Second World War. The previous ‘anarchy’ in the fields of translation and publication was to be superseded by a new system of centralized planning. Tasks like this, just as in all other areas, were to be ‘entrusted’ by the authorities to trustworthy people, rather than being left to the initiative of publishers and translators to produce and distribute in an unsystematic way. Lubomir Ognyanov was the right man in the right place: a journalist and literary critic of a pronounced communist

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persuasion; at the time he was working as editor at the Party Press (Partizdat). A look at his bibliography reveals the curious combination of translation tasks in which he was engaged in the post-war decade from 1947 until 1957. One of these was the proclaimed rendition of Shakespeare’s complete works; the other, the selected philosophical writings of Marx and Engels. The latter he translated from the German, in prose, the former from English, in verse. Both projects were considered essential for the ideological consolidation of Bulgarian society. Shakespeare’s plays appeared in the following order: The Taming of the Shrew (1947); The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Winter’s Tale (1948); The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It and The Comedy of Errors (1949); Othello (1952); Macbeth (1954); Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet (1955); and King Lear (1957). Alongside these ran publication of the fundamental works of Marxism: Friedrich Engels, Anti-During (1946) and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1947); Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1948); Friedrich Engels, The Decline of Feudalism and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1949); Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1949); Marx and Engels, Selected Works in two volumes (1956) and On Religion. An Anthology (1957). The Shakespearean series was published by two consecutive state-owned publishing houses specializing in literature in translation – Narodna Prosveta (People’s Education) and Narodna Kultura (People’s Culture) – while the Marxist editions were the product of the Communist Party Press, which in eVect also belonged to the party-state. Each of Shakespeare’s plays, as it came out in its new authoritative version, was prefaced by an extensive introduction written by the translator, enlightening readers on the progressive outlook of its author and the equally progressive message of the work thus introduced. This strongly ideological focus could not fail to aVect the method of translation. The emphasis was on the meaning of the words and not on their aesthetic organization. However, as Ognyanov had been involved in the theatre as playwright and director from 1942 to 1946, he had the necessary

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inside knowledge about the requirements of the stage. This useful expertise shows itself in the contemporary, natural and sinuous language of his translations. The straightforward vigour and simplicity of ordinary speech is what he tries to imitate – often at the expense of the richness of figurative expressions. In Ognyanov’s – and the Party’s – view, Shakespeare was the spokesman of the common people and the diction of the translations was derived from their unaVected way of speaking. As for the poetry, it was unimpressive in Ognyanov’s rendition as was the, at times rugged, versification. This was perhaps caused by preference for the accents of authentic speech, for which Ognyanov certainly had a good ear. Some of his rather daring attempts to substitute the actual prosodic qualities of the living language, such as the slurring of certain vowels, for mechanicallyscanned syllables (a feature of artificial enunciation sanctified by the theatrical tradition) are quite striking and refreshing, as well as inherently Shakespearean. From 1952 Lubomir Ognyanov started teaching German literature at Sofia University and the extraordinary pace of his translation slowed down. A serious illness in the 1960s put an end to it and the last instalment of the Shakespeare series was a revised version of the 1954 Macbeth, published in 1961. Thus the grand project floundered before completion and only twelve of the thirty-seven canonical plays were accomplished. One wonders whether Ognyanov’s sudden switch from the comedies to the tragedies after 1949 had not already signalled an abridgement of his original plan. It was during the last phase of Ognyanov’s work that a professional journalist and translator, Vladimir Svintila, completed the first comprehensive Bulgarian version of the Sonnets. In 1957 the book was put into print by the same state publishing house, Narodna Kultura, which had taken over the publication of the plays from Narodna Prosveta and had now become the oYcial institution entrusted with the selection and dissemination of ideologically appropriate literature in translation. Svintila’s rendition is poetically evocative and stylistically consistent. As the staple metre of Bulgarian poetry is, like English poetry, the

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iambic pentameter, the translator of the sonnets does not face any formidable prosodic problem. There is another insurmountable diYculty in his work though, which has to do with the considerably greater average length of Bulgarian words, the Bulgarian-English syllabic ratio being 3:2. This discrepancy combined with the utmost compactness of Shakespeare’s lyrical expression compels the translator to sift the original rather mercilessly for its most important elements, leaving aside a number of details and nuances that are considered less indispensable for the overall eVect. Unlike poetic passages in a dramatic text, the fixed form of the sonnet cannot be enlarged either horizontally (by extending the metrical limits of the line) or vertically (by increasing the total number of its lines defined by the unalterable rhyming scheme). This linguistic diYculty is not specifically Bulgarian and applies to many other European and non-European languages.6 It seems to have been the principal reason why the Sonnets were usually recreated after the plays in other countries too. In the larger context of the appropriation of Shakespeare in Eastern Europe, similar delay is noticeable in Russia, Poland, the Czech lands and Hungary. Like most foreign translators of Shakespeare’s lyrical poetry, Svintila has had to reduce the connotative range of the original while endeavouring to retain as much as possible of its central ideas, attitudes and images. If we can speak of a general veering away from the author’s aesthetics in this translation, it is most strongly pronounced in the dilution of some of the author’s quasi-metaphysical conceits into less puzzling figures of the more familiar romantic type, an approach shared by the majority of Shakespeare’s translators in Bulgaria. An asset of this edition is the afterword written by the Shakespearean scholar Marco MincoV, which outlines the history and the generic characteristics of the Petrarchan sonnet and its Shakespearean transformation, as well as providing a concise survey of the possible dedicatees of the sonnets and of the possible prototypes of the personae that Shakespeare presents. Thus, by 1957, Bulgaria had acquired its first complete translation of the Sonnets and one-third of the entire dramatic

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canon had been rendered anew in partial realization of an ambitious project to reproduce it single-handedly. In the 1960s, about 80 years after the first Shakespearean text had appeared in Bulgarian, the Narodna Kultura Publishers decided to give the overall project another try and asked the well-known poet and dramatist Valeri Petrov to translate the complete plays. He had a special fascination for the poetic atmosphere of the romantic comedies and, in 1961, had written a vaudeville of his own, When the Roses Dance, that bore an unmistakable resemblance to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play particularly dear to his heart and the first one he now chose to translate. The experience was satisfactory and during the next three years Petrov managed to finish all ten comedies written in the last decade of the sixteenth century. They were published in two companion volumes in 1970 and 1971. The response of the theatre was immediate. This was the time when Peter Brook’s East-European tour with his A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Benno Besson’s production of As You Like It in Sofia convinced Bulgarian directors that the Renaissance master could be made to speak to the audiences in their own contemporary accents and feel exciting and new. The most gifted among them recognized at once the striking rediscovery of Shakespeare’s genius in Petrov’s rendition. His texts sparkled with the amazing linguistic ingenuity of their lively repartee. The richness of the poetic imagery was intoxicating and the witty sonorous rhymes, an especially prominent aspect of Petrov’s talent, contributed to the playful sound of the dialogue. The language was freshly idiomatic and racy. Though English was not the translator’s preferred foreign language, he was versatile in Russian, French and Italian and could also compare a number of earlier Bulgarian versions of the plays. In addition, he had managed to persuade Marco MincoV to become his editor and consultant. For several years, a poet and a scholar of the highest quality worked in close cooperation over each detail of the texts, especially during the early stage of the project. The result of their combined eVort is a translation that is at once poetically inspired and fairly faithful to both the spirit and the letter of the original.

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The success of the comedies gave Valeri Petrov suYcient confidence to continue his work on the remaining groups of plays. Another factor, a rather long political disfavour, which eventually proved a blessing in disguise, also gave him a push in this direction. At a conference of the oYcial Writers’ Union in 1970, convened for the purpose of issuing an oYcial protest against the decision of the Swedish Academy to give the Nobel Prize to the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Petrov became one of the few union members who refused to support the declaration. Together with the other recusants he was expelled from the organization and struck from the list of writers eligible for prestigious sinecures and entitled to have their works published in books and periodicals. In eVect, the only space where he could continue to exercise his literary abilities and earn a living was the translators’ niche, the blessed refuge of all men and women of letters who incurred the displeasure of the totalitarian government. Petrov’s next task was the rendition of the tragedies. These came out, in 1973 and 1974, in another couple of volumes containing ten plays. They had also taken three years to complete. The translation was obviously developing rhythmically and systematically. The appearance of the tragedies, however, did not meet with a similarly enthusiastic acclaim. Very few of them were staged in subsequent years. Though the stylistic texture of the plays had been recreated as sensitively as that of the comedies, it was felt that the highly dramatic tone of this genre was dampened by a verbosity eager to retain every detail of the original. The count of lines in any tragic monologue taken at random will reveal that Petrov exceeds his original by between 30 and 60 percent. In the few commentaries on his own translations, he has theorized that while it is dangerous to expand the text horizontally it is relatively safe to expand it vertically, for the directors will cut the longer speeches anyway and the original sound will be preserved. This, however, has proved rather controversial, for it is diYcult to shorten a long-winded sentence and it is quite impossible to utter it on the stage, if it is not intonationally segmented into a number of shorter units, as in the original.

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A volume entitled Tragicomedies and Romances appeared in 1976, comprising the three problem plays of Shakespeare’s middle period and the four late romances. It was certainly more exciting than the previous two. Petrov had come back into his own element of the comic. The last couple of volumes (published in 1980 and 1981) took longest to finish but they completed the heroically sustained endeavour by adding to the rest the last ten plays belonging to the genre of the histories, the ones least familiar to the Bulgarian audience. A similar achievement in Poland during much the same time belongs to Maciej Słomczynski, a professional translator who did all the plays and published them in a series of individual volumes in the 1980s. Thus, the grand project reached its full realization. Shakespeare was made available in Bulgarian with each of the thirty-seven plays firmly attached to his name. They were all rendered in the accents of the contemporary national language and in those of a single poetic voice. Bulgaria had acquired her own Shakespearean dramatic canon, just as, a quarter of a century earlier, she had acquired her own canon of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Now Bulgarian commentators on Shakespeare’s work could quote with a good deal of confidence from the necessary authoritative text of almost his entire literary legacy.7 A comprehensive body of Shakespearean texts was made available when needed to theatre directors, critics, writers and speakers of all hues. Each of the seven volumes was supplied with a competent introduction by Marco MincoV. Lubomir Ognyanov’s dream had come true and in a way he was right that Bulgarian readers and audiences owed this important achievement to the socialist revolution, to the centralized and highly organized social structure it had created. Yet, one cannot help noticing the historical irony in this success story. The completion of the task had become possible not because of the enthusiasm of the builders of socialism – a group to which both Ognyanov and Petrov once belonged – but rather as a consequence of the suppression of individual freedom and the forced diversion of creative energy from the arena of its direct expression into the translator’s niche of artistic circumlocution. This peculiar space was often a refuge for intellectuals whose own

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work was suppressed by the communist regime. In the Soviet Union, poets like Michail Lozinsky and Boris Pasternak, to mention only two of the best-known names, created milestones of Shakespearean translation because they were not free to proceed with their own work. Petrov’s translations can also be included in this category.8 For all its oppressive nature, Soviet-type socialism, imposed after the Second World War on the whole of eastern Europe, oVered a unique opportunity for countries like Bulgaria to channel their relatively limited resources in ambitious ventures. The translation of the complete Shakespeare was such an undertaking. An oYcial publishing house sponsored by the state and designed as an ideological institution concerned with the cultural education of the masses was, naturally, eager to accomplish the task. Its financial capacity was considerably greater than that of any private publisher of the pre-war period. By the time this eVort was undertaken, the worst period of Stalinist reprisals was over and a slightly more liberal cultural climate had come into being. Although deflecting a creative writer from his own original work into translation was a form of punishment, the system took good care to make his life comfortable enough to take the sting out of the situation. It tried its best not to antagonize its critics unnecessarily. Whoever was chosen for a translator’s task of this magnitude was oVered a rather enviable deal. The lucky one was entitled to seductive fees fixed by a government document and carefully graded according to the diYculty of the assignment and the status of the person hired to carry it out. At the translators’ union annual conferences the entire production of the preceding period was surveyed and discussed by the guild. Praises and prizes were bestowed for outstanding achievements. In the case of drama translation, a fixed proportion of the theatre box-oYce collections was earmarked for the translator. When it came to Shakespeare’s plays, this income could be counted on, for there was hardly a single theatre in the country that did not include at least one of them in its repertory every season and Shakespearean performances were usually presented

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to a full house. Another steady trickle could be expected from radio and TV programmes, especially when new serial productions were dubbed or subtitled on the basis of the existent ‘canonical’ translation. And, last but not least, as one or two plays by Shakespeare were the regular set texts for the schools, they were published in inexpensive large editions every year and added a pretty penny to the other dividends. All in all, translating the entire Shakespearean canon under socialism was an undertaking that was sure to make you not just famous but, with some luck, quite rich too – a prospect that the Renaissance poet would have appreciated. One is reminded of the generous royalties Alexander Pope got for his translation of the Iliad two centuries earlier, which enabled him to devote the rest of his life to literary pursuits. The same eVect could be achieved now, once the oYcial disfavour was lifted. Such exclusive conditions for concentrated artistic work were, of course, oVered to a chosen few. The choice in most cases was based on professional merit, but, as the history of art amply shows, this is a commodity that is not easily gauged. One way or another, the over-centralized system of state monopoly in all areas of life fostered single unchallenged achievements in each of them and ruled out the element of competition and variability. It is significant that no alternative translation of a Shakespearean work appeared in Bulgaria until 1989 with the only notable exception of a separate edition of King Richard II, translated by the director of the Narodna Kultura Publishing House, Bojidar Bojilov.9

After communism The collapse of communism put an end to the system of monopoly. The pre-war state of cultural market ‘anarchy’ re-emerged once again as a variety of larger and smaller private publishers came into being. Valeri Petrov was probably the first to break the previous rule of ‘single unrivalled achievements’ by publishing his version of the Sonnets in 1992.10 Vladimir Svintila, their first translator, died soon after the political changes. As it turned out, he had also translated the two Shakespearean plays

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that have always been favourites in Bulgaria, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, and they were published posthumously.11 The family and friends of a highly talented translator of the middle generation, Spas Nikolov, who died prematurely, published an impressive volume of his collaborative renditions of several tragedies and one of the history plays.12 Some of these texts had been used to dub the BBC TV series shown on the Bulgarian TV screen in the 1970s. Then, they had struck the audience as powerful and true to the original, but they had had no chance of being published during their author’s lifetime. In the 1990s, a university teacher of literature from the younger generation, Evgenia Pancheva, published to high critical acclaim the first Bulgarian verse translations of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece as well as new versions of a number of sonnets, which have appeared in print.13 With the publication of the narrative poems the Bulgarian Shakespeare canon was nearly complete. The Phoenix and Turtle appeared in a newspaper recently, and the only two works that remain unrendered are A Lover’s Complaint and The Passionate Pilgrim.14 The tradition of Shakespearean translation continues across eastern Europe. Large projects started in the 1980s, like Branimir Zivojinovic´’s in Yugoslavia and Martin Hilsky´’s in the Czech Republic, are still in progress and the theatres show an avid interest in each new text. Harvard professor Stanisław Baranczak, a Polish expatriate in the USA, has recreated most of the plays and the sonnets during the last dozen years. His essays on the art of Shakespearean translation have been published separately and are an important attempt in summarizing the insights oVered by the latest experience in this field. A young nation’s language that is coming into its own over recent decades, Macedonian is also striving to acquire its own Shakespeare. Translators like the poet Bogomil Gjuzel and the university professor Ivanka KoviloskaPoposka, have rendered more than one play each in the accents of their language. No European nation, old or young, can ignore Shakespeare, if it strives for self-legitimization. Translation is an ongoing, self-perpetuating process, though sometimes singular achievements tend to block out the simple

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fact that ‘great translations’ exist in a dynamic world and are, because of the nature of language and culture, perpetually called in doubt. Recently, a lover of poetry frequenting the common room of the University of Sofia expressed her indignation at a rumour that some students had voiced the ambition to translate again the Shakespeare canon. ‘The cheek of it!’, she exclaimed, ‘Don’t they know that a Bulgarian Shakespeare already exists and that the translator is a no lesser poet than Valeri Petrov?’ Such remarks make one think how, more than 120 years ago, Nikolay Gerbel, the editor of the Russian Complete Works of William Shakespeare, saw this collective achievement as a mere step in an ongoing process. Casting a glance into the future, he modestly remarked in his general introduction: Every generation will find in Shakespeare something new, something that escaped and slipped from the attention of the previous age, and every century will turn to the study of Shakespeare with new zeal and aVection, wherein all foreign literatures will be constantly enriched with new translations of his works. (Gerbel, vii)

Full of creative eVort and artistic imagination as it is, the work of translators is not for all seasons but of a time, and the various voices of Shakespeare, among them his Bulgarian voices, will multiply and change from generation to generation. The resumed pluralism of cultural life that characterizes the newest history of eastern Europe cannot but act as a strong encouragement of this development.

Notes 1 Yuli Tsezar, trans. Iv. P. Slaveikov (Plovdiv, 1882). 2 For more detailed information, see Shurbanov & Filipov (17–36). 3 See Alekseev (633); Strˇ´ıbrny`, ‘Czechoslovakia’ (217). 4 See Levin & Feodorov; Shvedov; Helsztyn´ski; Strˇ´ıbrny`; and Klein & Da´vidha´zi, especially the articles by Kisery and Egri.

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5 About the Soviet tradition in this ideological canonization of Shakespeare, see Shurbanov & Sokolova. 6 Shakespeare’s texts pose similar problems to the French translator. See De´prats, ‘Proble´matiques’ (23–55). 7 Valeri Petrov expresses this ambition in a book-length interview with literary critic Ivan Sarandev; see Sarandev (207). 8 The translator’s ‘niche’ syndrome of Soviet culture is analysed by Bagno (55–64). 9 Kral Richard II, trans. Bojidar Bojilov (Sofia, 1974). 10 Soneti, trans. Valeri Petrov (Sofia, 1992). 11 Hamlet, trans. Vladimir Svintila (Sofia, 1996). 12 Shakespeare, Piesi [Plays], trans. Spas Nikolov and Alexander Tonchev (Sofia, 1999). This collection contains the following plays: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet and King Richard III. 13 Wiliam Shekspir, ‘Venera i Adonis’ / Kristofer Marlow, ‘Hiro i Leander’, trans. Evgenia Pancheva (Sofia, 1994); and Pohishtenieto na Lukretsiya [The Rape of Lucrece], trans. Evgenia Pancheva (Sofia, 1996). 14 The translation of The Phoenix and Turtle (as ‘Feniksut i gulubut’) belongs to Ludmil Dimitrov and was published in the Kultura weekly 29 (27 July 2001), 12.

5 A Mi r r o r u p t o ‘ Hu ma n ’ N a t u r e The Case of the Chinese T r a ns lator Liang Shi Q i u

Shen Lin Lu Jiu Yuan, the twelfth-century Chinese thinker, who does not believe in writing his own works to express his philosophical deliberations, reflects on his life-long endeavours as an annotator of Confucian classics and says hermeneutically: ‘I interpret the classics, and the classics interpret me’. A Chinese Shakespeare translator may share similar feelings and, in a flight of intercultural fancy, venture to say: ‘I interpret Shakespeare, and Shakespeare interprets me’. Among the Chinese translators of Shakespeare, Liang Shi Qiu translated more of Shakespeare’s works than any one else. In fact he remains the only one to have single-handedly completed Shakespeare’s entire canon. In this essay, which seeks to make a contribution to historical and cultural studies of translation, I shall concentrate on Liang Shi Qiu’s translation of a single word in Hamlet, which is probably the most translated play in China. I hope to demonstrate that one instance of explanation proves to be not so much determined by the interpreter’s own belief in a principle of interpretation as aVected by the interpreter’s subscription to a criterion of literary excellence, which upon further investigation reveals the translator’s ideological persuasion. The relevant lines for my investigation occur in Hamlet’s famous speech on acting addressed to the vagrant players who are about to represent the piece to ‘catch the conscience of the king’: v 98 v

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Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For any thing so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. (Ham 3.2.17–25; italics added)

The focus of attention for the ensuing discussion will be the two instances of the word ‘nature’ and, for the sake of comparison, six Chinese interpretations other than that of Liang Shi Qiu’s will be cited. They are by Shao Ting, Zhu Sheng Hao, Cao Wei Feng, Bian Zhi Lin, Wu Xing Hua and Qiu Ke An. Of these, Wu Xing Hua contributed a revised version of Zhu Sheng Hao’s earlier version, while Qiu Ke An oVered his reading in his influential annotated edition of the play. For ‘nature’ as it first appears in Hamlet’s monologue (‘the modesty of nature’), Cao Wei Feng, Bian Zhi Lin as well as Wu Xing Hua (who changed Zhu Sheng Hao’s reading when revising the latter’s work), all oVer the straightforward ‘zi ran’ (‘nature’), which in the contemporary Chinese context usually has the connotations of (a) nature as opposed to nurture, (b) naturalness as opposed to artificiality, and (c) the natural world as opposed to human society. However, the translators were not being ambiguous. They just refrained from pinning the word down to any one of the three meanings. Qiu Ke An, the annotator, does not bother to explain the first instance of ‘nature’ in his Commercial Press edition. The translation rendered by Shao Ting in classical Chinese style verges on adaptation, which upon close scrutiny proves unexpectedly discrete and carefully considered. His translation of the original line ‘with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature’ reads ‘in careful observance of the rigour will be found the way to capture lifelikeness and vividness’ (Shao Ting, 71). It is clear that for him the first usage of the word ‘nature’ points to the sought eVect or

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aim of the player’s artistry, despite the fact that the target language is so authentically classical Chinese that it is not easy to find a close syntactical correspondence between this target language and the original English. For Liang Shi Qiu, however, the ‘nature’ in the first instance is not an eVect but an entity. It is objective rather than subjective. It constitutes ‘the golden mean, or the harmony of human disposition’ which the player should not ‘o’erstep’ (Liang Shi Qiu, Ham, 59).1 That Prince Hamlet may be exhorting the common players to observe a kind of Confucian moderation is such a fantastical idea as to make the reader wonder if Liang Shi Qiu could have perpetrated something even further from the purpose of translating than the seemingly freer Shao Ting. Zhu Sheng Hao, who accomplished more than the others in the early days of Chinese Shakespeare translation, feels that ‘nature’ in the first instance stands for ‘the common way of sentiment’. For the apparently simple word in its second appearance in the passage these Chinese translators oVer three readings. Zhu Sheng Hao the translator (4:208) and Qiu Ke An the annotator (134) both opt for ‘life’ as a synonym for the original ‘nature’. Qiu Ke An further comments that ‘it does not refer to ordinary nature, even less so the kind as is found in the nineteenth century romanticists’ advocacy to “return to Nature”’ (135). In their translations of Hamlet, Cao Wei Feng, Bian Zhi Lin, and Wu Xing Hua the reviser, invariably choose to read ‘nature’ in both instances as ‘the world around us’. Wu Xing Hua actually changed Zhu’s reading ‘life’ to ‘the world around us’ in his revision of the latter’s earlier version. Shao Ting (71) and Liang Shi Qiu (Ham, 59) both read ‘human nature’. Liang adds further explanation of his reading in a footnote to his translation: The meaning of the original line ‘to hold, as ’t were, the mirror up to nature’ means that the actor’s performance should follow the way of human nature and stay clear of overstatement. This line has often been cited as a footnote to ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’. This is erroneous. (Liang Shi Qiu, Ham, 80)

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For the line ‘to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image’, Shao Ting’s version makes ingenious use of a classical Chinese literary allusion of ‘the Qin mirror’. It is said that Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, better known in the West as the owner of the Terracotta Army, had in his palace a huge mirror that acted like a precursor to X-ray. It could detect stirrings of disloyal thoughts in his court ladies by revealing in reflection the movements of their hearts and gall bladders. Many fell victim to the mirror. The translator obviously thinks that what is reflected in the player’s art is human nature, or the motion of Elizabethan hearts and gall bladders. Of these translators, Cao Wei Feng, Bian Zhi Lin and Wu Xing Hua render ‘nature’ in both instances as ‘zi ran’. The most common contemporary connotation this choice evokes will be nature as the realm outside and beyond our subjectivity. Liang Shi Qiu reads both instances of ‘nature’ as ‘human nature’ or ‘human disposition’. Despite their diVerences in interpreting this single word, none of these translators distinguishes between the first and second instances of the word ‘nature’. In contrast, both Shao Ting and Zhu Sheng Hao see a diVerence in meaning between the two instances. For Zhu Sheng Hao, ‘nature’ refers to a general pattern of human behaviour in the first instance and to ‘life’ in the second, whereas to Shao Ting’s mind, ‘nature’ is naturalness, meaning lifelikeness in eVect in the first instance, and human nature or motions of the heart in the second.2 Happily oblivious to the connotations of the word in the Chinese context, neither the Riverside editor (G. Blakemore Evans) nor the Cambridge editor of the play (Philip Edwards) considers annotation of such a common word necessary. Still, the reading of the second instance of ‘nature’ oVered by Liang Shi Qiu and Shao Ting agree more closely than do the other five definitions with the third definition of the word ‘the moral constitution of man’ in Alexander Schmidt’s Lexicon. That opted for by Zhu Sheng Hao and Qiu Ke An could be corroborated by the quotations given for Schmidt’s sixth definition, ‘human life’, while the reading given by Bian Zhi Lin, Cao Wei Feng and Wu Xing Hua comes very close to Schmidt’s first definition of the word as ‘the world around us’.

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As for the readings of the first instance of ‘nature’, that adopted by Zhu Sheng Hao, ‘the common way of sentiment’ approximates Schmidt’s second definition, ‘aVection of the heart and mind’. The reading by Shao Ting – ‘lifelikeness and vividness’ – uncorroborated as it is by Schmidt, may yet find support of a sort from Philip Edwards’s New Cambridge edition, in the sense that Edwards’s annotation of ‘mirror’ instead of ‘nature’ as one ‘which sets standards; here by revealing things not as they seem, but as they really are’ (Ham [Cam2], 3.2.14–20) indicates that he, like Shao, is concerned with the function and purpose of the mirror. v It is worth reflecting at this point that these Chinese readings, diverse as they are, all seem capable of being borne out by the meticulous scholarship of anglophone experts. Also, it should amaze no Shakespearean scholar that there are many instances where the Bard cannot be construed precisely. It is surprising, however, to find a veteran translator such as Liang Shi Qiu so adamant and unequivocal in defending his sole interpretation of a word which, though not one of the notorious cruces in the canon, will naturally be open to various interpretations because of all the historical and cultural significations it is encrusted with. The reason must be looked for in places that lie beyond the immediate scope of Shakespearean lexicography and annotation, in Liang’s principles of literary criticism. As a critic Liang Shi Qiu can hold his ground and indefatigably reiterate his beliefs as in the following sample: Literary criticism presupposes a criterion, a standard of excellence . . . However what matters is where to find such a criterion. If ever we were to acquire such a standard, we would have to acknowledge first that literature develops from ‘human nature’ . . . Pure human nature is not as [Henri] Bergson asserts in ‘constant motion.’ The fundamentals of human nature never change. (Li Zhao, 132)

And elsewhere:

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States of matters change. Attitudes to life diverge. Yet, the disposition of humanity remains universal. The literary taste stays fixed. Therefore, literary masterpieces stand well the passage of time and change of locales. The Iliad is still read today. Shakespeare is still played today. This is because universal human nature provides the foundation for the greatness of all literary masterpieces. For this reason, literary greatness, regardless of the time and place of the work, may be evaluated by a set of fixed values . . . For this reason, literary criticism is not to be concerned with the literary standard of one time and one land, but is to aim at establishing a universal standard that transcends the limits of one place and one period of time. (Li Zhao, 134)

Since Liang is eager to establish literary universalism on human nature, the question will naturally arise as to what constitutes human nature or, to be more precise, whether human nature is, as he insists, really universal and constant. The ensuing controversy on literary criteria between him and left-wing writers led by Lu Xun was inextricably linked with the issue of class-consciousness as opposed to ‘eternal and universal human nature’. Class-consciousness for Liang Shi Qiu is only accidental and extrinsic to humanness, while for his left-wing opponents it is an essential or at least a significant part of human nature as evidenced in social life. To demonstrate the timedefying constancy of human nature, Liang Shi Qiu cited the example of Macbeth. Both the Scottish pretender and Emperor Jones share the same kind of fear. That is, the human capacity for fear remains the same in spite of the passage of time. According to Liang, the example demonstrates that the so-called class-consciousness accounts for but a part of background studies whereas bona-fide literary criticism is to highlight the humanness of the humanity. Class is but a superficial phenomenon, whereas the quintessence of literature is to deal with human nature. (Li Zhao, 453)

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With respect to the reading of ‘nature’ at the beginning of this essay, Liang virtually admitted that he was aware of the existence of other possibilities in translating this word when, in his speech at the ceremony on the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, he gave his glossary on ‘nature’ again: ‘the nature in the case of “to hold a mirror up to nature” is meant to be “humanness”’. By now it should have become clear beyond doubt that the crux of the matter is not how to crack a crux, as it has never been recognized as a crux by anglophone Shakespeareans. The crux is an age-honoured one about what human nature consists of, about the stuV of which ‘human heart and human nature’ are made. Human heart under Liang’s literary formula is free from class-consciousness, or has no place in constant humanness. It is from this starting point that Liang proceeds to his conclusion on why Shakespeare could have attained his unsurpassable level of fidelity in capturing human nature. The secret of Shakespeare’s success lies in his freedom from partisan feelings and his lack of class awareness: Shakespeare oVers no propositions, joins no parities, involves himself in no religious squabbles, and never minds fastidiously about poetic justice. For him, a play is but a play, nor more than a play. Yet this attitude helped him achieve greatness. He is devoted to dealing with human nature only. We do not harshly criticize his failure to carry out unremittingly the mission of ‘reflecting the time.’ If ever we want to find out about Shakespeare’s historical background, are not there always histories for us to turn to? The true value of literature does not lie in giving voice to the zeitgeist but to eternal human nature. (Liang Shi Qiu, Memorial, 3)

These words alert us to the wider background against which this controversy unfolded. Shakespeare was cited in a debate on such big issues as the relationship between literature and society, the purpose of literature, the use of literature. In the final analysis, the debate was not about Shakespeare but about diVerent attitudes towards literature. The driving force behind it was even

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an ideological controversy between Marxism and Conservatism, and between the left and the right in the Chinese literary arena, between two political fronts, and between two diVerent classes. In the postscript to his translation of Karl Marx’s comment on the power of money in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (in which the German philosopher quotes Timon’s raillery against gold), translator Liang asserts firstly that Shakespeare is a great genius, one reason for this greatness being the freedom of his works from loyalty to any single class, and secondly that Shakespeare is not a thinker belonging to any party or school of thought (Li Zhao, 631). Although today’s new historicists, cultural materialists and post-colonialists would probably marvel at such a display of blatancy and insensitivity to the huge irony, one should not deny Liang the fairness of his argument that there are spheres of human feelings which transcend class barriers, and areas of human interest which are not susceptible to class analysis: A capitalist and a working man are indeed diVerent in their hereditary conditions, education backgrounds, economic circumstances and therefore live diVerent lives. Still, they share some common points. Their human nature is not of two diVerent kinds. They all feel the relentlessness of the life process from birth, growth, and sickness to death. They all crave for love. They all have feelings of pity and fear. They all have ethical feelings. They all hope for pleasure both for body and soul. Literature is an art that expresses this basic humanness. (Li Zhao, 175)

What is problematic is whether great works of literature explore these basic feelings per se and by themselves alone. If yes, what could account for the huge diversity and colourfulness of the great works on such common themes as love, hope, friendship, and the pursuit of happiness? Misconceptions here arise not from the timelessness of such categorized human feelings but from the way we take their timelessness as the explanation for the power and appeal of literary works. The source of literary power is more

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likely to lie in the way these same emotions forever find diVerent and new expressions under the forces of various and forever changing circumstances, contexts and conditions. Even though our experience will persuade us that universal human interests transcending social, racial and cultural diVerences do exist, they can easily become synonymous with primal instincts and physiological activities, if they are explored literarily without reference to gender, class, race and culture. In the Shakespeare-led controversy on human nature and class-consciousness, Lu Xun humourously comments that such a physiological activity as perspiration that was, is and will be, may be reckoned as pertaining to ‘never changing human nature’. Yet, even in this instance, by the force of a Chinese literary convention, dainty ladies’ perspiration becomes sweet, whereas that of oxen-like working men is stinky (Li Zhao, 137). Shakespeare does not seem sexless, class-ignorant or colour blind. Had he not highlighted the racial tension in Othello, we would still be reading Cinthio’s sordid family tragedy today. Had he not given such prominence to the plebeians as no other playwrights had done before him and no other playwrights were to do until Brecht, we would still be poring over Plutarch’s tale of a lonely hero meeting his overthrow brought on by his own pride. Had he not dealt with Lear’s personal relationship with his daughters without any reference to the broad questions of justice, inequality, violence, and the encroachments of Machiavellian individualism on a traditional hierarchical society, we would simply be watching a morality play on filial piety. The timeliness of Shakespeare, as a matter of fact, seems to lie exactly in the way that he always deals with these themes of human interest in the broader context of class, race, gender and culture. v The dogmatism of which a refined translator and scholar like Liang Shi Qiu is capable may become even more perplexing when one considers that he is consciously aware of Shakespeare’s professed belief in the purpose of literature and theatre. As late as the 1960s, decades after his translation of Hamlet, his thoughts

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are found still dwelling both on his past exchange with the deceased Lu Xun over ‘human nature’ and, in a connected way, on the interpretation of the word ‘nature’ in Prince Hamlet’s famous speech: Shakespeare says in Hamlet first that theatre is ‘the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.’ Shakespeare has an even more famous saying: ‘the chief purpose of playing is to hold a mirror up to human heart and human nature (to hold the mirror up to nature).’ Not only does drama reflect real life but it also represents human nature in a deeper way. (Liang Shi Qiu, 184)

Liang seems to be reluctant to accept the validity or relevance of a citation which threatens both to undermine his interpretation of the drift of the Hamlet speech and to lend support to his opponent in the more general debate on the criterion of literary greatness. His failure to acknowledge the unfavourable evidence begins to look even more deliberate when we recall his admonition against construing ‘mirror up to nature’ as indicative of either realism or naturalism in Shakespeare’s dramatic pursuit.3 Of course, it would sound preposterous to argue that Shakespeare predates Stanislavski and Zola (see Bradbrook). However, the inconclusive and extended debate on the nature of Shakespearean playing, the very topic of the Hamlet speech under discussion here, between what are known as the formal and the realistic schools in contemporary studies of Elizabethan theatre, calls for caution in treating the mirror ‘cliche´’ as hard evidence for Shakespearean players’ subscription to any ism – even one that may be the exact opposite of ‘naturalism’ or ‘realism’ as understood today.4 Similar arguments brought either by the formalist or by the realist to each thesis are so vague that they may be just as easily bent to serve the opposite cause. The ‘mirror up to nature’ does not prove anything concrete; not simply because it is a cliche´, though cliche´ it undoubtedly is and has been throughout the vicissitudes of European literature, but because it is indicative of an attitude rather than descriptive of an eVect.5 Liang Shi Qiu is not concerned with the eVect. He is preoccupied with an attitude

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or, to be precise, the right attitude, meaning the one that accords with his understanding of Babbitt’s traditionalism. Shakespeare says unequivocally through Hamlet that actors are the ‘abstract and brief chronicles of the time’, public historians as it were. Time, by definition, changes. Time is a synonym of change. Time is change. The time means the present, this life, this society, and this world. Shakespeare means his actors to be concerned with change, with what is immediate, what is going on, not necessarily with (perhaps not at all with) that which defies time, withstands time, that which is constant and timeless. A good actor should go about his job as the walking abstract and chronicle with restraint (‘modesty’) so as to ensure fidelity in recording (holding up a mirror to) the goings-on of life. The lexicographer’s common practice of defining meanings from patterns of citations should permit such an interpretation. The force of statistical probability apart, the drift of argument in the original’s discourse may also be brought to bear on such an interpretation. The intertextuality between the two instances should argue in favour of such an interpretation. It is as if in awareness of such potentialities, Liang contends that the ‘mirror up to nature’ is far more famous than the ‘abstract and brief chronicles of the time’. But that would not serve the purpose, unless ‘nature’ to which the mirror is held up should be substituted for ‘human nature’. And that still would not serve the purpose, unless an admonition should be further added that ‘as an iron fact human nature, in defiance of time, never changes’ (Li Zhao, 449). When one looks back on Liang’s proposition to rest universalism of literary standard on eternality of human nature, one wonders whether there is in fact altogether a diVerent criterion involved in Liang’s assertion, which he neglected to elaborate on. Whether human nature really endures as he maintains is a point for discussion. Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s endurance is already a point of fact. Perhaps an altogether diVerent question should have been asked – why has Shakespeare endured? In Liang’s criticism an implicit link can be established between what constitutes literary excellence and what constitutes Shakespeare’s endurance. An eVort to simultaneously answer the

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two mixed-up questions, which seems to underlie Liang’s literary and Shakespeare criticism, may be responsible for the doubtful and circular argument. Shakespeare endures, a fact beyond doubt. Shakespeare deals with human nature, an honest belief. Therefore, human nature endures, a conclusion that cannot be deduced . . . Then starts the next circle. Since human nature endures, and since Shakespeare deals with human nature, therefore Shakespeare endures. This line of reasoning was taken to task by the caustic and laconic Lu Xun. The latter pointed out that what Liang was saying amounted to asserting that whichever literary masterpieces had come down to us had succeeded in doing so on account of their depiction of never-changing human nature, and whichever had perished had met their direful fate for their failures to do so. Moreover, so Lu Xun went on, whichever survived was good, while whichever failed was not good. Lu Xun asked sarcastically if this would mean that the rule as observed in Chinese history, whereby he who succeeded in seizing the land became the emperor and he who failed to do so became the bandit, should also apply to matters of literature (Li Zhao, 136). The history of Chinese reception of Shakespeare may oVer a diVerent explanation of Shakespeare’s endurance. The AngloSaxon poet was first introduced into China in Liang’s formative years, when the country was seized in convulsions of wars, revolutions, and a cultural movement against native traditions. Following the Beijing University-led campaign against Chinese cultural heritage, between 1918 and 1921, thirty-two Western classical plays were translated, including Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, which helped to bring forth modern theatre in China. Of these European dramatists, Shakespeare was the best known among the educated people, for whom the Anglo-Saxon poet became almost synonymous with theatre itself. He has become also the most popular with Chinese actors who perform his plays in either the original or the adapted form far more frequently than they do those of any other Western playwright. Yet in spite of his reputation and popularity, Shakespeare’s influence on modern Chinese intellectual or literary history is

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limited. He was not as influential as Ibsen for China’s reformminded writers, who learnt from the Norwegian master how to use theatre to address social problems at the time when Western theatre came into China. In more recent times, he has not been as significant in aVecting Chinese dramaturgy and stage presentation as Brecht, whose style, if not dialectical mind, has won him many followers. The answer to this paradox may lie in the way in which the acceptance of a foreign dramatist seems to be determined by use found for him on the domestic stage. Ibsen oVered Chinese intelligentsia a hitherto-unknown model for using the playhouse as a site for discussing matters of social and political significance, whereas the traditional venue for that purpose had always been the imperial court. To contemporary Chinese theatre, artists conversant with Stanislavskian acting and the naturalist playmaking Brecht oVered both an unprecedented writing formula and a unique staging technique. In both cases, the foreign playwrights stand for new intellectual and aesthetic resources. They are influential because they have been found to be new (not timeless) to the native (not to all the world) at a particular time (not all the time) and above all useful, i.e. serving often non-literary purposes. The Chinese literati in the position to introduce Western drama were those who had their eyes opened to a much more powerful civilization and as a result of feeling that their nation was in danger of extinction started actively searching for ways to ‘save’ China. European drama was welcomed as a means of enlightening the nation. This highly utilitarian and worldly frame of mind determined the way each European playwright was to be assessed and assimilated into modern Chinese culture. In 1915, eight years before Liang’s departure to study English literature in the USA, when Japan’s ‘Twenty-one Demands’ threatened to turn China into a Japanese ward, numerous companies put on productions of an adaptation of Macbeth, under the title ‘The Pretender to the Throne’, in protest against the then state leader Yuan Shi Kai, who was widely believed to have capitulated to Japanese militants. The forcefulness of these stage protests in the guise of Shakespearean

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art was tested in an incident in which an actor in one of these shows was arrested and received a death sentence for ‘acting like a rabble-rouser under the pretext of playacting’ (Cao Shu Jun & Sun Fu Liang, 80–1). In this famous case in Liang Shi Qiu’s youth, it was an iron fact that Macbeth was forced to become a mirror up to Chinese political reality and that this rabble-rousing actor was an abstract of the time in China. As numerous instances from other countries and cultures may further demonstrate, Shakespeare’s timelessness and universality rest precisely on the pertinence of the issues, problems, paradoxes and questions which his plays delved into and which still stay with us, sometimes in spite of our cultural diVerences. The aforementioned rare example in the short history of the Chinese appropriation of Shakespeare rates alongside multitudinous other cases in the four-century-long history of English performance of Shakespeare in demonstrating that the longevity and prevalence of his plays can be attributed to constant eVorts to thematically reinvent them. Liang’s Shakespeare criticism seems to have been characterized by a dichotomy between the temporal and local on one hand and the eternal and universal on the other. This is shown clearly in his strong refutation of a Chinese Marxist in words that leave very little to the imagination: ‘literary works have to choose concrete materials for their themes, which of course change with people and time. Yet, the feelings thus expressed have nothing new to oVer’ (Li Zhao, 448). In practice, subscription to constant values may block the critic’s vision and stymie the actor’s imagination. Our more recent experience will also tell us that attentiveness to the ways contemporary concerns may be read into the original texts, as evidenced in Brecht’s adaptation of Coriolanus, Strehler’s Tempest, and Grigori Kozintsev’s King Lear, actually helps to concretize and vividly embody the human emotions of the characters in many of Shakespeare’s plays. Liang was a child of his time. Like many of his peers, he was intoxicated by Rousseau and became a great admirer of such contemporary Chinese romantic poets as Guo Mo Ruo. In the

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1920s, however, he underwent a complete change of heart when he became a student of Irvine Babbitt at Harvard and turned apostate against Rousseau and romantic literature, under the influence of Babbitt’s neo-humanism. His change clearly coincided with the resurgence in China of a movement of cultural traditionalism, generated in response to the native radicalism against China’s cultural heritage, inspired by the Russian Revolution, that was to lead to the birth not only of a revolutionary romantic literature but also of the Chinese communist party. Liang experienced a simultaneous change of literary taste to the ‘classical’. He was to write and lecture at length about Aristotle, Boileau and Dr Johnson. While these represent the ‘classical’ in the accepted sense of the word, Shakespeare, to whose works he was to devote almost his entire life, would be a classical poet only in Babbitt’s extended sense of the word as belonging to ‘the best class’. The irony was apparently lost on Liang that the neo-classicists, the followers of Aristotle and Boileau, can be scathingly critical both of Shakespeare’s perceived deficiencies in observing the neo-classical rules and of his weaknesses in fitting exactly Babbitt’s description of the romantic as ‘strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique’. Furthermore, in dedicating his energies and literary skills to translating and eulogizing Shakespeare, Liang can be seen as travelling the same path as European champions of Romanticism, including the Schlegel brothers, Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset and Victor Hugo. A likely explanation for this idiosyncrasy is that Liang came to accept Babbitt’s notion of the classic as the classy, without scrutinizing Babbitt’s notion of the romantic, in exactly the same way as he subscribed to the notion of universal human nature without exploring what human nature would signify in his time and his country.

Notes 1 Further references to Liang Shi Qiu’s translation of the play are to the same edition. 2 Shao Ting’s reading of ‘nature’ as natural and of ‘natural’ as accuracy in representation accidentally conforms to Raymond Williams’s definition of naturalism in the first sense of the word (see Williams, 203).

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3 It may be worthwhile to compare Liang on this point with T.S. Eliot, also a student of Irvine Babbitt. For Eliot, Shakespeare’s works witness a development of the ability to express essential ‘realism’, which term Eliot defines and illustrates (see Marathe, Chapter 2). 4 R.A. Foakes (70) makes the important point that what makes for a realistic eVect must be considered within the context of a given system of reality. 5 The metaphor ‘a mirror to nature’ runs through all dramatic criticism of the Renaissance (see Spingarn, 104).

6 T h e F e a s t An d T h e S c r a p s Translating Love’s Labour’s Lost Into Portuguese

Rui Carvalho Homem

The critical reputation of Love’s Labour’s Lost has always been closely connected with the perplexities raised by this comedy’s language. Statistical studies of the play’s puns and tricks with words, like Thomas Price’s of 1889, have noted that ‘of the eighteen characters, sixteen may fairly be called punsters’, and have diagnosed ‘a youthful debauch of the poet in word-plays’ (Price, 71). Such a diagnosis combined an attraction to the play’s linguistic zest with an aversion to the pedantic qualities of supposed apprentice work that had made Hazlitt declare that ‘if we were to part with any of the author’s comedies, it should be this’ (4:332). Conversely, the recovery of critical and theatrical interest in the play in recent years focuses precisely on the play’s verbal pleasures, on the way in which, ‘in our image-oriented era, Love’s Labour’s Lost refreshingly challenges our verbal skills’, oVering ‘the modern theatregoer’ a gratification that will not require the audience to ‘understand every word or all the puns in this play’ (Londre´, 4). In an age that so blatantly challenges the possibility of unproblematic, objective reference, we no longer discard Love’s Labour’s Lost as a play about empty wordplay but willingly accept the sheer verbal enjoyment it gives us while helping us to reflect on the complexity of language. Love’s Labour’s Lost has been a particular challenge to translators, exhilarating as only a language comedy can be to a professional of language resources, exasperating for the sheer catalogue it provides of discursive patterns and of the flowers of v 114 v

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Elocutio (see LLL [Ard3] 47–8). It is hardly surprising that nearly two decades ago the play became the main point of reference for Keir Elam’s groundbreaking study of Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse, nor was it an accident that, more recently, it came to provide most of the corpus for a chapter on punning at the centre of a monumental study of Shakespeare’s wordplay from the perspective of translation.1 Besides the diYculties raised by the play’s vertiginous wordplay, besides its unusually frequent use of rhyme and the sonnets built into the dramatic text, the translator also has to face the conundrums posed by those passages which often have obtained little more than vague and sketchy glosses from critics and editors, and to decide on the strategies that will produce dramatically able versions of passages which, contentwise, remain notorious cruxes. Further, the translator is bound to experience the peculiarity (and excitement) of finding, through translation, new words for a text conspicuously and obsessively committed to coining new words, and of exploring all the ‘various modes of lexical productivity’ in a text that is central to the characteristic Tudor ‘cultural endeavour’ of ‘word-hunting, word-borrowing, word-coining, word-joining, word-reviving or simple word-spinning’ (Elam, 270–1 and 264). An equally redoubtable challenge posed to the translator of Love’s Labour’s Lost concerns the complexity of cultural reference, to be read on at least two levels. On the one hand, the play’s language reflects the importance of the Classics within Renaissance literary culture, even if only to satirize their teaching and application via the comic type of the pedantic schoolmaster. On the other hand, this comedy plays with the relationships amongst several vernaculars and their appertaining national images as represented and supposedly spoken by the characters of this late-sixteenth-century English construction of a court of Navarre. The court is attended by aristocrats with French names, visited by a French princess with her train, ‘haunted’ by a Spanish hidalgo of Italian dramatic origin (as is pointed out below), and served by a dialogue whose risibility draws on resources proper to the English language and to English culture. The translator will need to address the specific significance of those various cultural

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references in the target language and culture, whose relationships both to Latin and to the several vernaculars diVer from those in the source text and culture. The translator’s awareness will be buttressed by developments in Translation Studies which have, over the last two decades, contributed to defining this field of study precisely with reference to intercultural processes. As Edwin Gentzler has said, around the turn of the 1980s Translation Studies ‘took the “cultural turn”’ (xi). This was largely due to the work of scholars such as Theo Hermans, as well as Susan Bassnett and Andre´ Lefevere, who argued that ‘the study of translation is the study of cultural interaction’ (p. ix; italics in the original). ‘And vice-versa’, one is tempted to add, in particular when one juxtaposes Gentzler’s dictum about the ‘cultural turn’ with the observation by Wolfgang Iser that cross-cultural relations seem to be guided by a great many diVerent intentions – all of which, however, appear to be modes of translation . . . Thus translatability turns out to be the hallmark of any cross-cultural interchange. (Iser, 31)

Significantly, Iser’s words also illustrate how the relational nexus highlighted by juxtaposing translation and an intercultural awareness proves supportive of an ethical and political opening up to diVerence, to an acknowledgment of alterities. In translation, he says, the specific nature of the culture encountered can be grasped only when projected onto what is familiar. In this respect a foreign culture is not simply subsumed under one’s own frame of reference; instead, the very frame is subjected to alterations in order to accommodate what does not fit. Such changes run counter to the idea of one culture being superior to another, and hence translatability emerges as a counterconcept to cultural hegemony . . . Translatability makes us focus on the space between cultures . . . the space between opens up the experience of otherness. (Iser, 30 & 32)

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This statement reminds us of the attention translation has obtained within Post-colonial Studies and in any form of reading committed to putting in evidence the power relations which can relegate to a subordinate position those cultures and those traditions of writing usually found in a minority or peripheral situation (see Bassnett & Trivedi). It is not by chance that one of the best-known theorists of culture as diVerence resorted to the relational model oVered by translation to declare that ‘it is the “inter” – the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture’ (Bhabha, 38–9). A reminder of this framework of theoretical production, together with the preliminary description above of the complexities of linguistic and cultural reference in Love’s Labour’s Lost, might suggest the relevance of one of the most influential models for reading the relationship between a sense of the other and a sense of the self as it becomes apparent in the decisions made by the translator: Lawrence Venuti’s disquisition of the opposite strategies of ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ (Venuti, History). In his avowed adaptation to a present-day understanding of the intercultural and the intertextual of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1813 argument (38–70) that the translator has only two possibilities – either to bring the author’s text over to the reader as if it had originally been written in the target language, or to take the reader over to the author by emphasizing rather than eliding or erasing the foreignness of the text – Venuti’s plea is for ‘foreignization’ as a way of reinforcing respect for diVerence and an awareness of cultural plurality, even if the cost may be an apparent ‘clumsiness’ in the production of a syntax and lexical choices running counter to a sense of fluency and spontaneity. Venuti’s argument relates specifically to translation into English as a hegemonic language; further, his model of reception concerns the text for the individual reader, on the page, a lot more than performance-bound texts, with their own semiotic specificity, texts which fully come into their own in a public circumstance, through a process sometimes also, confusingly perhaps, described as ‘translation’, by which linguistic structures are made to

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cooperate with non-verbal systems, texts with a specific set of requirements with regard both to signification and communication. Moreover, an awareness of the foreign is posed by a text like Love’s Labour’s Lost at the level of representation – and it is posed as such, for the sake of comic eVect, to readers and audiences of the source text. In this last respect, though, Venuti’s model may be paradoxically relevant on two counts. It may highlight how such a sense of the foreign will hardly qualify for an interest in otherness, since, on the contrary, it entails that diVerent codes are othered through and for the sake of laughter. However, if there is concern with preserving the way in which stereotypes are instituted, played, and kept at a distance from readers and audiences so that laughter at what is diVerent becomes possible, the translator may feel called upon to enhance or reconfigure that diVerence whenever a more straightforward translation (or ‘transportation’) of Shakespeare’s specific construction of the foreign would bring its forms (as butts of laughter) too close to readers and/or audiences of the target text – too close for comfort, or simply too close for a sense of the foreign-as-ludicrous to retain its confrontational and relational capacity. Further, that distance is crucial for auto- and hetero-images to achieve definition and enter that ‘binary relationship’ through which ‘one nation’s view of the character of another provides an insight into its own self-estimate as well’ (Hoenselaars, Images, 15).2 Translating Love’s Labour’s Lost into a Romance language such as Portuguese inevitably faces the translator with the need for decisions of that nature. Latinisms and a rare-sounding English vocabulary of Latin (and occasionally Greek) derivation loom large in the play’s language as a way of instituting remoteness and pretentiousness in the discourse both of the pedantic Holofernes and of the grandiloquent Spanish traveller, Don Adriano de Armado with his ‘high-born words’ (LLL 1.1.170). But if preserved in translation, simply rendered into their cognates in the target language, several of those lexical forms would lose most of their original pragmatic value, being forms in daily usage in the Portuguese target context; the translator may, as a

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consequence, feel challenged to reconstruct the original remoteness and pretentiousness by resorting to other less common forms that will not produce in readers and spectators an undue sense of familiarity. Another, related complexity concerns the diVerent relationships that the source and the target cultures will have to the other vernacular languages and cultures that institute the sense of the foreign in Shakespeare’s text – French and Spanish. These diVerent relationships are historically determined in two distinct ways. In part, they will result from the distance in awareness of the foreign between an Elizabethan and an early twenty-first-century audience respectively (and this is unrelated to the linguistic, cultural or national identity of that audience). But they will also derive from the respective set of relationships developed by England and Portugal in European history, from the ways in which both countries will have developed a sense of identity, construed with reference to that which they are/were not, on the basis of ‘an act of separation’, ‘a pattern of diVerences or diVerentiations rather than cohesive characteristics’ (Leerssen, Mere Irish, 19). The former complexity – concerning Love’s Labour’s Lost’s use of Latinate vocabulary which is meant to be remote to English ears but is thoroughly familiar to Portuguese, as it is to other speakers of Roman languages – first emerges in the speeches given to Armado. One case in point is his remark that ‘tender juvenal’ is ‘a congruent epitheton’ for Moth in view of his youth (LLL 1.2.13–14).3 Another is his grand designation of the pourboire given to Costard as ‘remuneration’ (3.1.128), which is a source of much humour in the ensuing dialogue. In both cases the cognates in Portuguese will hardly appear far-fetched to a present-day audience: both noun and adjective in the Portuguese phrase ‘um epı´teto congruente’, though far from colloquial, do not necessarily identify a scholarly or would-be scholarly speaker, whereas ‘remunerac¸a˜o’ is fairly common in public but somewhat formal contexts (as in political or journalistic discussions of the level of wages earned by workers in a broad range of activities). Alternatives that may retain the ‘strangeness’ of a more remote lexis, and thus emerge as convincing choices, will include, for

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‘epitheton’, ‘antonoma´sia’; and, for ‘remuneration’, ‘estipeˆndio’ (cognate with English ‘stipend’). A similar diYculty emerges with Holofernes’s ostentation of his Latin, as in such phrases as: ‘sanguis, in blood’ (4.2.3–4), ‘on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth’ (4.2.6–7), ‘to Luna, to the moon’ (4.2.39). Here, a literal Portuguese rendering of the English glosses which Holofernes oVers in proper schoolmasterly fashion will be either identical in spelling and pronunciation to the Latin word, or too close to it for the use of Latin to become apparent and for the glossing to appear necessary. An appropriate representation of Holofernes’s pedantry in Portuguese (as in other Romance languages), a retention of the unequal relationship between classical and vernacular which the source text is rendering risible, may thus at certain points require an extension of his use of Latin, the insertion of the isolated Latin lexemes in slightly longer utterances or in tags that will leave reader and spectator in no doubt that it is Latin the schoolmaster is using to promote his intellectual authority, or rather what Holofernes himself calls his ‘foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions’ (4.2.66–8). Occasionally, a syntax with an erudite ring will raise similar problems, as when Jaquenetta’s approach is signalled by the schoolmaster with the words, ‘A soul feminine saluteth us’ (4.2.78–9). Paradoxically, the quaintness of this postpositive structure in the source text may obtain a similar eVect, when rendered into a Romance language in which the postpositive becomes the direct order, by being reverted (‘uma feminina alma’), for the sake of retaining the pretentious ring of the phrase. The importance of such occurrences from the standpoint of translation lies in that, if they are not successfully rendered, the dramatic eVect of the passages in which they belong may be lost; and in Love’s Labour’s Lost that eVect, characteristically risible, is a decisive component of the comic. In Shakespeare as elsewhere, the scatological is an important referential domain for the comic mode, which will inevitably emerge in some of the challenges to be faced by the translator of Love’s Labour’s Lost – such as Armado’s reference to ‘my

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excrement . . . my mustachio’ (5.1.96–7). The comic nature of this passage resides, of course, in an implication to which the character, in his far-fetched lexical choice, is himself impervious, using ‘excrement’ in its archaic sense of ‘an outgrowth’ (OED). This vital duality, however, does not exist in Portuguese; and the fact that in Portuguese the cognate word is more commonly used than is ‘excrement’ in English rules out the supposition of that duality on the part of an audience. A solution for the Portuguese translator may, in this case, reside in amplification, a strategy facilitated by the more flexible economy of prose predominant in Armado’s speeches. After ‘excrement’ and ‘mustachio’ a third term may be introduced which, proposed as a gloss for ‘excrement’ in Armado’s intended sense, will impart it that duality of meaning which would otherwise be absent. In concrete terms, the translation might run: ‘a minha excresceˆncia, o meu excremento, o meu bigode’ [my excrescence, my excrement, my mustachio]. Such a strategy will also eVectively bring to the fore the practice of ‘amplification as accumulation’, that ironical use of the ‘word heap’ which already looms so large in the text of Love’s Labour’s Lost, to the point of what Keir Elam calls ‘pleonastic logorrhoea’ (267–8). However, Armado’s ‘mustachio’ prompts another reflection with regard to cultural constructs and stereotypes. In the prominence it is given in his physiognomy, the moustache focuses the character’s panache and flamboyance, so important for Shakespeare’s stereotypical construction of his Spanishness. But that ostensible ‘Spanishness’ may carry both general and culture-specific traits and expectations when received in a Portuguese context – summoning a mixture of what George Steiner in connection with the translation of ‘what is “near”’ calls ‘elective aYnity and resistant diVerence’ (Steiner, 381). Armado’s linguistic and gestural extravagance gain a new edge in a country whose national narrative depends so much on an oppositional relationship with Spain, from whom, so a proverb goes, comes ‘neither a good wind, nor a good marriage’ [de Espanha, nem bom vento nem bom casamento]. Of the historical moments of confrontation around which that (inter-)national narrative is

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built, two loom particularly large: the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385, marking the defeat of a Castilian bid for the Portuguese throne; and the Restoration of Portuguese independence in 1640, at the end of a sixty-year presence of Spanish monarchs on the Portuguese throne begun when Philip II of Spain became also Philip I of Portugal in 1580. One of the consequences of this oppositional narrative is the continuity of salient features in that stereotype of the ‘proud’ Spaniard which by Shakespeare’s time was on the way to its seventeenth-century ‘black legend’ heyday, a stereotype ensconced in England in the wake of Mary Tudor’s marriage to Philip II and reinforced after 1588 – a stereotype, however, which after the eighteenth century may no longer have enjoyed a significant currency elsewhere since, as Leerssen argues, it was eroded by the decline of Spain as a world power and transferred to other powers better able to be perceived as threats (Leerssen, ‘Rhetoric’, 277). The particularity of the Portuguese relationship to Spain as powerful neighbour (perceived and represented throughout Portuguese history as the country’s major potential or actual threat) entails that such stereotypical features will exhibit within Portuguese culture a continued vigour (in recent years enhanced in some quarters by the commercial ‘invasion’ of Spanish banks, Spanish shops and Spanish food). These features include loudness, arrogance, and a culturally centripetal drive. A standard source of mirth or indignation concerns the real or supposed inability of speakers of Spanish to understand other Peninsular languages, whereas it is claimed that speakers of Portuguese understand every single word of Spanish.4 Clearly, Armado’s excessive self-confidence and the peculiarities of his linguistic habits are likely to ring several bells in the consciousness of a Portuguese audience. In connection with such Portuguese constructs of the Spanish neighbour, an element of literary history cannot be ignored. One of the dominant models for the rhetorically inflated expression of a baroque sensibility in Portuguese literature, in both the lyric and prose genres, is still associated with the name and the work of the Spanish author, Luis de Go´ngora.5 Although Armado’s verbal

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inflation burlesques a strand of tradition that is historically previous to the broader European consequence of such Spanish baroque models, this anachronism will hardly prevent a Portuguese audience with at least a secondary education from establishing the connection between Shakespeare’s Spaniard and what is known as cultismo (Spanish culteranismo). Such Iberian traditions, in addition to the fact that, for political reasons, Castilian was an important alternative language for Portuguese literature throughout the seventeenth century, may provide the translator of Love’s Labour’s Lost with an impressive hoard of rhetorical and lexical resources imaginatively to translate Armado’s eVusions. As pointed out above, the occasional use of foreign words (by or to Armado) is one of the strategies for constructing his Spanishness. However, it may also be a source of further perplexities. Armado’s conspicuous ‘mustachio’ is a case in point. On the one hand, the ‘i’ in its standard anglicized spelling (instanced in the Folio) signals a derivation from Italian mostacchio or mustacchio – whilst the single rather than double consonant (the latter, in the Italian form, indicates the hard c) suggests, indeed, a pronunciation closer to Spanish mostacho (the nearly homophonous Italian form mostaccio designates a snout, rather than a moustache). On the other hand, though, Q’s ‘mustachie’ can be either a compositor’s mistake or signal a corrupt form of French moustache. ‘Mustachio’ thus comes up as one of several words whose origin foregrounds the indefiniteness surrounding a character who is nominally a Spaniard and ‘haunts’ a French-speaking court. It may also constitute one instance more of Shakespeare’s debt to things Italian – Italy being, in Elam’s phrase, ‘a source of sources, or a metasource for Shakespearean drama’, and so often a synecdoche for the foreign and the alluringly exotic within Europe (Elam, ‘Vail’). Several passages in the play indeed buttress O.J. Campbell’s 1925 argument that this ‘Spaniard’, rather than being the direct result of an English observation of a Spanish social and professional type, arrives in Shakespeare’s comedy through an Italian cultural and dramatic mediation, that of the miles gloriosus

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or braggart soldier of Latin New Comedy as reworked in the tradition of commedia dell’arte (Campbell, 97V.). Making the braggart a Spanish soldier would have been a consequence, Campbell further argued, of the cultural attrition and political resentment caused by Spanish military presence in sixteenthcentury Italy (97–8); and the notion that Shakespeare would have consciously had the dramatic type in view is to a large extent confirmed by the fact that (both in Q and F) speech headings and stage directions for Armado, from Act 3 onwards style him ‘the Braggart’. The deferential forms employed to and in connection with Armado may prove even more revealing (or confusing). It is surely apt that most modern editions show Armado being addressed in Spanish, as ‘seno˜r’; when the translator’s target language is European Portuguese, the retention of that adopted form will allow the Spanishness of the word to be perceived, since the ‘e’ in Portuguese ‘senhor’ is mute.6 Readers of the English text in several of the best critical editions available may also notice that the form coexists in the text with ‘signor’, that standard abbreviation for Italian signore which (almost irrespective of its linguistic specificity) may occur in Shakespeare to mark a deferential treatment in an ostensible foreign context. But the same readers may be surprised to learn (as they will certainly do if they glance at the editorial apparatus of such editions) that the form ‘sen˜or’ occurs neither in the 1598 Quarto nor in the 1623 Folio, whilst the closest to ‘signor’ is ‘signior’, employed in both editions in the famous pun ‘signior Iunios’ (or rather, ‘Signor Junior’, 3.1.175, as Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, as well as John Kerrigan, G.R. Hibbard and H.R. Woudhuysen emend it). The other three occurrences in Q amount to as many alternative spellings: ‘signeour’, ‘signeor’ and ‘signeur’; whilst F also counts ‘signeor’ and ‘signeur’ (twice). Is it an accident that the only occurrence, both in Q and in F, of ‘signior’ (an ‘accurate’, accepted variant spelling of the Italian form of address) happens in the context of a pun (and an oxymoron) which is better served by a pronunciation that will make ‘sign(i)or’ a homophone of ‘senior’? Does the insertion of an ‘e’ in all other occurrences signal in the direction of

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French ‘seigneur’, French being the language which the characters are supposed to be speaking (within Shakespeare’s dramatic fiction)? After all, ‘Monsieur’ occurs at several points in the text (between the two, Q and F also count ‘Monsier’, ‘Mounsier’ and ‘Mounsir’). Both Hibbard and Woudhuysen follow the Oxford editors in emending Q’s ‘signeour’ and ‘signeor’, and F’s ‘signeor’ and ‘signeur’, to Spanish ‘sen˜or’ when the title is applied to Armado at 1.1.185 and 1.2.10, 11 and 16; but ‘signor’ is preferred for the other occurrences, generating a coexistence of Spanish and Italian which is not unproblematic. Kerrigan’s option for ‘signor’ on all occasions may indeed amount to a tacit acceptance that the Italian epithet may be taken as a default form of address for non-popular characters in non-English dramatic contexts in Shakespeare. Another passage may confirm the specific emergence of Italian forms in the construction of Armado’s Spanishness. It occurs with the phrase ‘fortuna de la guerra’ (5.2.528), a phrasing which was first proposed by Theobald (and is commonly adopted by modern editors) for both Q and F’s ‘Fortuna delaguar’. The proverbialsounding phrase is thus emended in a way which enables a Spanish character to speak Spanish; whilst in fact the second a in ‘delaguar’ in the 1598 and 1623 spelling, though obviously mistaken with reference either to Spanish or Italian, is yet suggestive of a voiced u preceding it which would only be possible in Italian [‘gwerra] (rather than Spanish [‘gerra]) – fortuna della guerra; besides, the Spanish cognate phrase might also, more simply, dispense with the definite article: fortuna de guerra. And how is the Portuguese translator to face these conundrums, both linguistically and culturally? The acknowledgment of the Italianness of the Spanish soldier matters, in my opinion, essentially as an element in the history of national images and of their consequence in Shakespearean drama: from the standpoint of the translator, it is a necessary step towards the recognition of the linguistic and cultural complexities of the source text, but it will hardly be an element of characterization to be productively retained. It is doubtful, moreover, that the incongruity in question would be apparent quite in the same terms to a Portuguese and to

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an English-speaking reader and/or audience: a greater familiarity of the former with Spanish would probably allow the ‘anomaly’ of the Italianate forms to be more easily noticed and therefore to generate a greater perplexity. Besides, the southern-Europeanness of a Portuguese audience does not make it immune to that prompt stereotyping of Italian, and of ‘Italian’ behaviour, that comes to it as a topos of American-framed mass culture: the earnestly or satirically treated mobster, the pizza-and-pasta restaurateur – embodiments of ‘Italianness’ that on stage, as Susan Bassnett has commented, can prove intrusive to the point of cancelling any other more ‘serious’ dramatization (Bassnett-McGuire, 90). It can be argued that for a present-day audience the mass fortune of that image will have cancelled the verisimilitude of that other ‘Italian’ stereotype – its perversity, its wickedness, its passionate excess – which for late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Portuguese translators of Shakespeare was still vital enough to be subscribed to in some of their Introductions, conspicuous for their alertness to Shakespeare’s portraits of ‘wicked Italy at its lowest’, to the ‘perverse plots’ proper to ‘the Italian race’, or (assuming a curiously ‘northern’ standpoint) to the excesses of ‘southerners’.7 In a Portuguese translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Italian reference will hardly serve to signify the sophistication of the aristocratic world of Navarre. The same cannot be said of French, the ostensible language (within the dramatic fiction) of Ferdinand’s court, or of the cultural implications of the French reference. Interestingly, there are good reasons for the twentyfirst-century Portuguese translator of Love’s Labour’s Lost to highlight precisely the Frenchness of Shakespeare’s court of Navarre. These reasons are closely related to the status of France and French culture in present-day Portugal. It is no longer possible with the nineteenth-century Portuguese novelist Ec¸a de Queiro´s to decry what he saw as the absolute dependence on France of Portuguese high culture and of the habits of the Portuguese intelligentsia, saying that Portugal regularly imported its culture in crates brought by ship from Le Havre (de Queiro´s, 48). Nor is one likely to repeat his even more pointed declaration that Portugal had become ‘a country translated from French into

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the vernacular’ – or, rather, in a later version of the same boutade, ‘a country translated from French into slang’.8 In the course of a century following Ec¸a’s assessment, French certainly remained the first foreign language spoken by the educated Portuguese, and Paris the major cultural lodestar for the intelligentsia, but a major change took place during the last two decades of the twentieth century. At this time, English, supported by all the standard forms of an anglophone mass culture, largely replaced French in the position of first foreign language for the majority of the Portuguese population. And yet, especially in the humanities, French intellectual models have continued to enjoy a huge influence in academe and in the conformation of the elites who control the major cultural and literary publications. Massification, though, has made all too apparent the yawning gap between those circles and the majority of consumers of cultural artefacts – meaning, in this case, not only the little-more-than literate, soap-opera-fed majority of the population, but also large sections of the educated consumers of high culture who hardly partake in the rarified perspectives of a smaller, but still very influential, Paris-bedazzled elite. All this entails is that an accentuation of the Gallic element in the characterization of Shakespeare’s court of Navarre, when ‘transported’ into European Portuguese at the beginning of the twenty-first century, may help highlight the satiric implications of the aristocrats’ wish for isolation in their quest for knowledge, of their blandness, and of the eVeteness at the heart of their sophistication, comically exposed and punished, in fact, in the ‘Jack hath not Jill’ ending of the play. v By invoking translation as a model for intercultural relations and appropriations, Ec¸a de Queiro´s’s quip that Portugal was ‘a country translated from French into the vernacular’, or ‘a country translated from French into slang’ in a sense seems to anticipate prevalent emphases in Translation Studies today. However, the quip rests on an understanding of translation as the (unwilling but servile) debasement of an original, and its satirical import

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concerns the need to resist the foreign, leading ultimately to the very rejection of ‘translation’ – an intellectual attitude which would not find many vocal advocates today. The quip proves alert to the nexus of power, to the variable hierarchies which characterize intercultural relations, but it seems tacitly to draw on the acceptance of the superiority of classical to vernacular (in particular when the latter proves exchangeable with ‘slang’), of the elevated status of a learned use of the language vs. other, dismissively treated uses – a stance which is directly opposite to the prevalent counter-canonicity of present-day theoretical discourse. Ec¸a de Queiro´s’s boutade was, after all, no more than a satiric sally prompted by his indignation that Portuguese culture was being debased at the hands of many of his barely literate countrymen, dazzled in their ignorance by the glitter of what was foreign; in the same essay, the writer, who was also a diplomat well read in several traditions, actually flogs the profound ignorance of other literatures and cultures which lies beneath the cosmopolitan veneer of those of his countrymen who have more blatantly ‘sold out’ to the appeal of Paris. Ec¸a de Queiro´s was really a cosmopolitan writer who understood that cultural strength and self-confidence could only come from an awareness of ourselves intersected with and largely predicated on an awareness of others. The major framework for the comic plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost concerns, precisely, the wisdom of a pursuit conducted in isolation and conceived in autotelic terms – Navarre’s belief that high knowledge and improvement of the mind will only come from an intellectual pursuit predicated on the rejection of intercourse (in its various senses); and surely this proves as clear an instance as any of that ‘idiocy’ which Rosanna Warren associates with the ‘incapacity to translate’: Our word ‘idiot’ comes from the Greek . . . [It is a word] whose primary sense is of privacy, peculiarity, isolation. A person or culture guarding its privacy to an extreme extent becomes ‘idiotic’, even autistic, and such resistance to the foreign, such incapacity to translate, spells its doom. (Warren, 3)

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Comic punishment will come for such ‘idiocy’ – as also, in varying ways, for the schoolmaster’s classicizing pedantry and corresponding lack of confidence in the vernacular, and for Armado’s discourse of excessive self-confidence and selfcentredness. Such features of text and structure in Love’s Labour’s Lost illustrate the particular challenges faced by the translator who takes on this comedy of language and of intellectual and human pursuit. They also give some indication of the reflections of a more general and indeed meta-translational nature that are bound to occur to the translator, ensuring the problematic but undoubtedly enriching consequence of a confrontation with such ‘a great feast of languages’.9

Notes 1 See Elam; Delabastita, Double. 2 See also Leerssen, ‘Rhetoric’ (271). 3 The form ‘epitheton’, adopted in most modern editions, first appeared in F2 (1632) in lieu of Q ‘apethaton’ and F1 ‘apathaton’. 4 Curiously, the topos of ‘the contempt for a foreign language’ as a sign of ‘the Spaniard’s arrogance’ also occurs in Elizabethan drama (Hoenselaars, Images, 46). 5 See Cidade; Coelho (1:192–3, 243). 6 It is diYcult in translation to signal the diVerences when, in Moth’s speeches to Armado throughout 1.2, this form alternates with ‘sir’ and ‘master’, both of which have their immediate equivalent in ‘senhor’. 7 Respectively, O Mercador de Veneza, trans. Domingos Ramos (Porto, 1912), viii; Othello, ou o Mouro de Veneza, trans. J.A. Freitas (Lisboa, 1882), lx; and Othello, trans. Domingos Ramos (Porto, 1911), xiv; (all trans. Homem). 8 Homem trans., ‘Portugal e´ um paiz traduzido do francez em vernaculo’, ‘Portugal e´ um paiz traduzido do francez em cala˜o’. See de Queiro´s, ‘Francezismo’ (397). 9 This paper was prompted by the experience of translating Love’s Labour’s Lost as part of a project coordinated by Manuel Gomes da Torre at the University of Oporto, which aims to produce a new complete Shakespeare in Portuguese.

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Pa r t II The Translator at Work

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7 Translating Shakespeare’s stagecraft Jean-Michel De´prats

What apparently distinguishes one Shakespeare translation from another is the choice of vocabulary and the way such formal problems as prose or verse, free or metred verse are solved. In fact, the translator is constantly faced with choices: torn between contradictory imperatives which any translation will necessarily rank in order of importance. Shakespeare’s texts are interwoven with inherent ambiguities and polysemous puns specific to English, with its network of homophones and semantic ambivalence. This presents the translator with seemingly insoluble diYculties. The lack of coincidence between the semantic and phonetic structures of two diVerent languages often results in an impoverishment of the translated text, erasing the eVects of irony and perspective which make up the very body of the text, its texture. Translation implies making sense of the original, keeping its rhythm, echoing its sonorities, transposing its metaphors and its prosody, while not distorting its poetic resonance. But in what order of precedence? How does one choose? Is it a question of sensitivity, of translation tactics, of a choice made concerning the language, or imposed by the object and the ultimate use of the translation? In truth, it is all of the above. Translation is an empirical task, but in order for translators to make their way through the labyrinth of the text, they have to define some principles of translation either at the outset or in the course of their work. v 133 v

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It is essential to the translation that there be a coherent set of choices constituting a philosophy of expression which provides informed answers to such questions as: is literalness the opposite of accuracy? How can one pay tribute to the specific genius of the target language? Can the content of dramatic poetry be separated from its form? How much importance should be granted to the historical dimension of the language? And above all, should accuracy and metaphoric richness be sacrificed in favour of an oral style, a spoken language? In other words are there two sorts of translation, one intended for the page, the other for the stage? Few observers would deny that, beyond stylistic idiosyncrasies, there are diVerent types of Shakespearean translation defined in part by the identity of their authors or characterized by the goal of their undertaking. In the history of Shakespearean translation in France, there seem to have been roughly speaking three sorts of translations: æ ‘creative’ translations (or rather adaptations) designed by

people with an institutional background in the theatre who, out of a greater concern for contemporary relevance and performability, feel free to cut, add or transform; their commitment to revitalizing Shakespeare for the modern stage implies a rejection of the ‘museum theatre’ they feel is the outcome of philological orthodoxy in translation. Their work is based on the implicit or explicit belief that, translated literally, Shakespeare is too profuse and lavish to be ‘actable’. æ ‘source-oriented’ academic translations made by scholars

with an institutional background in English Studies and characterized by semantic precision and philological accuracy. Translations of this type, a` priori devoid of poetic ambition or theatrical concern, are conceived as useful instruments in the classroom for the study and detailed understanding of Shakespeare’s notoriously complex texts. æ literary translations or versions written by major poets or

well-known playwrights. Those famous writers sometimes have a limited access to or command of the source language or of Elizabethan English in particular, but are implicitly

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asked to appropriate Shakespeare or translate ‘themselves’ in translating Shakespeare. This has given birth to sometimes superb and highly valued belles infide`les by Andre´ du Bouchet, Pierre Jean Jouve, Jules Supervielle or Andre´ Gide. When for instance Gide in the Ple´iade edition of 1959 translates Hamlet’s ‘When we have shuZed oV this mortal coil’ (Ham 3.1.67) by ‘e´chappe´s des liens charnels’ [delivered from these carnal fetters] it is clear that his translation is more Gidean than Shakespearean (see Fluche`re, II: 651). That ‘division of labour’ among theatre practitioners, scholars and poets is disconcerting as there are not three Shakespeares, one for the stage, one for the study, one for the reader. It would of course seem desirable to combine or reconcile accuracy, rhythm, movement and poetic density. As a translator of plays, I consider that what is most lacking in many (not all) academic or literary translations is the liveliness, briskness or sharpness of dramatic speech; hence the enterprise of retranslating Shakespeare for the stage – retranslating, not adapting – by people like Jean-Claude Carrie`re or Ariane Mnouchkine, and many other less famous occasional translators of Shakespeare’s plays for the stage. Translating for the stage does indeed require an awareness of the specifics of dramatic speech. But when we translate a Shakespeare play for performance, must we incorporate into our work aims that curtail or at least qualify the usual demands of translation? What is specific about translating for the theatre? Translators of plays often talk of ‘speakability’, ‘actability’, ‘physicality’ or ‘performability’ to define the gist of their endeavour. In The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, Susan Bassnett criticizes the use of such terms. She denounces ‘the futility of relying upon an ill-defined notion of “speakability”’, writes about ‘the vague concept of “performability”’ and asserts that ‘speakability or performability defies precise definition; it is presented as a quality and yet there are no guidelines for interpreting it or for defining it’ (Bassnett, ‘Theatre and opera’, 97). I have my own reservations about the loose use of such

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words by directors who call upon them to justify and hide the commercial nature of translations done with no significant knowledge of the source language. Yet, the purpose of this essay is to substantiate those notions and elaborate on them, and to provide ‘the guidelines for interpreting or defining them’, building upon the experience of twenty years of collaborative work with actors and directors. However diVerent dramatic texts may be, they all share a precise aim, which is to take body and voice within the space and movement of the performance. In the theatre, translation cannot simply convey the meaning of a play; above all, it must create something to be seen and heard. On stage, words ring and mimic, appealing to the imagination and to feelings rather than to the intellect. Consequently, translating for the theatre has even more to do with the dramatic than with the linguistic. A third language intervenes between the source and target languages: that of the stage and performance. The stage is the place where both the text and the imaginary world it conveys can be transposed from one language to the other, and the path from the original text to its translation leads through an awareness of its theatricality. Translating a play obviously means taking into account the oral, rather than the written word, which is destined for silent, solitary reading. Theatrical translation is immediately put to the test by a physical person, namely the actor at work: The art of the dramatic poet consists in finding the appropriate rhetoric to express the thrust of his thoughts or feelings, a phrasing which is directly linked to breathing, which obliges the actor to discover its code or its secret combination either intuitively or by making a conscious eVort . . . This breath has its pauses, its tempi, its suspensions. (Bataillon, 70–1)1

Translating a play thus means more than just rendering a text into another language: it involves, above all, translating for the muscles, nerves and lungs of the actors who will speak the text. Shakespeare’s plays are theatre first and foremost in the sense that they must be spoken, that their breathing, scansion and rhythm

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give them life. Above all, then, translating Shakespeare for the theatre means listening to the spoken voice. A voice, a way of speaking, or a rhythm will make the translator favour one word, one kind of melody or phrase over any other. The rhythmic pulse, whether it be slow or rapid, flowing or jerky, is what constitutes the tune and inner poetics of each translation. Without the melody, a translation is but a sequence of lifeless words; though they may be accurate, they will have no inner justification and will not work on stage. According to the French Shakespearean actor Jean Vilar, this is what most translations lack: Good plays are marked by a rhythm. In general, translators can neither find that rhythm, nor make it felt in their translations. I like to be carried along on the breath of a text. Translators’ texts do not breathe. (Gravier, 44)2

What Andre´ Gide criticized in the French translations of Hamlet which he had consulted while preparing his own version, was that they could not be ‘performed or breathed; [they] sound harsh and have no rhythm, momentum or life’, he stated; ‘sometimes they cannot even be understood without continuous attention, and, in the theatre, the audience has no time for that’ (Gide, Ham, 8). It is very common to hear such statements coming from directors, playwrights or critics. They all agree on the following: the translator must keep the oral style in mind. Shakespeare’s plays are first and foremost written for mouths that speak, for lungs that breathe. Translating them for the stage involves writing in an oral and gestural language that is energetic and lively, and that is likely to present today’s actors with a vigorous and precise acting tool. Thus, the translator must be aware of the actors’ concrete demands, and make sure that the texture of the words can be sustained by the movements of their bodies and the inflexions of their voices. Thus, in the opening lines of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the King of Navarre describes to his companions his plan for an ideal retreat where they will dedicate themselves solely to the quest for knowledge. Reading the English text aloud, it is clear that the

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verbal dynamics and the authority of the royal proclamation are upheld by a powerful rhythm and the strong framework of consonants. In Franc¸ois-Victor Hugo’s translation, the impetus of the original text, its vigour and clarity are absent, or at least subdued (see Hugo, LLL, 1:1081). His wish to allow a detailed understanding of the English text leads to a regrettable lengthening of the sentences which breaks up the play’s momentum. To favour the semantic and denotative functions of a language over its music and flow contributes to making a translation hard to use on stage. Preserving the oral and sonorous impact of the text requires a translation which is more concerned with movement and rhythm than with intellectual understanding. If we are to avoid drawn out explanations which weaken the taut dramatic structure, the translation must be clear, resolute, kinetic and concise, and must have considerable economy. Sticking closely to the construction of the original text, trying to keep the same word order and, as far as we can, the same number of words as there are in English, does not mean attempting to create an impossible imitation. It simply means trying to preserve the influx of the acting and the vocal energy. Shakespeare wrote for the stage, and the audience is more sensitive to the forms, rhythms and verse than to the semantic content. The perception of rhythms and sounds prevails over comprehension; or rather, it allows the latter to happen. The first aim of a translation for the stage is therefore to preserve the theatrical dimension of a play, meaning its vocal energy. But theatrical does not simply mean oral. Shakespeare’s plays are also theatrical in that they call for action on stage; they can create physical movement by specifically indicating what gestures the actors should make, and where they should go, or by implicitly suggesting physical attitudes. For language has a body, and not only in a metaphorical sense; the poetic word includes movement. The words of a play already imply the actor’s gestures, in the shape of imperceptible muscular promptings or gestural hints. Beyond the use of stage directions – there are hardly any in Shakespeare’s plays – gestures are programmed, described or suggested in the dialogue.

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J.L. Styan’s Shakespeare’s Stagecraft (53–80) reopened that direction of enquiry which Granville-Barker had first explored. In his comprehensive and precise study of Shakespeare’s dramatic craftsmanship, Styan examines what the words suggest about movement on the stage, about the relationship between groups of players on the stage, and about the delivery and dramatic eVect of the words themselves. He contends that Shakespeare’s verse is full of suggestions about how it is to be delivered; it is, in his own word, ‘gestic’. The scarcity of stage directions, he notes, is amply compensated for by the myriad indications of possible action woven into the verbal fabric itself. Instructions to the actors are built into the text, rooted in the words selected. They are at times explicit: the Ghost in Hamlet (1.1.53) ‘stalks away’, Juliet draws near Friar Lawrence’s cell with ‘O, so light a foot’ (RJ 2.6.16). At other times they are implicit: through his rhythms, images and prosody, Shakespeare suggests physical movement and directs the actor’s voice and body. Antony in his frustration after the sea fight enacts his rage in the verse, speaking a ‘gestic’ poetry. It seems as if he writhes with the shirt of Nessus scorching his flesh, then flings up his arms as he seeks release from the torture of mind and body, then fights his anger in the subsequent low-toned lines (AC 4.12.43–9). Soon after, it is the other, moody Antony who speaks these lines: Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish, A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, A towered citadel, a pendent rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon’t that nod unto the world And mock our eyes with air. (AC 4.14.2–7)

‘Now the hesitant verse reflects the slow pace of his thought and his feet’ (Styan, 54). Shakespeare imagines the actor’s gestures and movements with a firm sense of both motion and lack of motion on stage.3 Ariel’s tripping syllables ‘to fly, / To swim, to dive into the fire’ (Tem 1.2.190–1) follow the rhythm of dance, whereas in the deposition scene in King Richard II, the ritualism within the written text calls for immobility and hieratism:

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With With With With

mine mine mine mine

own own own own

tears I wash away my balm, hands I give away my crown, tongue deny my sacred state, breath release all duteous oaths. (R2 4.1.207–10)

A theatre text requires being brought to life in the body, voice and acting of a player. If the audience is to understand the words spoken on stage, then these must be decoded and relayed through the actor’s body. This physicality can be found to its highest degree in Shakespeare’s language. These potential gestures and cores of theatricality are what Brecht calls the gestus. The gestus includes the speaker’s physical deportment and behaviour toward a partner, but also the way the speaker considers speech and the theatrical situation. Brecht tells us that: ‘A language is gestic when it indicates the exact standpoint adopted by the speaker toward others. The phrase: “Pluck out thine eye if it oVend thee” is, from a gestic point of view, less rich than: “If thine eye oVend thee, pluck it out”. In the latter, first the eye is shown, then comes the first part of the phrase, clearly including the gestus of conjecture, only then does the second part come, like an ambush or a liberating piece of advice’ (Brecht, 329; trans. De´prats). Maik Hamburger has on several occasions shown the importance of this notion of gestus for the study of the language of theatre. In ‘Gestus and the Popular Theatre’ he analyses the popular roots of Shakespeare’s gestic language and pinpoints the ‘gestic inadequacies’ of the Schlegel-Tieck translation (Hamburger, ‘Gestus’). In a more recent paper, he advocates a stage-related, close reading of Shakespeare’s playtexts and underlines many pointers for physical communication that must be taken into account by the translator such as rhythm, rhyme, verse, sounds and connotations of words (Hamburger, ‘Now’). This goes from the double beat and syncopated stress on ‘too too’ in Hamlet’s ‘O, that this too too solid [or sullied] flesh would melt’ – which indicates a double-pounding gestus directed at the actor’s own body – to the short staccato phrases: ‘If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it is not to come, it will be now’ (Ham 5.2.219–20), in

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which Hamlet gives himself up to the workings of fate and renounces his subjective possibilities of controlling events. A single word or phrase can convey a significant attitude. The phrase ‘At supper’ in the prose dialogue between Claudius and Hamlet (Ham 4.3.17–18) expresses the gestus of disrespect, of flippancy and insolence, produced by the connotation and sound of the word ‘supper’. For this word the German translator paradoxically proposes the word ‘Fru¨hstu¨ck’, rejecting the more formal ‘Abendbrot’, ‘Abendessen’, or ‘Abendmahl’, all of which lack the throw-away sound. Understandably, the gestic meaning of a text also appears in the structure of the verse ‘which does three-quarters of the actor’s job for him’, in the measure of time provided by the iambic pentameter, in breaks in metre or incomplete verse (which translators too often take as an opportunity to expand) or in the dramatic eVect of metrical variations. Thus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egeus’s clumsy, forced entrance line: ‘Happy be Theseus, our renowned Duke!’ (1.1.20) characterized by its flawed rhythm – a trochee instead of an iamb – makes Egeus enter court – metrically, metaphorically and physically – on the wrong foot. The gestus is that of Egeus stumbling in and throwing his vexation like a challenge in the ring. The inversion in 1.1.22–3 (‘Full of vexation come I, with complaint / Against my child, my daughter Hermia’) stresses the self-centredness of a man overstepping the rules of ceremony.4 It should be clear from these examples that the notion of gestus is not restricted to physical action contained in dramatic lines. It also applies to more clearly literary elements. Thus, far from being contradictory, the theatrical and poetic dimensions of a play coincide. In plays written first of all for performance, such as Shakespeare’s, the sensorial aspects of the verse, more so even than the meaning, are all part of the gestus, and they matter for the actor. All the formal elements – stylistics, rhythm, phrasing, syntactical breaks, redundancies and repetitions, metrical structures and verse schemes – are included in the gestus. For a long time, translators produced free adaptations which gave precedence to the way words felt in the actor’s mouth.

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Concerns of functionality dominated the confrontation with the hard, rugged poetic word. Nowadays, some readily take the opposite view. French director Daniel Mesguich declares: Actors find it hardest to get their tongues around highly written texts, which are rough and rasping on the throat, and thus demand the most amount of work. I think that the greatest challenge arises when there is a horrible graft between a language which is not made for the human body and a human body which takes charge of this language. (Mesguich, 77)

It is thus necessary to distinguish between translations which carry the acting dimension in them and translations which must be carried by the acting, which force the actor to make them viable on stage, in spite of the diYculties he may encounter. However, there is no rule imposing a distinction between literary and dramatic translations. As we have already seen, the finer points characterizing a text – its formal elements, its stylistics, its rhythm, its phrasing, its prosodic patterns – constitute the very body of its theatricality. When it comes to Shakespeare, there are certainly some literary translations which prove awkward for use on stage (for example those of Pierre Jean Jouve), just as there are theatrical translations which, for the sake of fluidity, reduce and simplify the imaginary content (for example the adaptations of Maurice Clavel, or the translation of Richard II by Jean Curtis, which Jean Vilar staged at the first Festival d’Avignon in 1947). But there are also translations which are both literary and theatrical, such as Andre´ Gide’s Hamlet (unjustly underestimated nowadays), which engages in Baroque or even Mannerist literariness as well as in a theatricality verging on the highly rhetorical. Constantly keeping the theatrical dimension in mind allows the translator to stay close to the physical reality of the original text and to its sensorial and material aspects without curtailing any of its brilliancy or poetic fertility. However, this awareness does not imply subjecting a translation to the intentions and theatrical expectations of a

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future production. The point is not to depart from the original text in order to be in keeping with the ‘style’ of a production – as Vitez (6) reminded us, translations command productions, not the other way around – nor to adapt a passage so as to please an actor. Yet if a text does not work well on stage, the translator may want to work on it once more and make it more precise, improving it sometimes. The translator must be ready to suggest alternative solutions. After all, a translation is not the original; it can be perfected and can constantly be revised. A vague, dull-sounding translation which is diYcult to speak reduces the actor’s inventiveness. Conversely, a dynamic, vigorous and poetic translation adds the pleasure of listening to the attraction of seeing. The translator is the first interpreter of a work – more in a musical than in an hermeneutic sense, in fact – while being neither director nor critic. The translator delivers a web of interwoven sounds and meanings, a musical score – and it is up to the actors to breathe life into it. Does translation prefigure production? It does, if what is meant is that it potentially paves the way for it, or includes it. But not if it is understood as already containing staging options. Of course, a translation is an interpretation; but the fact that the range of meanings of a play is inevitably reduced (polysemy or amphibology can hardly ever be kept as rich as in the original) does not involve restricting the expressive possibilities of staging. From word to gesture and from gesture to word, the link remains open and dialectical. A director always disposes many non-verbal elements – settings, costumes or stage movements – to render meanings that might be absent from the translation. Instances of regular collaborations only prove that some directors choose translators who share their aesthetics. They do not establish translations as virtual stagings. Even if, in some cases, translation and direction projects cannot be dissociated, a good translation, which can be used in diVerent stagings, exists independently of any reference to a specific production. Translating, like the art of the theatre, is the art of infinite variety. The acting must be done over and over again, the whole play must be looked at again and retranslated. Classical texts,

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continuously reread and retranslated, are constantly being renewed with each new period. Translations must be redone, first because their language quickly seems old-fashioned, but especially because no translation can ever encompass all the inexhaustible, open-ended dimensions of a work. Neither can it kill in others the desire to retranslate. Thus, the many new ways of translating Shakespeare are not a sign of a fractured, unstable approach; rather, they imply an attempt to meet the challenge of creating, for each new period, a lively, new bond with the play to be translated. The problem of translating Shakespeare should not be seen in terms of isolated elements such as a word or line, but of each play as a whole. The translation, too, must be a theatrical text, a real poem, a real work in its own right; otherwise, it will be merely a paraphrase, or a commentary which may explain the mysteries of a complex work of art but will result neither in a performable text, nor in a convincing work of imagination. A translation which does not lend itself to acting is a misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of Shakespeare’s works. It may be accurate, inventive and written in beautiful language, but if it doesn’t take performance into account, it is essentially an unfaithful rendering. Shakespeare’s plays comprise precise theatrical indications because they are concerned with the physical movements of the actors. Everything about them is geared towards performance. They are written by an actor for actors; they are texts in which rhythms and images are used above all to bring gestures to life, in which the words inform the actors’ performance. The aim of translation, in the case of dramatic poetry, is not only to communicate meaning but also to reproduce an object, a rhythm, form and volume. Thus, translating for the theatre does not mean making the text easier to act and speak by breaking it into sections, smoothing out its roughness or pruning its metaphors. That would aVect not only the poetic richness of the text, but also the tool given to the actor, because dramatic rhetoric is designed to be seized rather than to seize. Within the theatrical economy of the Shakespearean text, the abundance of metaphors serves first and foremost to increase the energy of

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delivery and the bounce of diction. The influx of acting and the theatrical energy come from an almost uninterrupted chain of magnetic words, of thoughts and images forming radiating constellations. Jean-Claude Carrie`re explains: The long, free-flowing sequence of a Shakespearean sentence is punctuated with radiating words that suddenly burst into diVerent meanings, images and scents. It seems that each one of those words is a crossroads in the middle of a whirlwind. The word explodes, Shakespeare seizes one of the fragments it projects and follows it to another radiating word, which in its turn vibrates and shines, and so on. (Carrie`re, 9–10)5

In order to preserve this energy in translation, the metaphor which holds in one word should not be expanded into a phrase or sentence, nor should the strange violence of an image be made commonplace for the sake of intellectual comprehension. Thus, it would be more appropriate to translate ‘the fruitful river in the eye’ (Ham 1.1.80) by the core of the metaphor, such as in ‘la prodigue rivie`re de l’œil’, than to resort to explanatory recreations and rationalizations, which have led to ‘fleuves intarissable ne´s des yeux seuls’ (Yves Bonnefoy), the ‘ruisseau intarissable qui inonde les yeux’ (Franc¸ois-Victor Hugo), and the ‘ruissellement des pleurs’ (Andre´ Gide). When the translation seeks to disentangle the web of images, it produces a logical result, but at the cost of losing the poetic and theatrical flow of the original. Gide claimed that he preferred to sacrifice the meaning of a sentence for the sake of its cipher. We must come back to a certain degree of literalness, going against one of the most current notions which claims that being literal is the reverse of being exact. In Shakespearean translation, being literal is a better way of preserving the form, which is a source of theatrical energy. Translating Shakespeare into French involves trying to forge new forms, rather than manipulating existing expressions and standard turns of phrase. The process should favour the language it is translating and not serve the target language. As the aim is to

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preserve the rhetorical economy and the imaginative content of the original text and its system, as well as to stick closely to the physical aspect of the language, it works against both lexical and grammatical standardization, and re-creation, which puts poetics itself into play. In keeping with that conception of theatrical translation, its objective is not so much to seek to produce a written text which exists in French in its own right, but more to seize the gesture which brings the work to life and gives rise to the oral word in the theatre; and to recreate, in an imaginative, energetic and spontaneous tongue, a language which today’s audiences can relate to. Therefore, taking theatricality into account does not imply restricting the usual criteria for translation. There is nothing contradictory about scrupulously respecting the ‘original’ while translating for the stage. Far from distorting the text or reducing it for extra-textual reasons, bearing in mind the theatrical dimension leads a translation back to the material aspect of the play. It does not replace such demands as precision or faithfulness to the text – on the contrary, it coincides with them and incorporates them, making them stronger and keener. Attentiveness to the needs of the players means imagining bodies in movement and hearing voices speak to a ‘listening eye’, which is not quite the same as the ‘reading eye’. A translation for the theatre must be as oral and gestural as possible, but its function is not to reduce the Shakespearean flow or adapt it to more everyday modes of expression. Shall we take this one step further? Shakespeare’s plays imply gesture without dictating one type of gesture; they do not determine the movement of the body or the inflexions of the voice. They do not say or solve everything. Translation for the theatre must remain open: it must allow acting without ever dictating one way of doing it, be animated by a rhythm but never impose one. Translating for the stage does not mean twisting the text in favour of what one hopes to show, of the way it will be acted or, indeed, of the actors themselves. It does not imply anticipating, foreseeing or suggesting a production; it allows it to happen.

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In short, the point is not really to translate for the theatre, which always conveys the notion that a text will be adapted with other ends in view, but to translate theatre. Yet, the one and only guideline for the translator of theatrical texts is the physical dimension of a text written for mouths, lungs and respiratory systems. Paraphrasing what Vitez said of Molie`re, I would say, ‘There is only one trace of Shakespeare left, and it is pneumatic’ (see Bataillon, 70).

Notes 1 Record of a round table discussion held at Arles, France, with Anne-Franc¸oise Benhamou, Patrice Pavis, Jean-Franc¸ois Peyret and Jean-Michel De´prats, under the chairmanship of Michel Bataillon. 2 Summary of a talk given by Jean Vilar. 3 On the question of language-implied or explicitly stated directions concerning gesture and movement, see also Hasler. 4 For these and further highly illuminating examples of gestus, see Hamburger, ‘Now’; also Hamburger (73–83). 5 This French adaptation includes notes by Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carrie`re and Jean-Pierre Vincent.

8 Translating and copyright Maik Hamburger

Shakespeare, as we know, had a hard fight with the pirates. Rapacious publishers could make a profit by printing and selling the text of a successful stage play in book form without the consent of the author or the playhouse that owned it. The owners had no legal means to proceed against this or to claim any part of the takings. The ‘right to copy’ was circumscribed by the physical ownership of the manuscript, and if a printer was able to purloin the text of a play and publish it, there was no law to protect the original author or his theatre. The only counter-measure the defrauded parties could take was to have a more authentic version of the same play published, hoping to oust the rival from the market. This occurred with Romeo and Juliet for instance. After an auspicious run on the stage the tragedy was published in a ‘bad’ (pirated) quarto by John Danter in 1597. This first printing is held to have been set up chiefly from memorial reconstruction by the actor who played Romeo. The text, though corrupt, is invaluable to scholars today because it contains a number of stage directions bearing witness to an actual theatre production. Reprehensible as it may seem for the man who had the privilege of being the world’s first Romeo to betray his company thus, we have to be grateful for the unique hints he gave us regarding contemporary staging of the play. For Shakespeare and his theatre, however, such fraudulence meant someone else was cashing in on a success into which they had invested a good deal of time, money, talent and hard work. The only course left was to put a ‘Newly corrected, v 148 v

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augmented and amended’ edition printed by Thomas Creede on the market to try to scoop up any remaining book profits. Although the author and entrepreneur Shakespeare may have suVered pecuniary losses from the lack of copyright protection, the benefits he derived from this open situation probably far outweighed the deficits, since he was in his turn able to exploit all available literary products for his purposes. He dramatized English translations of Italian novellas without remunerating either the authors or the translators, he incorporated passages from Florio’s translation of Montaigne and North’s rendering of Plutarch with the same impunity, he reworked plays that had been acted on rival stages in London, he lifted slices out of the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed to fit into his Histories almost unaltered; all these practices would have landed him in a copyright court in no time these days.1 Whereas in Elizabethan days only printers and booksellers were protected from piracy by the ordinances of their guild (the Stationers’ Company), copyright laws today recognize that authors should be the primary beneficiaries of the dissemination of their works.2 The copyright holder (generally the author) has the exclusive right to publish, reproduce, alter and sell the work in question and to prevent others from doing likewise. A copyright owner has a kind of monopoly over the created material which assures him of both control over its use and the financial benefits derived from it. Copyright laws also include ‘moral rights’ which recognize the right of an author to preserve his or her work from any alteration.3 However, these laws have only limited duration, after which the works pass into public domain.4 The authors of a translation of a literary work are protected by the same copyright laws as any other author. German translators can invoke the law if their texts are misused, plagiarized, usurped or commercially exploited without their consent. The situation of a translator, however, is rendered more complicated by either of two sets of supplementary conditions, depending on whether the original text is still covered by copyright or not. Literary translators of a living or recently dead author are indeed entitled to copyright for their product but on the other

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hand they are bound by the copyright of the author they are translating. Through an agent or a publisher they have to acquire the right to translate the original work and complete a contract stipulating how the financial benefits accruing from the translation are to be shared. Furthermore they have to respect the integrity of the work being translated. Translators are committed to fidelity to the original text. This requirement is generally set down in a clause of the contract reading roughly like this: ‘The translator warrants that he or she will translate the work in a manner appropriate to the original without cuts or additions and maintain the personal right [Urheberperso¨nlichkeitsrechte] of the original author.’ That sounds self-evident; the crux of the matter is the word ‘appropriate’. Who decides, on what authorization, whether a translation is ‘appropriate’ or not? It is precisely the problem of appropriateness that goes to the root of all debates on the subject of translation, be it a dispute between an author and his translator or a general treatise on the philosophy of linguistic transfer. How is the paradox of reproducing the ‘same’ meaning in a diVerent language to be resolved? What criteria are there for judging whether a text is a faithful reproduction of the original?5 A translator will commit himself or herself to respect the form, the manner and the content of the original as far as possible and not to distort the author’s intentions in any way. As long as copyright prevails authors or their representatives are legally in a position to check what is being reproduced in another language in their name. It is for them to decide whether their work is being adequately presented to another language-community. This does not mean they really are in a position to judge the foreign language version of their own brain-child. Writers are not necessarily proficient linguists nor the best judges of a translated version of their works.6 In general, however, authors leave translators alone. More often the agents or publishers in the destination country are the ones to assume responsibility for the quality of a translation. This may be of service to the text or it may not. German copyright law puts agents and publishers in a powerful position vis-a`-vis translators and the ultimate decision as to the published text is theirs. Due to immense competition,

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especially in the area of the commoner languages, the agents can virtually dictate the terms of the contract, which creates a pattern of dependency for translators. A striking example of an agent’s capriciousness occurred a few years ago. The English play in question contained a good measure of sexual and faecal slang. Such expressions represent a particularly tricky challenge for the translator; not for reasons of decency, I should add, but because the vernacular, besides being vulgar, often brings forth highly ingenious neologisms; a translation that merely reproduces the vulgarity without the ingenuity does justice neither to the author nor to the native speakers’ creative phantasy. One of the terms occurring in the play was ‘brown noser’ for which the translator coined the word ‘Schlammru¨ssel’ [roughly: ‘mud snout’]. The agent, who had obviously never heard the English expression, demurred. ‘Brown noser’, she asserted, denoted a person working in a peat bog whose nose had been coloured from the peat. The translator corrected her with all due politeness but her amour-propre was evidently seriously injured. Forced to accept his correction, she continually stalled the translator while finding, behind his back, another person willing to retranslate the whole play. After a further period of two months, she informed the unsuspecting original translator that she was unable to use his translation for ‘conceptual reasons’. Because of the loosely worded contract legal proceedings would have been tedious and not very rewarding: the play (a London success) flopped in Germany. And as the translator had pocketed a reasonable advance, he let things rest. When copyright expires, a new situation comes into eVect. There is no law to protect the writings of a (dead) author from misrepresentation. From that very moment on his or her work is opened up to all potential translators. Copyright now no longer subsists in the source, but it does in each translation of it, however many there may be. Each such translation is the legal property of its originator and is protected by copyright from plagiarization or misuse, like a newly written piece of literature. Although the original work has come into public domain, its oV-shoots are now original works. This may lead to complications when the

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author involved is as popular and much-translated as Shakespeare, especially when there are substantial financial rewards to be expected. Since the first serious German rendering of a Shakespearean play – Julius Caesar in 1741 – there have been a good dozen translations of the canon and over fifty of better-known plays such as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Every year new translations are being written. How can a translator come to terms with such a legacy? After all, the original works are to all intents and purposes invariant.7 Can a present-day translator do more than produce a new set of permutations and combinations of existing texts – involving, in fact, a good measure of plagiarism? Isn’t there a standard translation already in existence, the nineteenthcentury Schlegel-Tieck rendering, itself a landmark of German Romantic literature? Is this text which came into public domain long ago not being poached on by all and sundry? Apparently Irmentraud Candidus and Erika Roller, reviewing a translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Richard Flatter, thought this was the case. They wrote: ‘Next to Schlegel, Flatter occasionally uses other good translations . . . in describing the sleeping Titania he convincingly and happily combines slightly modified passages from Schlegel, Bo¨ttger and Gundolf with four newly translated lines’ (142).8 This elicited a reply by Flatter himself (214–15). He admits to borrowing occasionally from Schlegel where ‘this master of language found the finally valid’ phrase, but he firmly rejects the imputation of having copied versions by other translators, saying he does not even possess the texts of Bo¨ttger and Gundolf. He concludes: ‘A Shakespeare translator who collects his text bit by bit from other translations would be like a landscape painter who does not paint from nature but from picture postcards.’9 We shall see that there are translators of this ilk. When many translations of one play exist there will naturally be a certain degree of borrowing as well as a number of coincidental agreements. It would be a misunderstanding to always put this down to plagiarism. Comparing a number of professional translations, even from the same period, one is struck much

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more by the diVerences than the similarities. It is surprising how many equivalents may be constructed out of one foreignlanguage text. Each rendering is an individualized piece of art, albeit based on one and the same source. In Germany an experienced eye will quickly recognize whether a Shakespeare translation is by Schlegel, by Dorothea Tieck, by Baudissin or by the Voss family; just as among more contemporary translators it is able to distinguish between, say, Erich Fried, B.K. Tragelehn, Klaus Reichert, Frank Gu¨nther, Michael Wachsmann or, for that matter, the present author. How can each translation be an original work taking into account an ‘invariant’ source-text? An answer to this question can be ventured by taking a closer look at the degree of perception and re-creation required by an act of translation. In the words of George Steiner: ‘Meaning’ resides ‘inside the words’ of the source text, but to the native reader it is evidently ‘far more than’ the sum of dictionary definitions. The translator must actualize the implicit ‘sense’, the denotative, connotative, illative, intentional, associative range of significations which are implicit in the original, but which it leaves undeclared or only partly declared simply because the native auditor or reader has an immediate understanding of them . . . In the ‘transference’ process of translation, the inherence of meanings, the compression through context of plural, even contradictory significations ‘into’ the original words, get lost to a greater or lesser degree. (Steiner, 276–7)

Centuries of criticism have demonstrated that the ‘range of significations’ implicit in a Shakespearean text is practically unbounded. Each translator discovers ‘his’ or ‘her’ meaning or set of meanings in the complex, multilayered language of the poet and creates a subjective equivalent, knowing that inherent layers of significance must needs be lost in the process. Thus each competent translation of a Shakespeare play has its specific character, imaginative structure, atmosphere, stylistic coherence

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and perlocutionary quality. The history of Shakespeare translation in Germany is one of an unending series of individual approximations, each profiting from the work of its predecessors and each standing out against the rest as a unique contribution. Every translator hopes and believes to have reproduced the greatest range of significations and the most significant significations, but one knows one cannot fathom the full depth of the original. The variant versions are not arbitrary, of course. They depend on a large number of factors. One of these is, indeed, the perception and artistic stamp of individual translators. Another is the spirit of the age in which they are working. This is compounded of many factors. One of these again is the state of evolution of the target language: German speech and literature have undergone considerable change since the nineteenth century and texts from that period have an antiquated touch today. Another historical factor is the changeful nature of the function of theatre and that of stage dialogue. Thus the classic SchlegelTieck translation of Shakespeare is highly esteemed for its poetic force but is seldom played by theatres today because it is not intrinsically a theatrically conceived text (see Hamburger, 73–83).10 Even literally identical wordings in diVerent translations do not have an identical significance within the framework of the text as a whole. Translators do not generally react pedantically if they discover a number of corresponding lines in the translation of a colleague. After all, it would be counter-productive to avoid the apposite phrase merely because it has been used already by someone else. It would seem stupidly over-conscientious to go into contortions to find a variant on Schlegel’s ‘Es war die Nachtigall und nicht die Lerche’ [‘It was the nightingale and not the lark’ (RJ 3.5.2)]. However, translators frequently do present us with an astounding variety of solutions, as with the opening line of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’ (Ham 3.1.56): æ ‘Sein oder Nichtsein, das ist hier die Frage’ (August Wilhelm

Schlegel, 1799)

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æ ‘Sein, oder Nichtsein, die, die Frage gilts! –’ (Johann

Heinrich Voss, 1827) æ ‘Sein – oder nicht sein! – ja, das ist die Frage’ (Theodor

Fontane, 1844) æ ‘Sein oder Nichtsein – das ist die Frage’ (Friedrich Gundolf,

1921) æ ‘Sein oder Nichtsein – : das ist die Frage!’ (Richard Flatter,

1954) æ ‘Sein oder Nichtsein – ja, das ist die Frage’ (Rudolf Schaller,

1960) æ ‘Sein oder Nichtsein, das ist die Frage’ (Maik Hamburger/

Adolf Dresen, 1964) æ ‘Sein oder Nichtsein dann, das ist die Frage’ (Erich Fried,

1972) æ ‘Sein, oder nicht sein, das ist die Frage’ (Frank Gu ¨ nther,

1995).11 Seeing that any proficient translation is a self-containing piece of craftsmanship it would seem sensible, for reasons of aesthetic coherence and artistic integrity, for a theatre to use a single translation when staging a Shakespeare play. This has long been the custom in Germany although, as in England, directors have frequently adapted an existing translation to their tastes and purposes. Notable instances are Friedrich von Schiller, who translated and adapted Macbeth in 1800, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who reworked Schlegel’s Romeo and Juliet in 1812. Both plays were performed with considerable success at Goethe’s theatre in Weimar. In recent decades, however, possibly in the wake of post-modern concepts of interchangeability, an altered attitude towards the status of translation can be observed. Various theatre dramaturgs and directors show less interest in exploring the many-layered structure of a playtext. Instead, they are more fascinated by the eVects of interstylistic friction or formal deconstruction and thus prefer to stage a verbal pastiche collated from a number of extant

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translations. According to copyright law each of the translators whose text has been incorporated should give their authorization, be named in the programme and receive a portion of the royalties. In fact they are generally not even informed. Two instances of this lax attitude were related by Frank Gu¨nther, a translator with thirty-one Shakespeare plays to his credit. One enterprising theatre director produced an abridged reworking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which enjoyed an unusually successful run. It proved so eVective that many other houses took it into their repertoire and it is likely still to feature on some playbills. The director and author of this adaptation mingled five translations – some classical ones but also some modern ones by Erich Fried and Frank Gu¨nther himself – without taking the trouble to obtain permission or pay royalties. Although this playtext is getting handsome returns, of which Gu¨nther has not seen a penny, he refrained from taking legal steps on the grounds that it would be too diYcult and wearisome a task to prove which percentage of the text was his. Another theatre had announced a production of Twelfth Night without stating which translation they were using. When questioned about this, the director replied airily: ‘We are rehearsing with Thomas Brasch’s and yours and mixing them up a bit’. Gu¨nther was horrified, declaring he would never want to be mentioned in one breath with Brasch, and withdrew his translation; a purely symbolical gesture which did not prevent bits and pieces of his text being used. A production of Twelfth Night in Brandenburg in East Germany in 1981 operated with texts from quite another angle. The director Martin Meltke naively decided to turn the availability of numerous translations to dramaturgical eVect. He allotted to each character the translation he considered most fitted to him or her. Thus Olivia was given the smooth rendering of Erich Fried, Orsino spoke the romantic verse of Schlegel, and Malvolio had to negotiate the academic pedantries of Rudolf Schaller. As the production received harsh criticism for its alleged absurdist leanings, its textual solecisms went unnoticed. Another example comes from the dramaturg and translator of the Munich Kammerspiele Theatre, Michael Wachsmann. The

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highly idiosyncratic Austrian playwright Werner Schwab (1958–94) put out an adaptation of Troilus and Cressida (Troiluswahn und Cressidatheater) in which he made use of Wachsmann’s translation. Schwab rewrote the greater part of the comedy in a grotesque modern idiom, leaving a few straight sections standing like erratic blocks: he thought he was quoting ‘Shakespeare’ and seemed to have been quite unaware that in fact he was quoting Wachsmann’s modern, copyrighted German translation. This has since been rectified. The title of the book version now reads: ‘A Game after TROILUS AND CRESSIDA by William Shakespeare in the German Translation of Michael Wachsmann’, which not only covers the actual citations but correctly indicates that Schwab composed his whole text on the basis of Wachsmann’s translation. The post-modernistic authors in the cases described above, while showing a deplorable disregard for copyright technicalities, were artists in their own right. They pieced together their windfalls with a creative will and produced highly profiled original new works of theatre. In recent decades, however, a heterogeneous product has come into being that might be designated as the home-made translation. This is quite a diVerent kettle of fish. Theatre employees, directors or their friends assemble a minglemangle of half a dozen existing translations, pepped up with a few slang expressions to provide a modern tang, passing oV the product as their own translation. There is no question any more of the long process of ‘cumulative self-correction’ by which a professional translator tries to ‘come ever nearer to the demands of the original’.12 Such a concoction may on the surface of things appear more closely geared to the ad hoc requirements of theatre than to an individual’s creative transposition, but because it ignores all layers of meaning beneath the surface it is necessarily a sorry patchwork, lacking in linguistic depth and artistic coherence. The ones to suVer most from what is in eVect an abuse of language are the actors who have to speak lines that prove frustratingly brittle and devoid of resonance. The more thorough the mixture, the less chance do the original translators whose works were pillaged have of asserting their legal rights.

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The director Adolf Dresen and myself were the objects of quite a diVerent form of appropriation in the 1970s. We had done a translation of Hamlet for a performance in Greifswald in East Germany in 1964. It was the first post-Brechtian translation of a Shakespeare play in the sense that it profited from that poet’s innovative use of blank verse and his insight into the nature of dramatic speech, hitherto a neglected feature in German literature. Like the source text, it employed a wide range of stylistic levels from highly pitched rhetorical verse to everyday vernacular. The text incurred the displeasure of the socialist authorities because it was held to subvert the elevated tone associated with classical poetry. The ban was raised by 1973 in consequence of an expert opinion by the Shakespearean scholar Anselm Schlo¨sser, and after that this version was performed at theatres all over Germany. In 1977 the East Berlin Volksbu¨hne contracted to play this text in a staging directed by its Intendant, or Artistic Director, Benno Besson. For several weeks rehearsals ran their usual course as the cast conned their lines. Three weeks before the opening our agent, Henschel publishers, was informed by the theatre that it was now using a new translation by Matthias LanghoV and Heiner Mu¨ller instead of Hamburger/Dresen. At the opening it was obvious that substantially our text was being spoken, although the programme named LanghoV and Mu¨ller as translators. The deception was evident to every practised eye, yet it proved extremely diYcult to take eVective action.13 The theatre was indeed compelled to pay our agent royalties as per contract, but the question of correctly naming the authors proved impossible to push through. To begin with, the theatre refused to submit the text it alleged to be playing for weeks. After a good deal of pressure it eventually proVered a text which turned out to be a newly revised version that did not tally with the words the actors were actually speaking. Henschel then applied for a temporary injunction to have the production stopped until the case had been decided in court. The text Mu¨ller and LanghoV provided for the court expertise was a version still further removed from the actual spoken text. In the event it scarcely mattered. The crux of the proceedings in the Copyright

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Court in Leipzig was a long telephone conversation the judge had in the recess with some authority in Berlin, after which he threw the case out of court. Evidently a political decision had been passed at a higher level aimed at preventing a public scandal. The actual issue of copyright infringement was scarcely mentioned. Then and later Mu¨ller had continually altered the text at each stage of the proceedings. The version he submitted to Henschel was not the one acted, the version given to the court was a diVerent one again, and the one eventually published by Rotbuch diVerent again. In view of such smoke-screen tactics the only course remaining to our agent was to have a clandestine tape recording made during performance – which, in the event, fully corroborated our claims. By this time, however, Hamlet was about to be taken oV the programme so it was decided to refrain from further legal action. Henschel’s threat to go to court if the so-called Mu¨ller/ LanghoV text were to be acted elsewhere proved eVective enough to prevent any further productions. After the passage of a few years during which Mu¨ller continued to re-edit his version, the agent suggested a compromise to which finally all parties agreed: it stipulated that the latest Mu¨ller text was to be allowed but the prelims were to carry a note acknowledging its debt to the version by Hamburger and Dresen, who were also to receive a portion of the takings from all performances. The case described above with its successive phases of Mu¨llerization of a text provides a telling illustration of the diYculties lurking in the border areas of copyright in translation. Add to this the law’s delay and it is no wonder that in the main all that can be achieved is a compromise of sorts. From the time of the Luther Bible up to the present day German cultural life has been deeply influenced by literature in translation. So much so that translation has often been described as the ‘innermost destiny’ (‘innerstes Schicksal’) of the German language. It is significant that the position of a Dramaturg, a literary advisor employed by German theatres to this day, was originally established in the eighteenth century to assess and adapt foreign plays, which constituted a major portion of theatre repertory.

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Generally the authority of a translated text is taken for granted. People mostly believe they are reading or hearing the original work. Thus I was attending a Shakespeare opening one day and went forward to take my bow at the end of the performance. A woman spectator sitting next to my wife asked her why. When my wife explained I had translated the play, the neighbour said quite indignantly: ‘But I have the original German Shakespeare on my bookshelf at home.’ It had never crossed her mind that the original was English and I presume to this day she considers me a bare-faced imposter. Of course the unspoken assumption of readers in general is that the translation oVers a true equivalent of the original. They read their book in good faith as Shakespeare’s Macbeth or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Tolstoy’s War and Peace. If they were to give the matter any thought at all, they would refer to their confidence in the reliability of the printed word. They would simply believe in the existence of some authority that would preclude any distortions of the original. Indeed it would seriously impair their pleasure if they were continually to question the authenticity of what they were reading. There is no point in burdening readers with the consciousness that any translation must involve losses as against the original foreign-language work. In general their confidence will not be misplaced. The primary authority at all times lies in the sense of responsibility and the perceptive faculty of the translator. Then there are, as we have seen, legal mechanisms enabling the author, publisher or agent, as well as the foreign language publisher and his editor or the theatre dramaturg to exercise control over the quality of a translation. It is of course one of the basic assumptions of copyright law that those holding the copyright are responsible for the undistorted reproduction of the moral and aesthetic spirit of a creative work. By and large these controlling authorities can be relied on to operate conscientiously and the great body of literary work being translated into German can be assured of an adequate representation in that language.14 However, now and then a closer analysis of a translation brings some odd results to light.

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Thus in the 1960s there was an authorized translation of Sean O’Casey’s one-act plays in which it was literally impossible to recognize what was supposed to be going on. In the play, Hall of Healing, a patient at a Dublin Parish Dispensary says of the drunken doctor that ‘he’s partial to th’ drop’; this had been translated as ‘er liebt Hinrichtungen’, meaning ‘he is fond of executions’! Obviously the translator, totally ignorant of slang, had opted for the seventh entry under ‘drop’ in a dictionary – which happened to be the drop of the gallows. There is absolutely nothing in the play to warrant such an interpretation. It should be said that the O’Casey estate immediately changed its German publisher after being notified of the circumstances, and new translations were commissioned. A considerable scandal was caused some years ago by a translation of a similar nature. In 1992 the Munich publishers Albrecht Knaus Verlag launched a German translation of Lawrence Norfolk’s novel Lamprie`re’s Dictionary accompanied by an extensive advertising campaign. The 700-page book received rave reviews and sold 140,000 copies in the first five months. Nobody seemed to notice that the translation bristled with the most appalling mistakes. This finally provoked professionals to unprecedented action: eleven of the most renowned German translators wrote an open letter to the publisher demanding he withdraw the book and have a new translation made.15 They referred to the translation as a ‘gigantic collection of stylistic howlers fit for a cabaret’. They enclosed four pages of selected quotations to prove their point. Thus the translator had written ‘Lamprie`res Kopf rollte in ihrem Schob umher’ (‘Lamprie`re’s head rolled around in her lap’) for ‘Lamprie`re’s head lolled in her lap’ and ‘er . . . versuchte seine Bu¨rde zu tragen’ (‘he . . . tried to bear his burden’) for ‘he . . . tried to get his bearings’, just to give two of hundreds of examples. A heated debate followed in the press. Most critics now sided with the letter-writers. They found the translator Hanswilhelm Haefs had not only repeatedly misunderstood English idioms and syntax but had not even recognized important structural patterns, not paying any attention to leitmotifs or to changes in narrative perspective.

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The publisher’s first reaction was to attempt court proceedings against the letter-writers, but this was tacitly dropped. A professor of comparative literature took it upon himself to justify the criticized text in a long article. He accused the complainants of running down a colleague and praised the translation for its alleged creative alienation without, however, being able to prove that Haefs’s howlers were in fact the result of intentional linguistic distancing.16 The petitioners justified their intervention by stating: ‘if it becomes accepted practice that such amateurish translations are not only not criticized but even extolled as masterpieces, we can chuck in our profession as we understand it. If it doesn’t make any diVerence anyway, why do we cudgel our brains, why all this time-consuming polishing of our translations?’ Indeed, if those responsible for copyright were to become indiVerent to translation standards, there would be no more legal means of ensuring a minimum of quality. As a critic wrote under the headline ‘Autopsy of a Best-Seller’: ‘In this case, which gives a warning signal, the onus is on the publisher to correct the damage done to the reader, to literature, to the language – and finally to himself’.17 However, Knaus still claimed that with Haefs’s translation they published an irreproachable text. The original author – who has no German – endorsed the translation which is still on the market in a slightly revised version. Arguably the two objects of copyright law came into conflict with one another: the commercial interests of the author were amply served while the artistic character of the work was not. Possibly he felt you can’t have everything. But how about the classic writer? Who is going to rescue him from translators of this kind? Obviously there is no statutory authority to watch over the integral treatment of his works. There are remarkable exceptions. Matters of art being intractable to legal definitions, judgements in copyright cases are often left to the discretionary powers of the court. Thus a surprising decision was taken by the Bench at a court in Frankfurt in 1989. The matter in dispute was an operatic libretto after Alexander N. Ostrovsky’s play The Forest. The libretto by He´le`ne Vida, wife of the opera’s composer Rolf Liebermann, had transposed the action into a

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German environment. This was not to the liking of Adolf Dresen, who was to direct the opera at Schwetzingen in 1988 and a year later in Frankfurt. He re-wrote the libretto, bringing back the Russian names and the Russian atmosphere of the original play. When Liebermann and Vida went to court about this, the judge decided in favour of Dresen (for this particular production) on the grounds that the moral rights of the original author had to be defended even if dead. This was of course a wholly unconventional judgement. There is no law and no court extant to assert Shakespeare’s authority vis-a`-vis his adaptors and extrapolators. In view of the oeuvre of Hans Rothe, not a few Shakespearean scholars in Germany might have wished there were. Rothe, who was a playwright and dramaturg in Leipzig and Berlin, began publishing his self-styled translations of Shakespeare from 1922 onward. He had put forward a radical theory that the Quarto and Folio texts of Shakespeare already represented haphazard compilations by a bevy of collaborators. Indeed he regarded this state of aVairs as a definite advantage: ‘Today copyright stops the first good idea from being developed further: in the Elizabethan age nothing was lost that had suYcient vitality. Unceasingly and ever anew the whole poetic and narrative material of the Elizabethan stage was thrown back into the great melting pot’ (Rothe, 14).18 In spite of his manifest enthusiasm for the great Elizabethan melting pot, Rothe felt himself called upon to extract the original Shakespeare out of this alloy. He claimed to be able to achieve this partly by virtue of his innate sense of theatre and partly by complicated phonetic investigations based on a method evolved by a professor of German philology, Eduard Sievers. The result of Rothe’s endeavours was a fundamentally revised version of the Bard’s plays which simplified the syntax, rearranged the verse, clarified diYcult passages, popularized complicated arguments and cut down on rhetorical flourishes. Blank verse was partly changed into prose or free verse and vice versa. Considerable passages were summarily cut: not only many quibbles but whole scenes or acts the translator deemed unauthentic.19 Rothe’s scripts were welcomed by actors because they were eminently speakable and

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became quite popular with the theatres until 1936, when they were banned by Nazi propaganda chief Goebbels.20 After World War II they enjoyed a new lease of life, being played until the late 1950s. While being acted all over Germany, these texts were subjected to severe criticism by Shakespearean scholars who regarded Rothe as an unprincipled amateur and a charlatan; but although invested with all the authority of academe, they had no power to protect the author Shakespeare from what they obviously regarded as an insuVerable violation of moral copyright. On the other hand, Rothe claimed that he had unearthed the authentic text and was thus the true champion of the poet’s integrity. In the end, time passed judgment: like the previous adaptations of Davenant, Dryden, Goethe and others, Rothe’s revisions now merely cause readers to shake their heads at the high regard in which they were once held. The strongest counsel for Shakespeare’s moral rights is still the power of his dramatic art. The situation in Germany today is in some respects reminiscent of that in Shakespeare’s day. There is a manifold hodge-podge of Shakespearean translations, adaptations, interpretations, variations and oV-shoots. Due to directorial individualism practically every staging of the poet presents us with a new artefact based (more or less) on a Shakespearean text. Translations are proliferating more than ever, and there is naturally a certain amount of interdependence as well as independence. Inevitably cases of inadvertent similarities turn up which cannot be counted as plagiarism, but there are also cases of deliberate lifting, of illegitimate mixing of various translations and of downright piracy – just as in Elizabethan times. Although copyright laws are now in force to protect translators, the niceties of the translating business are often of too delicate a nature to be grasped by the existing legal apparatus. Thus the translator is still legally in an insecure position. This state of aVairs is probably unique to the works of William Shakespeare. No other author exerts such a permanent appeal on creative artists, nor represents such an unending challenge to translators, nor lends himself to such a volume of commercial exploitation. The ship bearing the brightest treasure is the one most prone to be robbed.

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Notes 1 For an historical view, see Patterson. 2 The basic ideas of modern copyright law were first formulated by the Statute of Anne, passed in England in 1709, which influenced the relevant legislation of all European countries. 3 These principles have been incorporated in international law at various conventions, the most important being the Berne Convention of 1886, revised in Brussels in 1948, and the Universal Copyright Convention of 1952. The EU is at present taking steps to harmonize copyright law in member countries. 4 The current term of copyright in Germany, as in many countries, is seventy years after the author’s death. 5 A full-length exposition of these problems may be found in Steiner. 6 A case in point is George Bernard Shaw’s quite misplaced enthusiasm about the translations of his plays by Siegfried Trebitsch. 7 This may seem a daring statement in view of both the vast amount of editorial progress made in the past century and the new theories of authorship expounded by modern literary criticism. But the actual alterations confronting a translator – be it in the Arden, Cambridge or Oxford editions – still constitute a small proportion of the body of the work. Recent investigations into the modalities of Shakespearean authorship in interplay with performing practice may well inform the work of contemporary translators, but that is part of their individual creative approach. 8 Adolph Bo¨ttger was one of a team translating an edition of Shakespeare in the 1850s. Friedrich Gundolf, a follower of the esoteric poet Stefan George, edited and partially translated the canon in 1920–2; as he died in 1931 his heirs would have owned the copyright up to 2001. 9 All translations from the German are by Hamburger. 10 For a comprehensive treatment, see Weimann. 11 A few features worth noting: (a) the attempt to regularize the metre with the help of fillers such as ‘hier’, ‘ja’, ‘dann’, although the original line is irregular (‘ja’ derives scanty authorization from Q1: ‘To be or not to be, ay, there’s the point’); (b) the expressionistic employment of punctuation either for dramatic emphasis or as a philosophic marker; (c) the alternative use of the infinitive (‘sein’) or the nominalized verb (‘Sein’), the latter emphasizing the existential element; as the versions are homophones, the diVerence would not be noticeable on the stage. 12 Pierre-Daniel Huet, as quoted in Steiner. 13 Anselm Schlo¨sser’s impression after the opening, conveyed in a letter, was that 80 per cent of the text consisted of Hamburger/Dresen, 10 per cent of Schlegel and 10 per cent possibly of Mu¨ller.

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14 About every seventh book published in Germany is a translation. In 2001 a total of 9,338 titles was published of which 3,746 were belles-lettres; from the English the corresponding figures were 6,924 titles including 2,833 belles-lettres (Buch und Buchhandel in Zahlen, 2002). 15 For a re´sume´, see Otto Bayer et al., ‘“Irgendwo in all diesem war irgendwas falsch”’, Politik & Kultur 3 (1993), 42–4; and Josef Singldinger, ‘Professionlita¨t ist gefragt und nicht moralisierende Polemik’, Politik & Kultur 4 (1993), 38–40. 16 The complainants asserted that they had waited until 100,000 copies had been sold before taking action so as not to cause losses to a colleague. 17 Uwe Pralle, ‘Autopsie eines Bestsellers’, in Neue Zu¨rcher Zeitung 6 (February 1993). Quoted in Otto Bayer et al. (see note 15 above). 18 Quoted in Hortmann, 88. 19 Thus barely a quarter of the received text of King Lear was deemed to be by Shakespeare. 20 The Nazi regime solved the copyright problem in its own way: it raised the Schlegel-Tieck version to the oYcial translation whose use was mandatory for all theatres.

9 The Translator as Editor T h e Q u a r t o s o f Hamlet

Alessandro Serpieri

Translating any play by Shakespeare necessarily implies editing it, whether or not one is aware of the philological problems involved. Since none of his plays appears in its authorized version, textual diVerences and/or frequent cruces are always open to debate, particularly when two or more early printed texts are extant. Consequently, in most cases, any translation is the result of a preliminary choice both of one text among others and of local variants of greater or lesser importance. The translator may ignore the problem and take more or less casually one of the many editions available as the text to be translated; still, the very acceptance of the chosen edition is an act of editing. Editing also means interpreting, and interpretation is the first job of any reader, most of all of the translator who has to cope with the variant readings transmitted by the early texts, to distinguish misreadings, to consider emendations, and finally to choose or to establish the text to be translated. Ideally at least, the translator should have an adequate grounding in textual criticism. Translating Shakespeare also means enlarging one’s critical scope to extra-textual as well as strictly dramaturgical problems. The translator should possess: æ a profound knowledge of the early modern period and of

the dramaturgical and theatrical structures and conventions of this complex world; v 167 v

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æ a thorough acquaintance with Early Modern English, whose

grammar, syntax and semantics were still unstable and developing towards modern English; æ a knowledge of the canon in order to ascertain the debatable

meaning which Shakespeare’s inventiveness attached to words and phrases, particularly when he coined neologisms and new expressions; æ a theoretical competence in the peculiarities of dramatic

discourse in order to render the virtual theatricality of speeches for delivery on stage; æ a talent for writing in the translator’s own language.

Before tackling the textual problem proper, however, it seems worth dwelling briefly on the constraints of translating drama in general. With Roman Jakobson one might say that any translator of Shakespeare must deal with an endolinguistic translation, which ‘consists in the interpretation of the linguistic signs through other signs of the same language’ (Brower, 233). This type of translation is carried out by native speakers, often with the help of explanatory footnotes in modern editions, and it amounts to looking up words and phrases, preferably in the OED, in order to ascertain their historical meanings. This is also a task in which foreigners, and most of all critics and translators, are inevitably engaged. But it is the task only of translators to proceed to an interlinguistic translation, which in Jakobson’s terms is ‘the interpretation of linguistic signs through another language’ (233). As is well known, plays are unique pieces of writing, being texts written on the page but conceived for the stage where characters speak and, at the same time, act according to nonlinguistic signs (the mimic, the gestic, the proxemic) which are encoded explicitly in stage directions, and implicitly in the language itself. As a consequence, the translator of drama must also deal with intersemiotic translation, which ‘consists in the interpretation of linguistic signs through non-linguistic systems’ (233).

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Translating Shakespeare, then, means taking into account all three kinds of translation and rendering, as closely and eVectively as possible, both the literary richness and the intersemiotic, theatrical instructions encoded in his texts. Translation always entails a linguistic, cultural and historical hybridization which is essential to the life of cultures, bringing about a dialogue between two diVerent views of the world, systems of perception, cultural and historical periods, as well as two existential and linguistic consciousnesses: the author’s and the translator’s, the latter as a new author. But the translator’s choice must, first of all, aim at rendering a language which, however rich and complex on the literary level, was conceived for the body and voice of actors/ characters performing their action/life on the stage. What a task! Any translator is doomed to lose the game. Still, translation does cooperate to give new life to Shakespeare’s plays, introducing them into a new language and a new world; and occasionally it can also contribute new perspectives on their complex semantic and dramatic meanings. In fact, while establishing, interpreting, annotating and rewriting Shakespeare’s texts, the translator enjoys a peculiar vantage point – a distance that is only partially perceived by a native speaker whose linguistic heritage still derives from those Early Modern English writings and who is therefore at least partly guided by an automatic, if imperfect, understanding of that language. A nonnative foreigner, on the other hand, is likely to question every semantic trait of the text – and this may sometimes be rewarding. In fact, even at the level of lexis, semic analyses of words (and of sequences of words) must be worked through in order to discover almost equivalent signs in the translator’s own language. Trying to unravel such a complex texture, the translator may make some textual discovery, or at least raise some doubts about accepted interpretations, particularly when faced by corrupted texts, cruces, neologisms and hapax legomena. In this essay, I discuss a number of textual problems in relation to the three Hamlet texts transmitted by Q1, Q2 and F. More than is customary, the translator of Hamlet has to act the part of the philologist and deal with a wide range of textual problems, the

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solution of which aVects both the meaning and the structural, dramaturgical pattern of the play in its new language. The translator has to decide what kind of text, or which text altogether, is to be transposed into the target language. In the late 1970s I translated Hamlet into Italian for a nationwide production, and soon afterwards published it, with an introduction and both critical and textual notes. It was a conflated edition based on Q2, since there seemed to be no serious objection to such a procedure at that time. Recently, I was asked to revise it for another publisher and consequently I had to cope with the new philological and editorial theories advanced by textual criticism in the last decades with particular reference to Shakespeare’s plays. Passing through the whole querelle between revisionists and antirevisionists, my attention was mainly focused on the need for a decision about which of the two authoritative texts (Q2 and F) to adopt for my translation with parallel text. At the same time, I was captured by the perennial debate about Q1 Hamlet. This text – called a ‘strange apparition’, an ‘enigma’ and a ‘mystery’ – does in a way aVect the editing of the ‘classical’ play, if only because of some precious stage directions which are functional to the action and only occur there. Working on the three texts, I finally decided to produce, in two separate volumes, my revised edition of Hamlet and, for the first time in Italy, a brand-new edition of the first Quarto. Here I cannot give an adequate account of the centuries-old textual debate about Hamlet Q2 and F. SuYce it to say that Q2, supposed to have been printed from the author’s ‘foul papers’, was favoured as copy-text by most twentieth-century editors up to the 1980s. W.W. Greg, for example, preferred it to F (supposed to derive from a prompt-book) on the premise that it was the more authoritative, being closer to the author’s manuscript. However, he admitted some variant substantive readings from F according to what he called a restricted eclecticism. The 1980s saw a revolution in Shakespearean textual criticism and in consequent editorial practice. Hamlet was one of the plays at the centre of the discussion, since it presents three diVerent early texts which might point to diVerent stages of composition.

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The question was, and is, whether editing should conflate the two authoritative texts (Q2 and F) on the assumption that this might approximate the ideal text Shakespeare had in mind, or should drastically opt for one of them since plays did not, at any stage, have the status of definitive writings, but were to be considered as very fluid pieces of writing. In 1986 Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor presented the Complete Works of Shakespeare with most of the plays edited according to the F texts on the assumption that they represented the performance texts in Shakespeare’s time. A few years earlier, Wells had advocated the greater authoritativeness of F, which seemed to him to oVer the plays in their theatrical version, whereas the quartos composed from the ‘foul papers’ had probably been delivered by Shakespeare to his company in the awareness of their provisional status which had to be tested and adjusted in the course of their stage production. Opting for the F texts, Wells (Re-editing, 81) used an eVective metaphor: ‘Do we prefer the play a little undercooked, perhaps even half-baked, or do we like it in a more finished form, even if a hand other than the author’s may have added some of the icing?’ The Complete Works stuck to this assumption and presented Hamlet according to the Folio text. But actual practice in the editing of this play, in more than one way betrays the scholars’ declaredly puristic choice. In fact, apart from the insertion of editorial stage directions and some more or less debatable emendations, this edition ends up as being once more a substantially eclectic text, accepting almost three hundred variant readings from Q2 (see TxC). For my edition of the play, and for the consequent translation, I eventually chose Q2 as copy-text once again. Only this time I carefully established the text, referring to the original Quarto of 1604–5, and consulting in parallel the original text of the Folio in order to emend manifest misreadings of Q2.1 While accepting the revisionists’ notion of plays as fluctuating texts, I do not share the confidence of many of them regarding the supposedly superior theatricality and finality of F when compared with the supposed literariness of Q2. My choice of

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the quarto was motivated by several considerations which I will briefly expound. No edition can claim to provide the text which Shakespeare’s company put on stage. The performances of Hamlet must have been various and most probably diVerent, in both length and structure, during the period stretching from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the publication of F in 1623. Both the Q2 and the F versions of Hamlet are the longest plays by Shakespeare – F being only a little shorter since it omits some 230 lines present in Q2 but includes about 80 lines absent in the previous text – and they were certainly too long to be performed in their entirety according to the conventions of that epoch. Moreover, the argument in favour of F as the theatrical version, while Q2 represented the literary text to be reshaped later for the stage, does not sound convincing. Let us now consider the main diVerences between the two texts. The dramaturgical line being more or less the same, there are some passages that occur only in one or other of the texts. Most of those that are present in Q2 and omitted by F are of great literary and functional value, consequently the assumption that they might easily be omitted for a stage production is very disputable indeed. On what grounds can we view such valuable pieces of writing as having been doomed, from the very conception of the play, for excision in some later performance? A better argument has been that, since most of these passages belong to Hamlet’s speeches, they may have been cut later when Joseph Taylor, a less gifted actor than Richard Burbage, took the part. On the other hand, only five of the passages presented by F, and not by Q2, extend for more than two lines. Rather than later additions, they seem to be a reintegration of cuts in the manuscript from which Q2 was composed. To conclude, I once again adopted the text of Q2, but this time I adhered to it in all variant readings and, at the same time, reintegrated it with the additional passages from F on the assumption that they belonged to the larger, earlier version of the play. I am aware that the text I provided is an eclectic text, but I am also confident that it is not a textual patchwork. It is up to

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theatre directors to cut and reshape the play according to their theatrical poetics and/or the constraints of their production. My translated Hamlet has been staged by Gabriele Lavia in three diVerent productions (1978, 1982 and 1985) and, more recently, by Antonio Latella. On all occasions, the text has varied consistently. I trust that more or less the same would have happened in the diVerent productions which the play passed through during Shakespeare’s time. Lastly, on one occasion I emended the text after referring to the first Quarto. The passage is Hamlet’s speech in Act 4, scene 2, where he outrageously treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as sponges. Here is Harold Jenkins’s reading in the Arden 2 edition: ROSENCRANTZ

Take you me for a sponge, my lord? HAMLET

Ay, sir, that soaks up the King’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities. But such oYcers do the King best service in the end: he keeps them, like an ape, in the corner of his jaw – first mouthed, to be last swallowed. When he needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you and, sponge, you shall be dry again.

(Ham, Ard 2, 4.2.13–20, italics added)

The italicized passage is from F, whereas Q2 reads ‘He keeps them, like an apple in the corner of his jaw.’ Let us compare these readings with Q1: Ros. How a spunge my Lord? Ham. I sir, a spunge, that sokes up the kings Countenance, favours, and rewardes, that makes His liberalitie your store house: but such as you, Do the king, in the end, best servise; For he doth keep you as an Ape doth nuttes, In the corner of his Jaw, first mouthes you, Then swallowes you: so when hee hath need

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Of you, t’is but squeesing of you, And spunge, you shall be dry againe, you shall. (Ham, Q1, ll. 1427–35, italics added)

Granted that Q1 is badly composed, but it still gives a logical reading of the central image here. The other texts lack either the subject (Q2) or the object (F). Only Q1 oVers the full meaning, since it defines the food preserved by the ape in its mouth as nuts, something tasty and small enough to be taken in the corner of a jaw in order to savour it to the last. The compositors of Q2 certainly misunderstood the manuscript and comically ruined the sense, muddling the comparison and incongruously putting a big object like an apple in the corner of the King’s jaw. No less comical was the interpretation of the compositors of F: they saved the Ape but took out the food and so ruined the comparison, awkwardly obliging the King to open his mouth even more in order to lodge his oYcers, Gargantua-like, in one corner of it. Stubbornly sticking to their uncompromising contempt for Q1 as a degenerate oVspring of the pure text, recent editors still refuse any help from it.2 None of them wants to acknowledge the fact that, in this case at least, it is Q1 that gives sense to the authoritative text, and not the reverse. This appears absolutely clear to a translator. Consequently, I integrated the central part of the passage with an addition from Q1 in square brackets: ‘He keeps them, like an ape [doth nuts] in the corner of his jaws’, and translated it accordingly: ‘Egli se li tiene come fa la scimmia con le noccioline, in un angolo della mascella’ [He keeps them as an ape does with nuts, in the corner of his jaws]. This seemingly minor but important example may give an idea of the disparagement with which the first Quarto is still largely regarded. The debate about this mysterious text, well known to most Shakespearians, has gone on for many years. For reasons of space, one may note that this most elusive text has been considered either a very poor piratical work, mnemonically reconstructed by one or more minor actors who sold it to the publisher, or an authorial first draft, possibly superimposed – palimpsest-like – on the pre-existing Hamlet play of the 1580s

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and 1590s, whose main authorial candidate is generally thought to be Thomas Kyd. Both sides agree on the following: æ Q1 is a poorly composed text and also, partly due to this,

badly arranged, botched and bungled. æ Q1 is a composite text, showing traces of diVerent strata of

writing, with some passages very close to Q2 and/or F, some confused or sketchy, and others formally adequate but using diVerent wording to convey more or less the same meaning as the parallel passages of the two authoritative texts. The true dispute turns on the person responsible for the composite text. Was it the reporter or the author himself, in a provisional draft possibly conducted, at least in part, on another playwright’s version? In other words, is the composed and confused state of Q1 due to a degenerative process which must be ascribed to the faulty and muddled memory of a reporter who could not properly remember the complete text represented by Q2 or – maybe better – by F, which shares with it some structural features (like cuts and occasional wordings)? Or is the confusion due to the fact of its being a generative text, an earlier draft, which might then give us a glimpse of the process through which the authoritative texts were eventually completed?3 Naturally, while working on my revised edition of the ‘classical’ Hamlet, I could not help becoming involved in the great querelle about this ghostly text that preceded Q2 in print, and I must confess that it haunted me too during the whole period of my close investigation of its meanderings, which I carried out with an open mind, without any preconceived assumptions. At a certain point I thought that the best way for me to ascertain the nature of this text might be to translate it into Italian. Having already translated the classical Hamlet, I might hit upon some interesting findings. As already said, translating a dramatic text requires an understanding, and a rendering, not only of its verbal contents but also of the theatricality implicit in its language. And it was precisely at this level, which could be called the level of intersemiotic translation, that Q1 progressively

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showed me, even in its apparently or supposedly corrupt passages, a surprising coherence and a scenic as well as semantic autonomy. If the external evidence seems to support the theory of the reported text as unduly cut and put together by somebody other than the author, the internal evidence is open to debate and requires a thorough examination.4 Those who propose the memorial reconstruction as the only answer to this textual mystery usually argue that Q1 is often incapable of producing sense unless one is familiar with Q2 and F.5 No eVort could make us forget these texts in order to allow us a fresh view of Q1 in its own right. Our perspective is inevitably blurred by textual ghosts which interfere with the text we are examining (see Dessen, 65–78). Translating this text, however, might provide a fresh view of it during the process of its metamorphosis. My intention was to verify (a) if Q1 is, after all, capable of producing sense without seeking help in the ‘authoritative’ texts; and (b) if Q1 shows a structural autonomy both at the level of the action and characterization, and at the level of theatrical congruity. It was hard work, but illuminating. While translating Q1, I felt the need to annotate it as well, and the further I proceeded in the enterprise the more I became convinced that no reporter could be credited either with the structural variants which immediately strike the eye or, even less so, with the many widespread semantic and theatrical variants that are disseminated throughout the text. And as my translation reached its conclusion, I grew more and more convinced that Q1 cannot be viewed as a badly arranged transcribed reduction of either Q2 or F. A shortened version of the play might have been produced by Shakespeare himself or by other members of his company, mainly to reduce the cost for a tour outside London. Recently, though, McMillin (179–94) has shown that not only Q1, but also Q2 and F could have been acted by only eleven players, if so required in London or in the provinces. Besides that, one could argue that if the author himself had reduced his play, he would have quite likely cut down scenes and shortened dialogues and long speeches here, there and everywhere in the whole play, whereas Q1, when compared with the two authoritative texts, gets progressively

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shorter, starting from the first scenes, which have almost the same length as in the other two texts, right until the end. Moreover, by no stretch of the imagination can we envisage the author, and even less a player, changing the sequential order of the action for the purpose of reducing the play. And why should he have modified the scope and the attitude of such central characters as the Queen and the King? These considerations led me to believe that Q1 constitutes a diVerent draft of the play, most probably an earlier draft, possibly superimposed onto the mysterious Ur-Hamlet. At this point, I decided to present the text to the Italian general reader, and not only to the specialists, reproducing it in a diplomatic edition, so that they could see the real state of the text, and providing alongside it my translation which was meant to be both faithful and interpretative: it had to re-establish a logical punctuation and unwind some syntactical knots, but without introducing any semantic stuV to adjust the meaning. A foreign perspective on this text, both in itself and as mirrored in another language, oVered an interesting vantage point on its mysteries. For reasons of space I shall limit myself to several points of discussion, all of them related to the internal, textual evidence. From a dramaturgical point of view, the main pieces of evidence which point to a diVerent structuring of the action – hardly attributable to a reporter unless one esteemed him as crafty as a playwright – are the diVerent location of the ‘To be or not to be’ monologue and the Nunnery scene, with the consequent postponement of the Hecuba monologue, and the invention of a new scene accounting for the unexpected return of Hamlet to Denmark (Q1, scenes VII and XV). Even the most convinced supporters of memorial reconstruction have found themselves at a loss in attributing to their reporter such a radical reshaping of the action resulting from the arrangement of scene VII, which oVers a more congruous development of events in comparison with the structure of both Q2 and F. Rather than linger on this point and repeat the arguments provided by Urkowitz and others who object to the theory of the reporter, let me note that in Q1, soon after the Nunnery scene, Hamlet meets Corambis (later Polonius) and

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straightaway calls him ‘fishmonger’, whose connotative meaning was ‘pimp’ or ‘pandar’: such an epithet sounds much more convincing after his violent exchange with Ophelia – in the course of which he is clearly shown to be aware of the trap laid against him, which leads him to obliquely accuse Corambis of having used his daughter as a pandar – than far before it, as in Q2/F, where Hamlet meets Polonius in Act 2, scene 2 and the ‘To be or not to be’ monologue and the Nunnery scene follow later in Act 3, scene 1. The supporters of the memorial reconstruction are always eager to show how pieces of the original and completed text either collapse through utter degeneration or sensibly weaken in Q1. As has been noted, they remember the authoritative text and therefore are ever ready to incriminate the reporter who could not remember well and got lost in absurd inconsistencies. Occasionally, though, he is also considered to have done a very good job, both with his memory and with his invention, in spite of his failings. Curiously, this most elusive figure comes out as at the same time lucid and senile, gifted and incompetent! Let us try to adopt the opposite perspective and test how some textual passages of Q1, when juxtaposed with Q2/F, may show features of an earlier draft which was later revised in the authoritative texts through systematic reshaping and rewording. Hamlet’s soliloquies in Q1 have often been ridiculed as muddled, despicable and laughable. They are inferior in comparison with the classical versions but, even in their tangled syntax, surprising anacolutha and incongruous punctuation (this last due to poor and hasty composition), they show an overall semantic coherence which could hardly be credited to a reporter. A case in point is the ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy. It looks a horrible mess at first sight. Careful inspection, however, reveals it as a diVerent draft, as is found also after the bench test of a faithful translation addressed only to unknot the faulty punctuation. Unlike in Q2 and F, Hamlet in Q1 is not resisting the temptation to commit suicide on account of his fear of ‘what dreams may come / When we have shuZed oV this mortal coil’, of ‘the dread of something after death’ (3.1.66–7 and 78), but because in ‘The undiscovered country’ beyond life ‘The happy smile, and the

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accurs’d [are] damn’d’ (ll. 842–3); and it is for his hope of salvation that he continues to suVer the wrongs of life: ‘But for this, the joyfull hope of this, / Whol’d beare the scornes and flattery of the world’ (ll. 844–5). Significantly, this hope is repeated in the question concluding this line of thought: ‘But for a hope of something after death?’ (l. 853). Might a reporter with a faulty memory invent such a reversal of the semantic pivot around which the whole soliloquy develops? Let us now consider the Hecuba monologue. In Q1, when Hamlet tries to imagine the eVect the actor would achieve should he feel his real loss and his real passion, he does not resort to an explicit theatrical metaphor, as in Q2/F: ‘He would drown the stage with tears’ (l. 556). Instead Q1 Hamlet says ‘He would turne all his teares to droppes of blood, / Amaze the standers by with his laments’ (ll. 1138–9). In the process of translating this passage I was puzzled by the expression standers by which could hardly mean the audience of a theatre, and finally I rendered the lines thus: ‘Trasformerebbe tutte le sue lacrime in gocce di sangue, / sbalordirebbe gli astanti con i suoi lamenti’ [He would transform all his tears into drops of blood, / amaze the bystanders with his laments] – where astanti conveys more or less the same as ‘bystanders’, meaning individuals who are present without taking part in what is going on (OED). Soon afterwards, in fact, rather than mention a stage, Hamlet seems to allude not to the audience of a fictional show, but to the audience of a real-life happening, possibly to the audience of a courtroom where the crime of the king and the wrong suVered by himself might be discussed: ‘Strike more then wonder in the iudiciall eares’ (l. 1140). Note that ‘iudicial’ or ‘judicial’6 does not appear in the canon and might therefore be taken as another clue to a pre-existing layer of the composite text of Q1, namely the mysterious Ur-Hamlet. In fact, it might not be a coincidence that judiciall occurs twice in Thomas Kyd’s The Housholders Philosophie.7 Should one infer that the Hecuba monologue of Q1 might be a rewriting of a passage in the old play, probably by Kyd? Translating Q1 also yielded new insights into Hamlet’s age. In Q2 and F he is thirty, yet still a student at the University of

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Wittenberg; and is called ‘young Hamlet’ twice, by Horatio (1.1) and by the first Clown (5.1). There is a strange discrepancy here between age and role. There can be no doubt about Hamlet being, for that time, a rather old man. In fact, in the graveyard scene, the first Clown says that he has been in the craft for thirty years, and adds: ‘It was that very day that young Hamlet was born’. A bit later, he shows Hamlet a skull (which will soon be identified as that of Yorick, the King’s jester who entertained Hamlet when a child), and says: ‘Here’s a skull now hath lien i’th’ earth three and twenty years’ (ll. 166–8). Supposing that the child Hamlet was six or seven when Yorick died, the age of thirty is confirmed. But in Q1 there is no previous indication of the Clown’s working time in the graveyard, and the skull is said by him to have been in the ground for twelve years: ‘Looke you, heres a scull hath bin here this dozen yeare’ (l. 1987). How should this be explained? It makes sense if Q1 is an early draft and Richard Burbage, born around 1567, could appear on the stage in the 1590s as a twenty-year-old man, while at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the ‘classical’ Hamlet was composed, he was too old for that age. A cue to this eVect might be seen in that strange speech of the Queen in the last scene where she interrupts the duel and oVers her napkin to Hamlet: ‘He’s fat and scant of breath. / Here, Hamlet, take my napkin’ (ll. 290–1). This qualification has disconcerted critics for centuries: how could ‘young Hamlet’ be fat and breathless? Useless to suppose that fat in this case means ‘sweaty’. My guess is that it might have been a joke inserted sometime in the text in order to tease the now heavy Burbage. Altogether, despite the opinion of the majority of textual critics and editors, who reject any suggestion other than that of a poor memorial reconstruction conducted from the complete text of Q2 or F, Q1 appears to be far from senseless and inarticulate. It may very well be a reported text, but if it is, it looks like a reconstruction from another version of the play; and that version cannot be but an earlier one. No one can deny that in various points Q1 appears to be a confused text, but textual confusion should be tested in view of its

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possible theatrical clarification; and translating it adds evidence to its coherence. Many more examples might be brought to this eVect. Due to lack of space, I can discuss only a few more points. ‘O speake to me’, says Horatio to the Ghost in the second scene, and adds: ‘Or if thou hast extorted in thy life, / Or hoorded treasure in the wombe of earth’ (ll. 106–7, italics added). Q2 and F read: ‘Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life / Extorted treasure in the womb of earth’ (1.1.139–40, italics added). The diVerent wording of Q1 may certainly be seen as a reporter’s fault, but it might as well express a diVerent arrangement of temporal logic: in Q1 the ghost is suspected of being a malignant spirit who has extorted money and valuables in his life and/or accumulated it, while in Q2/F the logic points to the Ghost’s having accumulated the already extorted. My translation makes Q1 reading sensible enough: ‘O se hai estorto nella tua vita / o accumulato tesori nel ventre della terra’ [Or if in thy life thou have extorted / or hoarded treasures in the womb of the earth]. Let us take also the exchange between Hamlet and the Bragart Gentleman (later Osric) in the last scene of the play. Here is the beginning: ‘Gent. Now God save thee, sweete prince Hamlet. Ham. And you sir: foh, how the muske-cod smels!’ (ll. 2090–1).8 These speeches are absent in Q2 and F. Let us now go to the end of the exchange: ‘Gent. I shall deliver your most sweet answer. exit. Ham. You may sir, none better, for y’are spiced, / Else he had a bad nose could not smell a foole’ (ll. 2118–20). Going away, the courtier has left behind a trail of his excessive perfume, which Hamlet immediately connects to his ‘most sweet answer’, thus dismissing him with ironic contempt. Could a reporter invent such an apt textual congruity? Could he also skilfully construct the folly of Ofelia (sic) in a similar, but, at the same time quite diVerent way to that of Ophelia in Q2 and F? She comes on stage twice in scene XIV as she does in Act 4, scene 5 of the authoritative texts, but both the action and the language are diVerently arranged. Q1, by the way, is the only text which gives us a precious stage direction describing her aspect and her doing: ‘Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing’. During her first appearance, Q1 does not

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present four brief speeches of the Queen which interrupt her folly, and keeps only one of the four short interventions of the King. Ofelia has the whole stage to herself. The same can be said for her second appearance, where she is briefly interrupted only twice by Leartes (sic), who intervenes four times in Q2 and F. In both cases, then, her folly has full scope. But what is more interesting is the fact that her first entrance – apart from the first four lines (ll. 1693–6) dedicated to the theme of the diYcult recognition of true love – is entirely centred on the theme of her father’s death; and consequently ll. 1708–18 reproduce very closely a sequence of lines on this theme which Q2 and F present at the end of her second entrance. Vice versa, in her second entrance, which is centred on the theme of frustrated love, we find a sequence on that same theme which Q2 and F present in her first folly. How should we account for such interesting displacements? The supporters of the reporter would of course argue that his memory was responsible for this textual earthquake: he remembered the songs, but did not remember how to put them together. Nevertheless, these two follies, as they appear in Q1, work very well on stage, and furthermore they show a semantic and structural congruity which could hardly have been produced by a random memory. Once again, it seems more logical to suppose that Q1 gives us an earlier draft and that, in the course of his revision, the author thought it better to interweave the two themes of death and love, both in the first and in the second folly, rather than leave them separate. In conclusion, Hamlet Q1 still has very much to reveal, both as an autonomous text and, even more, as a text which might have generated one of the masterpieces of modern theatre. As a translator, I hope to have oVered a few more points for discussion by transposing the text in the possibly revealing body and soul of another language.

Notes 1 The textual research was conducted with the invaluable help of Bertram & Kliman.

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2 John F. Andrews (1993) follows Q2; Harold Jenkins (1982) and Philip Edwards (1985) follow F; while T.J.B. Spencer (1980), Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (1986), G.R. Hibbard (1994) and Stephen Greenblatt (1997) all make a bizarre conflation of Q2 and F (‘He keeps them, like an ape an apple in the corner of his jaw’). 3 See also Serpieri, ‘Q1’ (461–84); and Serpieri, Amleto. 4 Q2’s title-page claim that it was ‘Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie. Etc.’ is no evidence that Q1 had piratically misrepresented the play. Q2 might signal the substitution of what had been a less extended and finished play with what was now felt to be its final form. Nor does ‘Newly imprinted and enlarged . . .’ necessarily imply a disapproval of the previously printed text: the verb ‘to enlarge’ means, and meant: ‘To make larger; to increase the size of; to extend the limits of’ (OED). Therefore, enlarged does not clearly point to the restitution or restoration of the text to its original and complete state, for which the verb would have been ‘restored’ or ‘reinstated’. In other words, enlarged may imply a process of writing, development of a previous draft, rather than an editorial process of restoration of the text. What follows is also open to interpretation: ‘enlarged to almost as much againe as it was’, that is, the play had almost doubled in size, with respect to what it was, not necessarily with respect to what it had been reduced to. 5 The most influential supporters of this hypothesis include E.K. Chambers, G.I. Duthie, A. Hart and K. Irace, as well as recent Hamlet editors including Jenkins, Hibbard, and Wells & Taylor. 6 Defined by OED as ‘Of or belonging to judgement in a court of law’. 7 At line 701 (‘and Love by the judiciall figures of antiquitie hath . . .’); and at line 1730 (‘so judiciall as to censure that which you propose’). See also Crawford. 8 OED defines musk-cod as ‘1. The bag or gland containing musk, 2. transf. A scented fop’, and quotes Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour (1599), v. 6: ‘I beleeve, muske-cod. I beleeve you’. This expression is not found elsewhere in Shakespeare.

10 Think-along Edition T h e b i l i n g u a l Studiena usgabe of Shakespeare

Werner Bro¨nnimann

As chapmen do, I will begin with a complaint. The Germanspeaking countries are an important market for academic publications on Shakespeare, including single-volume editions of his plays. Austrian, German and Swiss students of English – to name only the most obvious group of readers – will often want to own a personal copy of a Shakespearean play, and will therefore usually purchase a textbook from one of the three big players: Arden 3, The Oxford Shakespeare, or The New Cambridge Shakespeare. As an educator and a contributor to the bilingual project of a German-English Shakespeare edition – the Studienausgabe – I both welcome and condemn these ingrained consumer habits. A student who realizes that it is preferable to buy a good scholarly edition rather than to make a photocopy is undoubtedly a welcome sight to any instructor in the academy, but as an editor and translator I must protest against the unfair market advantage of our English and American competitors in the German-speaking part of the world, because it is not really quality criteria that determine students’ buying behaviour: it is rather the publishers’ aura of authenticity, of imagined geographical or linguistic closeness to the Bard which makes for the market dominance of the names of Arden, Oxford or Cambridge. By contrast, the notion of the bilingual suggests distance from the original source, and the term Studienausgabe, which is presumably an edition for the study rather than for alfresco perusal in a mossy forest clearing, sounds like hard work rather than facilitated or even pleasurable access. v 184 v

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To be sure, a lot of hard work has gone into the twenty-two individual volumes of the English-German edition that have appeared so far (by late autumn 2003). The bulk of this eVort has been devoted to translation, semantic explication and interpretive commentary. Textual studies and performance history have been slightly neglected but the project, now well beyond its thirtieth year, is undergoing subtle modifications of emphasis and methodology, while remaining true to its basic concepts. Like many a good enterprise, the Studienausgabe began with a row. These altercations mainly concerned the style of the translation, with heated arguments between the proponents of a more poetic and those of a more prosaic choice of language. Only in the first phase was there a fight about the fundamental question of whether the new translation should be in verse: Shakespeare’s verse, it was soon agreed, would invariably be rendered in prose, thus allowing greater semantic precision and echoing the tradition of the very first translations into German, which were also in prose, as was for example that of Christoph Martin Wieland (1762–6). Disagreements arose rather about the question of so-called ‘literalness’ in the choice of words, with the advocates of a more poetic style pleading for greater closeness to the original wording. Hence, a phrase like Othello’s ‘a world of sighs’ would be rendered literally as eine Welt von Seufzern by the poetically minded, while the more prosaic faction insisted that a verbatim rendering of the poeticity of ‘a world of ’ was unhistorical and factitious, because the phrase occurred very frequently in contemporary writing, simply signifying plenitude, and that the most appropriate translation was therefore the more ¨ berfu¨lle von Seufzern factual, quantitatively connoted mit einer U [with excessive sighs]. In retrospect, it emerges that what appeared to be (and partly was) a battle of diVerent temperaments and stylistic preferences was really a disagreement about the nature of the reader envisaged and about the service function of translation. The more prosaic faction, which eventually won the day for the Studienausgabe, envisions readers who will follow the original whenever possible and who will want to find an added value of semantic information

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when they move to the prose version on the facing page. This can mean that the readers will encounter a slight semantic obstacle or even, as in the example from Othello, a surprising anti-climax, and will hence be encouraged to read the explanatory footnote which historicizes Shakespeare’s choice of expression by the use of philological contextualization.1 Reading, editing and translating Shakespeare historically demands the cultivation and sharpening of a sense of ‘semantic discomfort’. C.S. Lewis’s term is central to the English-German edition’s linguistic ambitions, and it was taught with great passion to all editors by the late Ernst Leisi, one of the initiators and the only linguist among the three founding General Editors.2 Semantic discomfort is neither a methodology nor a semantic tool, it is rather a state of mind or an attitude that will not permit any compromises in the search for meanings. As an attitude it is rule-driven in that it defines some explicit don’ts, and it is a trifle repressive in that it fosters a floating sense of guilt about not getting a word’s meaning right. The don’ts include an absolute prohibition of ‘situational equivalents’, semantic definitions that are only valid for a single context. For the practice of translation and commentary this implies a prohibition of paraphrase or lump translation that glosses over the fact that the equivalent is only applicable to the one and present instance.3 In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio addresses the following contemptuous sneer to Tybalt: ‘Will you pluck your sword out of his pilcher by the ears?’ (3.1.79–80). Although ‘pilcher’ in this situation clearly refers to the ‘scabbard’, glossing or translating it simply as such (German Scheide) is an uninformative and misleading shortcut. Rather, the etymological connection with Latin pellis (‘skin’) should be pointed out, as well as its closeness to the noun ‘pilch’, which designates a furry garment. This leads to a metaphorical reading of Mercutio’s question, whose contemptuous tone resides in its personification of Tybalt’s sword as a child who is reluctant to take oV his jerkin (for bathing?) and must hence be pulled out by the ears. This explanation is based on a certain degree of conjecture, but it eschews a facile evasion of the diYculties the passage poses.4

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The practice of smoothly adapting a lexical item’s definition to a single context is of course common both in dictionaries and in older editions’ explanatory notes or glossaries, and it is a tempting, time-saving device, but it has been banned from the Studienausgabe since the very beginning – as it has indeed disappeared from most modern scholarly editions, although still the staple explanatory method in editions specifically designed for schools. Situational equivalents as a means of information for children are in fact dubious for pedagogical reasons because they suggest, by periphrastic sleight of hand, that diYculties are easily resolvable and that finding Shakespeare hard to understand is mainly the young reader’s fault. But the example of ‘pilcher’ shows that translation is also susceptible to resorting to the kind of situational equivalents just criticized; avoiding the pitfalls of glib paraphrase and of manipulating words to fit a specific context is part and parcel of a translator’s job; the eVort’s reward is the odd new discovery or insight. Semantic discomfort and the awareness of the dangers of context-driven distortions can indeed be a heuristic device, particularly if combined with Leisi’s insistence on a thorough re-examination of lexical meanings by a fresh and unbiased look at all entries of a given word, its contextual neighbours and, if necessary, its synonymous cognates in the concordance. Since the appearance in 1976 of the first volume in the series, Balz Engler’s Othello, the editors’ and translators’ indispensable tools for such a task have developed considerably. In the 1970s the basic editorial kit consisted of the OED, Alexander Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon (1902), Leon Kellner’s Wo¨rterbuch (1922), the concordances by John Bartlett (1894) and Marvin Spevack (1973), and Wilhelm Franz’s grammar, Die Sprache Shakespeares in Vers und Prosa (1939).5 In the meantime, this has been greatly enhanced by the appearance of electronic media, in particular the WordCruncher concordance based on the Riverside text (which now allows proximity searches), the OED on CD-Rom (whose full text and proximity search features oVer a wealth of new parallels not to be found under the relevant lemma), and the Chadwyck-Healey full-text databases, especially its Literature Online (which will

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eventually give more precise contours to Shakespeare’s partaking of the lexical pool he shared with his contemporaries, and which will provide new evidence for reception studies). Furthermore, Marvin Spevack’s A Shakespeare Thesaurus has opened the way for more intelligent search procedures, permitting inquiries based on fields of related or synonymous words.6 For all this recent refinement and sophistication of the editors’ and translators’ library, the work of categorizing parallels according to semantic criteria and of assessing their relevance to the passage under scrutiny has not been supplanted. If anything, it has become more intricate and time-consuming. Still, even without the newer technologies, the earlier volumes of the Studienausgabe also feature striking results based on the principles of semantic discomfort, avoidance of situational equivalents and fresh lexical research. A case in point is Cassio’s response upon Othello’s suicide: This did I fear, but thought he had no weapon, For he was great of heart. (Oth 5.2.360–1)

A contextual mould explicitly or implicitly applied to Cassio’s words – and one frequently found and strongly maintained among Shakespeare specialists and theatre directors – will impress the meaning of ‘magnanimous’, or in German hochgesinnt (Wolf von Baudissin), on his ‘great of heart’. Henry Longfellow very likely understood the line in exactly this way, in his poem set in Plymouth Plantation when he gave the following words to John Alden, who for friendship’s sake had agreed to woo the beautiful Priscilla, the Priscilla he was himself in love with, in the name of his captain Miles Standish, who was: ‘Not to be laughed at and scorned, because he was little of stature; / For he was great of heart, magnanimous, courtly, courageous’ (Longfellow, 331–2). What leads to an entirely positive reading of the words in Othello is Shakespeare’s purportedly invariable custom of paying a final tribute to his dead tragic heroes. Cassio’s tribute ‘For he was great of heart’ is thus aligned with that of Fortinbras to Hamlet:

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For he was likely, had he been put on, To have prov’d most royal. (Ham 5.2.404–5)

In his Studienausgabe volume of Othello, Engler claims that ‘great of heart’ did not mean ‘magnanimous’ in Shakespeare’s time, that today’s use of ‘great-hearted’ only began in the nineteenth century, and that it was exclusively in combination with the preposition ‘in’ that ‘great’ meant ‘significant’, ‘weighty’, as witnessed by ‘great in substance and in power’ (R2 3.2.35). He argues that ‘great of heart’ rather means ‘tense’, ‘excited’, ‘irritable’, ‘full of passionate pride’, meanings which explain the causal conjunction ‘For’: Cassio was afraid Othello would try to kill himself, because he knew of his proud, rash and excitable temperament. The evidence for the predominance of this contemporary significance is twofold. First, medical and psychological concepts posited that the heart under strong emotional pressures, be they euphoric or dysphoric, would swell and ultimately break. There are even passages in Othello that substantiate this view (1.1.67; 5.2.63 and 173). Secondly, contemporary references to a ‘great heart’ all refer to that medical or psychological condition; accordingly OED (s.v. ‘great’ 4) gives ample support to the idea that a great heart was one suVering from an emotional overload or was full of pride. Sceptics might of course argue that establishing one meaning does not necessarily exclude another, if indeed a relevant parallel could be found. A full-text search for the collocation ‘great’ and ‘heart’ in the OED was not available to Engler at the time of his inquiries. Such a search for an occurrence within six words (great #6 heart) yields 111 hits; not one of them invalidates the view that ‘great of heart’ can be translated as denn er war verzweifelt [for he was in great despair]. What the search does yield, however, is the Longfellow passage quoted earlier, thus illustrating the point that full-text databases will provide evidence for both contemporary semantics as well as for reception studies.7 Can one discard such inquiries as philological overkill? I think not. The point is that readers, who obviously include actors and

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theatre directors, will only very reluctantly abandon views and traditions of reception held on the basis of context, particularly if this context be one as powerful as ‘Shakespeare has always added a line of dignified farewell to his tragic heroes.’ It is one of the declared aims of the Studienausgabe to provide information to theatre professionals which might influence stage representations and to modify preconceived and time-honoured reception cliche´s. In the end, directors and designers will invariably make their own decisions, and they will not make them to please editors, but what editors can do is assess the available options and describe the interpretive consequences that directorial decisions entail. The theatrical energy inscribed in Shakespeare’s language has always been one of the Studienausgabe’s foremost concerns. This focus has been strongly influenced by Rudolf Stamm, whose own research on the systems of implied stage directions in English Renaissance drama, on the visual, atmospheric, physical and haptic forces embedded in Shakespeare’s words, has been a constant challenge to his students, whose translations and commentaries he supervised as one of the founding General Editors. Helpful pointers toward stage concretization can be found in all volumes of the series, and quite frequently such information has elucidated cruces that cannot be solved solely on the basis of semantic inquiries. Stamm was a true theatre aficionado, and his tenacious aYrmation of stage reality leads to a more vivid reading of what he called the theatrical ‘score’ – a reading that forces editors to sharpen their senses, to open their eyes and prick up their ears.8 Three concepts have proved particularly useful here. ‘Word scenery’, denoting the creation of place and time; ‘mirror passage’, referring to the projection in words of what is diYcult to act or needs verbal reinforcement; and ‘gestic impulse’, comprising deictic triggers. Achilles’ laconic ‘’Tis but early days’ (TC 4.5.12) or Oswald’s overfriendly ‘Good dawning to thee, friend’, addressed to Kent (KL 2.2.1), are straightforward verbal signals of an early morning setting.9 When Henry V says of the exposed traitors: ‘Look ye how they change! / Their cheeks are paper’ (H5 2.2.73–4), the imagined pallor of the accused is conveyed in words, supplementing the

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actors’ presumable facial expression of surprise and fear. Kent shouting at Oswald: ‘Draw, you rogue, or I’ll so carbonado your shanks!’ (KL 2.2.36–7) will threaten Goneril’s steward with his sword as he pronounces ‘so’. Such implicit, although fairly obvious, theatrical directives will usually be explained in short notes, but the Studienausgabe refrains from inventing and adding editorial stage directions, which are becoming more common (again) in the Arden 3 volumes, because such additions seem an abuse of the great authority that the edited text has for a majority of readers. More importantly, however, the translators and editors will exploit implied stage directions to investigate the relationship between the page and the stage, and they will in the process often gather unexpected insights. It is reported scenes, with their inherently metadramatic quality, that often prove to be especially fruitful. Thus, when Thersites says of Ajax that ‘he goes up and down the field, asking for himself ’ (TC 3.3.243), this is more than just the usual nasty pun on a jakes, it is rather a lively reported scene, a burlesque mirror of Ajax’ foolishly nervous pride, with Thersites mimicking the fidgety behaviour of someone who desperately has to go to the loo. The walk and the talk here reinforce each other, creating rather crude comedy; here as elsewhere, language and performance cannot and should not be treated separately. In this connection, it must be emphasized that the editors of the bilingual edition are not afraid of squeamish readers and will avoid writing prudish notes, if they can help it. On a less objectionable, albeit possibly more controversial note, stage events implied in the language can also be drawn upon to deliberate textual quandaries. In King Lear, Kent tells the king how, as he was being received by Regan, a ‘reeking post’ arrived, meaning Oswald, Goneril’s steward and messenger (2.4.29–30): Stew’d in his haste, halfe breathlesse, painting forth From Gonerill, his Mistris, salutations (in F)

Stewd in his hast, halfe breathles, panting forth From Gonorill his mistris, salutations (in Q)

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All recent single-volume editions of the play prefer the Quarto’s ‘panting forth’ to the Folio’s apparently mistaken ‘painting forth’, since the context of haste and of a messenger struggling for breath seems to demand a panting delivery of greetings. Only the Oxford Textual Companion pleads for the Folio, arguing that the meanings ‘to depict in words’ and ‘to flatter with specious words’ also fit the situation and that these meanings are more abusive, hence fitting Kent’s mood and attitude (TxC, 534). What both options share is their reference to past stage behaviour as witnessed by the speaker, to theatricals corresponding either to ‘panting forth’ or ‘painting forth’. The Textual Companion’s view that in his report Kent will tend to denigrate Oswald as a histrionic deceiver and flatterer can be substantiated by a striking parallel which also contrasts the flattering and the plain-spoken, namely Regan and Goneril as opposed to Cordelia. In Edmund Spenser’s version of the story of Leir, Cordeill’s restrained response to her father’s soliciting of a love declaration is described as follows: But Cordeill said she lov’d him, as behoov’d: Whose simple answere, wanting colours faire To paint it forth, him to displeasance moov’d. (FQ 2.10.28)

What Oswald shares with Regan and his mistress Goneril is precisely the ability to ‘paint forth’, an ability Kent disdains as much as does Cordelia.10 Reported scenes simultaneously operate in the dramatic past and the dramatic present; the reporter Kent’s language may to a greater or lesser degree express his own views and attitudes. ‘Panting forth’ is neutral and nicely fits the situation he is reporting on; ‘painting forth’ is not at all neutral. It signals Kent’s disapproval, while still evoking Oswald’s linguistic and gestic behaviour. It is endorsed by a parallel passage in one of Shakespeare’s sources which occurs in a closely related context, it is more partisan and more complex: it is to be preferred. For a monolingual edition the matter can rest at this point – the bilingual editor now has to find appropriate translations for both Q and F versions.11

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An experience shared by the translators of the Studienausgabe is the truly interdisciplinary nature of their editorial work; the ‘painting forth’ example from King Lear illustrates the interdependence of textual, communicative, linguistic, theatrical, source-related and interpretive issues as well as the necessity of avoiding compartmentalized thinking in the search for solutions. Such a multi-disciplinary approach has often been associated with the concept of style, and it is indeed the third of the initial General Editors, Werner Habicht, as well as his colleagues Ingeborg Boltz and the late Klaus Bartenschlager, who, all students of Wolfgang Clemen, have always insisted on the importance of stylistic analysis as a feature that would give a new and unique quality to the project (see Bartenschlager, 324–34). What typifies this approach is the tenet that the discussion of phenomena such as rhetorical figures, imagery or proverbial language should never be dissociated from their dramatic function. An edition that exemplifies this principle is Boltz’s The Winter’s Tale. References to rhetorical figures, for all the eVorts made by Brian Vickers, have increasingly vanished from most editorial commentaries, while the Studienausgabe, despite its declared policy of so-called diskrete Wissenschaftlichkeit, its insistence, that is, on a discreet mode of presentation of scholarly material and insights, tries to counteract this trend.12 The usual pattern of restrainedly scientific presentation proceeds by first describing as it were the shape of the rhetorical figure, by then naming it and finally by explaining its dramatic function in the context. Thus, when Leontes confides to Camillo whom he suspects of having ‘infected’ his wife Hermione, a specific rhetorical device is used: LEONTES

Why, he that wears her like her medal, hanging About his neck, Bohemia; who, if I Had servants true about me, that bare eyes To see alike mine honour as their profits, Their own particular thrifts, they would do that Which should undo more doing.

(WT 1.2.307–12)

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Boltz points out that while the relative pronoun ‘who’ in line 308 refers to Polixenes, the subordinate clause which depends on it never materializes: ‘who’ is left suspended in mid-air, because nothing in the rest of the syntactically quite disconnected speech refers back to it. This anacoluthon is not simply a mistake, it is rather a stylistic device used by the dramatist to convey a certain figure’s overexcitement or mental confusion. In Boltz’s short note, readers are thus aVorded the basic items of information they will need to appreciate the full extent of Shakespeare’s artistic rhetoric: its form, name and function (Boltz, WT, 77, n. 113). In his memories of the youthful years he had shared with Leontes, Polixenes uses rich imagery: We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’th’ sun, And bleat the one at th’other: what we chang’d Was innocence for innocence: we knew not The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d That any did. (WT 1.2.67–71)

These are obviously myth-laden images, evoking a prelapsarian, paradisal state of existence, particularly centred in the figure of the lamb, which is an Old Testament sacrificial animal approved for its purity, and which stands for Christ in the New Testament. In addition to these basic explanations, which are indispensable in an increasingly secular age, Boltz states that this flashback to the happy childhood of the two princes creates and opens a new time dimension in this play. Imagery is thus shown to be more than mere decoration, since it generates a subliminal awareness of non-linear time experience, which is crucial to a successful performance and appreciation of The Winter’s Tale (Boltz, WT, 54, n. 26). Proverbial language often provokes rather laconic editorial annotation of the following kind: ‘This expression is proverbial, see Tilley or Dent.’ Again, consideration of function is essential to more helpful readerly information. For example, one should discuss why Paulina is speaking in proverbs when she says:

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The silence often of pure innocence Persuades, when speaking fails. (WT 2.2.41–2)

Being repositories of popular wisdom as well as philosophical formulae applicable to everyday life, proverbs can have quite diverse dramatic functions. In Troilus and Cressida, Pandarus’s proverbial tags make him sound hackneyed and chatty, whereas Paulina’s utterances in The Winter’s Tale, if commonsensical, are anything but trivial, and their undeniable truth signals that she is a character who can be trusted. Such an aura of confidence is essential not only to her position among the play’s figures, but also vis-a`-vis the audience, who will need to be reassured that she can indeed be relied upon (Boltz, WT, 306). Purists might object that such functional information is interpretive and should therefore not contaminate the footnote apparatus. It is the Studienausgabe’s very structural outline that obviates such critique. Like any of the major single-volume Shakespeare series, the text of the Studienausgabe is preceded by a detailed introduction, followed by the double-page spread with the English text on the right, the German translation on the left, the variants being positioned below the original and the explanatory notes filling the lower parts of both pages – but what is diVerent from all other scholarly editions that I am aware of is the subsequent scene-by-scene running commentary. Again, this genre of commentary could be sneered at as an outdated and pedestrian form of scholarship and as one fallen into academic disrepute since its format resembles the various study aids series so popular among students who have somehow not quite managed to read the books they have been assigned. While such a critical view delineates the format’s obvious dangers, it does not correspond to what is on oVer. The concept of the scene-by-scene commentary has its origins in Wolfgang Clemen’s book on King Richard III, and it grants the editors the freedom to develop their own integral and sustained interpretations, while at the same time giving readers the opportunity to gather information on single scenes only. This feature should be particularly attractive to

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teachers who want to focus on a particular excerpt rather than the whole play, as well as for theatre directors or actors scouting for ideas. Furthermore, this running commentary is designed to pay considerable attention to Shakespeare’s meanings, styles and dramaturgy, and hence is tightly keyed to the information provided in the footnotes. Such hyperlinking demands careful distinction between local information, preferably given in footnotes, and corresponding, more expansive considerations, which are aVorded in-depth treatment at the end of the volume. Ideally, and the examples from The Winter’s Tale are representative in this respect, individual items of information in footnotes constitute solidly researched new insights which serve as evidence for more sustained arguments in the scene-by-scene commentary. It is for this reason that occasional functional explanations in the footnotes can be necessary, although interpretive approaches are predominantly the domain of the commentary concluding the edition. In my view, this feature of the scene-by-scene commentary greatly improves and simplifies the distribution and placement of information, which is after all one of the torments of editorial work. And there is a crucial boon to this additional vessel for information storage: it aVords generous space to an eVective integration of more recent critical approaches, be they along the lines of New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Cultural Anthropology, Reception and Performance Studies, or Gender Studies. It is likely that the format and content of this very Kommentar (Commentary) will preoccupy the new team of General Editors: Ru¨diger Ahrens, Andreas Fischer and Ulrich Suerbaum (who, with Margarete Suerbaum, has also taken on the parallel edition of The Tempest). One of the diYculties all commentators face is the almost ineradicable presence of character analysis in most writing on individual plays, with its inevitable blurring of boundaries between character and figure, the human and the artifice, eVect and design. Suerbaum does not suggest neglecting the crucial contrast between fully developed, central protagonists and less concretized, even ephemeral figures, but proposes a shift of focus from individual characters to slightly more abstract or collective concerns, to what he terms stage communities

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(Bu¨hnengesellschaften), and towards an assessment of varying group aYliations and group constellations. In his scheme, figures often belong to both social hierarchies and families, thus combining aYliations that can be conflictual and can lead to widely divergent reception patterns – the perception of a play as either a political or a family drama. Furthermore, within the event structures of individual scenes, figures often occur in combinations of twos and threes, allowing for contrastive or parallel patterning. Such reverse engineering of Shakespeare’s stage artistry may help future editors to supplement an altogether too figure-orientated critical commentary (see Suerbaum, 110–68). Whatever improvements future volumes of the Studienausgabe may feature, they will tend to expand rather than delimit its scope of topics covered, since the edition has been designed from its very inception to cater to a wide range of interests and to a great variety of readers. While it is true that readerly competence is inevitably unknown and notional, readers’ ability to absorb and judge information has as a matter of principle always been assumed to be of the highest order. The prose translation and all parts of the commentary therefore strive to diminish existing asymmetries between the providers and the recipients of information, with the aim to empower readers to make their own choices, to make them translators and editors of their very own play.

Notes 1 More detailed accounts of this translation controversy can be found in Ulrich Suerbaum’s report in Shakespeare Jarhbuch West (1971), 12–17; and in ¨ bersetzungen (Text und Bochumer Diskussion)’, Poetica 4 ‘Shakespeare U (1971), 82–119. The debate eventually led to the launch of an alternative English-German Shakespeare edition published by Reclam; notable books in that series are Holger Klein’s invaluable, richly annotated Hamlet (see Klein, Ham) and his Much Ado About Nothing (see Klein, MA). 2 On ‘semantic discomfort’, see Leisi, 132. 3 On ‘semantic equivalents’, see Leisi, 148. 4 On the meaning of ‘pilcher’, see Fritz, RJ (221, n. 35); and Leisi, Problem (163V.). Fritz translates it as Ro¨cklein, which is the diminutive of ‘skirt’, hence hinting at a possibly gendered bias to Mercutio’s insult.

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5 Blake (13) remarks that ‘editors are largely content to limit their consultation of language materials to Abbott and a few dictionaries’. It is indeed true that Franz is hardly ever mentioned in the new standard editions, even though his grammar fully integrates all of Abbott’s findings and contains a wealth of further insights with carefully selected parallel passages that are useful even for readers whose knowledge of German is shaky. As a reference work Franz has in fact not been superseded by Blake, whose new grammar is informative and makes for good reading but is challenging for users in search of individual items because the index is keyed to a cumbersome decimal chapter numbering system, rather than page numbers, and because the book lacks running heads, making searches a strain on thumbs and patience. 6 For information on further useful tools of the trade such as the invaluable Early Modern English Dictionaries Database, hosted by the University of Toronto’s Ian Lancashire, see the website of the University of Basel Shakespeare in Europe (ShinE) project, initiated and run by Markus Marti, editor of TA for the Studienausgabe: . 7 For ‘great of heart’, see Engler, Oth (282, n. 134); and Engler, ‘heart’ (129–36). 8 See Stamm; and Hasler. Further bibliographical details may be found in DaphinoV, AC (35, n. 134). 9 Such time indications may be repeated within a scene, particularly if the audience is to be reminded that the action takes place at night, or there may be several signals that the day is advancing, as in KL 2.4. See Suerbaum, 141. 10 S.S. Hussey oVers further evidence: ‘Painted is another word often used in the Renaissance to describe this false rhetoric. Harrison (1534–93) says that he has tried in his Description of England “truly and plainly to set forth such things as I minded to entreat of, rather than with vain aVectation of eloquence to paint out a rotten sepulchre”’ (Hussey, 70). 11 This ‘sigh’ expresses the translator’s fatigue with the ineluctable demand for total coverage of every tiny detail. The translator can never hide behind the original, can never indulge the privilege of silence, and is constantly forced to make decisions where the monolingual editor can leave things open. It is true that some of these decisions concern trivia (does a ‘would’ express a wish or a condition, for instance – the translation cannot leave this undecided), but quite frequently the no-gap imperative of translation leads to new semantic insights or highlights aesthetic phenomena. Take Roland Lu¨thi’s task in Coriolanus of translating the word ‘noble’ and its cognates, which occur eighty-five times in that play. It is one thing to point out this reiterative pattern in the commentary, it is a distinctly diVerent matter to decide in eighty-five places whether the translation should privilege the verbal echo or whether it should opt for the precise semantic equivalent appropriate to that particular context – and if the latter, what word to choose (see Lu¨thi, Cor). 12 To give two examples: all English, Latin and other foreign-language quotations in the apparatus must be translated into German; and all use of jargon is to be avoided.

11 Interpreting Shakespeare’s plays into British Sign Language Peter Llewellyn-Jones

If one distinguishes between translation and interpretation, the former working with written source and target forms and the latter the live interpretation of a spoken message in real time, the works of Shakespeare have never been translated into a signed language. Sign languages have no written form, other than phonetic notations used by linguists to record individual lexical items and, until the advent of film and video, it was impossible to record signed languages in a fixed medium. Shakespeare’s plays are, however, regularly interpreted into sign language. In Britain alone, rarely a week goes by when a performance is not being interpreted at one of the national or provincial theatres. Interpreting, as opposed to translating, is by its very nature a spontaneous, ‘decisions-being-made-on-the-hoof’ process. The interpreter does not produce a well-honed, carefully written and rewritten version that is checked and re-checked for linguistic and stylistic accuracy and equivalence. If a translation is likened to a paper intended for publication, an interpretation is the content and intent of that paper presented by a speaker to a live audience. The message will be the same but the way the message is constructed and the style of delivery is likely to be quite diVerent. One is not necessarily better than the other. Instead, both are appropriate in diVerent contexts. Interpretation might be a spontaneous act but, for that interpretation to be successful, there is no substitute for very careful preparation and in the initial stages an interpreter will v 199 v

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approach this in much the same way as a translator. An interpretation takes place within a situational and cultural context and the interpreter’s understanding of the many facets of this context is the starting point. The preparation starts not with the text (as many people assume) but by determining the ‘goal’ of that particular production. It goes without saying that the interpreter must understand the words and, as far as is possible, the author’s (i.e. Shakespeare’s) intended meaning of the lines, but it is the interpreter’s understanding of the intent of the director, as channelled through the actors, that moulds the interpretation. Put simply, the interpreter does not construct a well-prepared translation of the text. Instead, he or she attempts to convey, in another language and to an audience with a very diVerent cultural background from the play’s intended target audience, the intent and, indeed, interpretation of the director. It is an interpretation of an interpretation. The question is how does the interpreter access and understand the director’s interpretation? Here, knowledge of how theatre works becomes important. The director’s intent, and how successfully he or she has realized that intent, cannot be gleaned by observing rehearsals or even the technical run of a production. The show needs to go through the press-previews stage and bedding-in process before the interpreter can experience the production in its finished form. That is the show the non-deaf audience has come to see and, if the goal of a sign language interpretation is to give Deaf people access to ‘an ordinary night at the theatre’, that is the show that must be interpreted. When an experienced interpreter first watches a production, he or she does not concentrate on the language being used or attempt to spot the potential interpreting problems. Instead, he or she concentrates simply on understanding and enjoying the play and sensing the eVect it has on the audience. Which parts are particularly moving and which parts are played for laughs? How does the audience respond? This is of prime importance because it is this response the interpreter will be aiming to elicit from the Deaf audience. Having watched the production, when the interpreter then turns to the text he or she brings to it clear

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ideas of who the characters are, the mood of the scenes and the actions that accompany the lines. This is the point when the interpreter reads the play and uses the footnotes to elucidate obscure references and clarify the nuances of meaning. The interpreter does not, however, practise interpreting the lines into the target language. It is at the second viewing (in the author’s case, often the matine´e before an interpreted evening performance) that the interpreter begins to get a clearer idea of where the problems might arise, whether because of complexity of language, diVerent layers of meaning, ambiguity or speed of delivery. It is at this viewing that the first few decisions are taken, or at least half formed. One of the first of these, and one that appears to fly in the face of a translator’s goal of accurately rendering the written text, is what should be left out or not interpreted. There are two types of intentional interpreting omission when working in the theatre. The first is quite commonplace in any type of translation or interpretation and is succinctly described by Mona Baker: This strategy may sound rather drastic, but in fact it does no harm to omit translating a word or expression in some contexts. If the meaning conveyed by a particular item or expression is not vital enough to the development of the text to justify distracting the reader with lengthy explanations, translators can and often do simply omit translating the word or expression in question. (Baker, 40)

To some readers it might seem more than arrogant for an interpreter to decide that any of Shakespeare’s lines are ‘not vital enough . . . to justify distracting the reader’ (or, in this case, audience). What, however, does an interpreter do with the last line of Act 1, scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream? The scene ends typically with the mechanicals hurrying oV stage after being instructed by Peter Quince to meet the following night in the palace wood. The speed and comedic value of the exit is important as it is usually followed by a complete lighting and mood change to set the scene for Puck’s chance meeting with one

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of Titania’s fairies. The penultimate line, Peter Quince’s cry of ‘At the Duke’s oak we meet’ (1.2.104), seems the natural end of the scene but then Bottom responds with ‘Enough: hold, or cut bowstrings’ (1.2.105). The commentary notes in the Arden 2 edition attempt to clarify the line, starting with ‘The precise meaning is uncertain’ and, after citing Capell, Malone, Cunningham, Tilley and Wells, ending with ‘The general sense . . . may be “keep promise, or suVer disgrace”’ (MND, Ard2, 1.2.104n.). With only seconds to go before the scene change, no interpreter could even begin to convey the sense of the line and, rather than risk confusing the audience, the obvious decision is simply to leave it out. The second type of omission is linked to a diVerent sort of distraction and here the interpreter is often forced to cut or substitute some of the most famous and evocative of Shakespeare’s lines. The blinding of Gloucester in King Lear is accompanied by Cornwall’s lines, ‘Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly, / Where is thy lustre now?’ (3.7.82–3): surely some of the best known and most spine chilling lines in the canon. The problem here is twofold. In British Sign Language, the phrase ‘Out, vile jelly’ can only be interpreted by mimicking the action of plucking the eye from the socket and, holding the imaginary eye between two fingers and thumb, shaking it to show its jelly-like form. Without the action on the stage, this would indeed be both powerful and repulsive. The interpreter, however, has to make a decision. Which is more powerful, expressing the line in sign language or directing the Deaf audience’s gaze to the stage where the enactment is, more often than not, totally graphic and selfexplanatory? Bearing in mind that the interpreter has to hear the line before starting the interpretation (a time-lag that can range from one to ten or more seconds depending on the complexity of the message and the restructuring necessary for it to make sense in the target language) the first part of the line, ‘Lest it see more’, must also be dropped. The decision as to whether or not to interpret ‘Where is thy lustre now?’ depends entirely on the delivery of the actor playing Cornwall. If he leaves a long enough pause for the interpreter to regain the focus of the Deaf audience,

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an interpretation such as, ‘eyes-sparkling, where?’ or ‘eyessparkling gone’ can work but they are only descriptive and do not carry the menace of the original line. Most directors build in a pause before Gloucester stammers his reply and, in the author’s experience, that pause, coupled with the reaction of the actors, carries far more weight than an interpretation ever could. A similar problem faces the interpreter in the last act of Macbeth. Macbeth’s ‘lay on, MacduV’ (5.8.33) is so well known and so evocative, it carries many layers of meaning for anyone who has read or seen the play. The preceding exchange does not present too many diYculties, as sign languages are particularly suited to graphic description. Lines such as ‘MacduV was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d’ (5.8.15–16) can be interpreted with every detail retained (see page 204) and, in British Sign Language, Birnam wood really does come to Dunsinane. ‘Lay on’, though, can only be interpreted as ‘Come-on’ or ‘Fight-me’. (In sign languages, one rarely, if ever, uses the name of a person who can be referenced by pointing or by direction of eye-gaze.) In some performances, the addition of ‘Ready-me’, as in ‘after all I’ve just heard (enough to fill any man with fear) come on, fight me . . . I’m ready’, can go some way to planting the inference that ‘I know my fate but I’m ready to face it’ (see page 208) but, again, it depends entirely on the choreography of the fight and the delivery of the actor on the night. More often than not the line is either replaced or, simply, omitted. ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’ (3.1.56): perhaps the best known of Shakespeare’s lines. Actors’ performances are often judged on how well those lines and that speech are delivered. But what does an interpreter do when working into a language, which, along with other sign languages, has no verb ‘to be’? The sense of the line is not in question and can be quite easily and adequately interpreted into BSL. What is lost, however, is the evoked meaning the words have to the vast majority of English speakers. The Deaf audience has access to the sense of the speech but not to the anticipation, then the recognition and the shared sense that it is witnessing an actor delivering the most famous lines of one of the most famous dramatic characters ever written.

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Born-me?

(head shake) No.

Mother

pregnant

operation

baby-taken-out. (head nod) Yes!

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The interpreter does have the option of retaining the English by finger-spelling the words but the two short lines would still need to be followed by a BSL interpretation for the benefit of the Deaf audience members who do not have a suYcient grasp of English to understand the meaning of the verb or implication of the lines. (The majority of Deaf adults have very restricted access to the English language and have learnt it, as a second language, through print and other visual symbols such as the lip-patterns of parents and teachers.) The preparation, so far, has focused on understanding the play and gaining an insight into the director’s aim. Is it to make the production as accessible as possible to a naive audience of school children and tourists (Monday: The Houses of Parliament, Tuesday: Stratford), is it to explore yet further the rhythm and poetry of the lines, or is it to make the political message pertinent to today’s audience? How is the play staged? How much is the ‘business’ on stage crucial to the telling of the story and, consequently, when and how should the interpreter direct the audience’s attention to the stage rather than to the lines? Still, though, the interpreter has not rehearsed the interpretation. The other decisions that are made at this point are purely practical. Where is the interpreter to stand? How and when does the interpreter come on stage? What does the interpreter do during the curtain call? In a theatre used to presenting interpreted performances, all of these and more (such as the level of lighting needed, the need for a luminous mark on the stage if the entrance is during a black-out and whether the interpreter will need to move at any point to allow entrances and exits or, more often, to avoid becoming embroiled in fight scenes) can be made in a very few minutes in consultation with the stage manager. The next stage is the immediate, pre-show preparation. Many of Shakespeare’s plays include at least one song and any songs have to be learned. They may be sung by one character, like Feste in Twelfth Night, or sung by the ensemble, as by the assembled cast in the final scene of As You Like It. Here, the interpreter cannot aVord to be a few seconds behind and, invariably, sung as opposed to spoken words are more diYcult to hear.

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The curtain goes up and the interpreter enters and walks to his or her position. He or she might enter before the action starts or as one amongst a group of actors taking their positions. Whatever form the entrance takes, the interpreter adopts a posture that is totally in keeping with the atmosphere the director is trying to create. Often the first person the audience will see, it is essential that the interpreter fits into the opening ‘picture’. As well as the immediate preparation for this particular production, the interpreter also brings on stage a range of strategies, learned and honed over time, that help to ensure that the interpretation is as successful as possible, i.e. is understandable to the intended target audience and, at the same time, as inconspicuous as possible for those members of the audience not requiring an interpreter’s services. When theatres first began to open their doors to Deaf audiences in the mid-1980s they employed experienced conference interpreters. Who else could keep up with the dialogue? It soon became apparent, however, that the approach needed on stage was quite diVerent to that on the platform. Conference sign language interpreters are trained to be as unobtrusive as possible so as not to distract attention from the speaker. When nothing is being said, typically the interpreter assumes an ‘at rest’ or neutral position and posture, facing the audience, whilst waiting for the next source language input. It was an assistant director at the Royal National Theatre in London who first questioned this approach. He was worried that the interpreter was distracting the cast and audience. Whilst there was a tangible ‘energy’ on stage, just to one side, in full view, was someone quite divorced from the action. That person stood out like a sore thumb. An experiment was called for. What would happen if the interpreter reacted to everything that was happening and ‘reflected’ the energy on the stage? The result was a shock to the interpreting profession but, in hindsight, obvious. The actors saw the interpreter as an additional member of the cast for that performance, the non-Deaf audience found that, within a very few minutes, they stopped noticing the interpreter and the Deaf audience, taking cues from the interpreter (his or her reactions to

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what was happening and shifts of focus) felt more involved in the performance. Obvious perhaps, but the implications for theatre interpreters were enormous. The ability to interpret a source language into a target language was no longer enough. Reacting to what was happening on stage meant an awareness of stage protocols: in short, stagecraft. How does one react without overreacting (or overacting)? How does one walk on stage? Whilst conference interpreters were trained to engage the audience, theatre interpreters were having to learn about the ‘fourth wall’, the imaginary, transparent wall through which the audience watches the drama unfold on stage. Unless for special eVect, the actors pretend the audience is not there and the audience suspends its disbelief and reacts to the characters as if they are real. This suspended disbelief is broken as soon as an actor looks at a member of the audience. As the interpreter normally works from the stage, he or she must also respect and maintain this separation. Characterization became another major issue. Whereas conference interpreters were experienced at reflecting what was then called ‘speaker aVect’ (the style, feeling and intensity of the speaker), theatre interpreting demanded the incorporation of BSL discourse features more commonly used in informal conversations and story telling. Deaf sign language users report conversations by re-enacting them; taking on the roles of the participants with minute, almost imperceptible shifts of body position and eye gaze. The theatre interpreter needed to use this discourse strategy, role-shift, to show who was speaking on stage, who they were speaking to and their relationship: dominance, subjugation, respect, aVection, and so on (see page 208). The interpreter, then, begins the performance having never rehearsed the actual interpretation but having prepared well enough to be able to anticipate what is about to happen. On hearing the actors deliver their lines, the interpreter creates a target language interpretation that is sensitive to the moment; one that reflects what is happening there and then on the stage. The interpreter’s aim is to reflect the meaning, the intent and, to some extent, the style of delivery and passion of the actor. At the

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Examples of role-shift and characterization

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same time, the interpreter must be aware of the positioning of the characters on stage so as to make shifts in body posture and direction of eye gaze (role-shift) that will accurately show who is talking to whom. The cognitive and linguistic tasks involved in simultaneous interpretation are demanding enough but the interpreter must, at the same time, be sensitive to and constantly monitor his or her eVect on the actors. Often an actor must deliver a pivotal and diYcult speech across the stage in the direction of the interpreter. Being sensitive to the concentration required for this, the interpreter will focus on the actor (so directing the Deaf audience’s attention to the character) but never, ever, make eye contact. Nothing would be more distracting to an actor than engaging someone who is not a character in the play and who, even worse, appears to be mimicking or aping the actor’s every expression. If practice makes perfect, why is it that rehearsal of an interpretation does not work? Spontaneity is all well and good but surely a more planned approach would result in a better or more eVective interpretation. The answer lies in the cognitive eVort or concentration required. Interpreting involves listening to a source language message, determining the meaning of the message as a whole and, based on knowledge of the target language and an understanding of the target audience’s culture, shared experience, view of the world and, importantly, how a member of that audience would typically express a similar meaning and intent, put across that meaning in a way that can be easily understood. It is not, as is often thought, a memory task. The interpreter does not try to remember the form of the incoming message (the words and syntactic structures used) but instead concentrates on understanding the intended meaning of the message. Whilst producing the target message, the interpreter is, simultaneously, attending to the meaning of the next incoming message: not the words, but the inferences and implications of what is being said. Any additional cognitive task will, inevitably interfere with the process. In the author’s experience, attempting to recall the form of a preplanned, rehearsed chunk of target language simply distracts from the task of understanding and processing the incoming message.

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But some lines have to be remembered and recalled, not for reasons of semantic complexity or diYculties in finding target language equivalents but out of respect for the director’s vision. It is diYcult to think of a Shakespearean play that does not end in a final, dramatic speech. Romeo and Juliet, for example, shortly after the discovery of the dead lovers, ends with the Prince pronouncing: A glooming peace this morning with it brings: The sun for sorrow will not show his head. Go hence to have more talk of these sad things. Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished, For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo. (RJ 5.3.305–10)

A possible interpretation might be: Peace have but (pause) bad, bad (head shake). We-all go-away (in oV-stage direction). Why? Sit, discuss. (Pause) (Eye-brows raised) One-group (position indicated by placement of sign) (eye-brows lowered) me-forgive will. (Eye-brows raised) One-group (diVerent position indicated by placement of sign) (eye-brows lowered) me-punish will. Why? Never before story worse never. (Indicate the couple) J.U.L.I.E.T. (pause) R.O.M.E.O. both. Sympathy (as in ‘poor things’). In the above interpretation, single gloss words indicate a single sign. English glosses joined by a hyphen also indicate just one sign (the morphological rules of BSL dictate that pronouns are usually incorporated in the verb). Individual capital letters, e.g. J.U.L.I.E.T., indicate finger-spelled words; a common way of borrowing from English and often used for names of people and places. The interpretation is fairly straightforward and can be signed in as short a time as it would take the actor to speak the lines. The problem is time-lag. If the interpreter has to hear the lines and

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process the meaning before starting to produce the target form, he or she is likely to finish some seconds after the actor has uttered the final words. The last line of the Prince is the cue for a theatrical device that leaves the audience stunned, saddened, contemplative, quiet; whatever the director is aiming for. This might be a cast tableau, a slow fade to black, an immediate blackout or a slow lowering of the tabs (curtains). Whatever device is used, the eVect will be ruined if the interpreter continues for a further five or more seconds after the Prince has finished. The interpreter, then, must learn the speech. What is interesting is that (in the experience of the author) it is not the target form that is rehearsed and remembered; instead it is either the original speech or a detailed, line-by-line paraphrase. By remembering and recalling a source language version the interpreter stays in ‘interpreting’ mode but is able to use prediction to catch up with the actor and finish at the same time. The length of Shakespeare’s plays does raise the issue of fatigue. Performances lasting in excess of three hours are not uncommon, yet a conference interpreter would not normally be expected to interpret for more than twenty to thirty minutes at a stretch. All interpreters have experienced lapses in concentration as tiredness sets in. Chunks of source text are missed or not properly understood and errors begin to creep in. At its worst, the target language and message can become incoherent. How, then, can an interpreter function eVectively for the whole of a full-length performance? Some theatres have experimented by using two interpreters standing next to each other and sharing whichever characters are on stage at any particular time. For many of the reasons discussed above, this is usually counterproductive. The interpreter, instead of being able to concentrate just on the interpretation, has to remember which character he or she is representing. A further complication is that, because of the position and proximity of their colleague, the active interpreter will tend to address the interpreted lines to that colleague or directly to the audience rather than reflect the direction in which the lines are being delivered on stage. The interpretation, then, becomes a two-handed performance that

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can bear little resemblance to the action on stage. Another strategy that has been tried is to switch interpreters at the end of each act or at the interval. No two interpreters will make the same decisions about equivalence or characterization. The eVect on the Deaf audience is as significant as it would be if the actors were switched. One part of the play would have a totally diVerent feel to another. Whichever approach is taken, the result is interference with, or a total breakdown of, the audience’s suspended disbelief. Fatigue is not such a major issue. All interpreters will have experienced working well beyond the usual twenty to thirty minute period without making significantly more errors. The ability to do this depends on how well the interpreter knows the source text (so allowing for prediction) and, equally as important, how interested or even fascinated the interpreter is in the topic. When the interpreter is enjoying the performances and feeling drawn into the action on stage, time passes very quickly. It is not unlike watching a play from the audience. The better the production, the less the eVort required to concentrate. So how ‘accurate’ is the interpretation? How much access does a Deaf audience really have to the writings of Shakespeare? As with interpreting between any languages, the richness of the source language is lost. As much as a translator or interpreter might struggle to find stylistic as well as semantic equivalence, the target form will always be diVerent. Sign languages, because of their visual/gestural nature are able to deal with Shakespeare’s visual imagery with ease. Titania’s votress ‘her womb then rich with my young squire’ is easily likened to a sailing vessel (MND 2.1.131) and Romeo’s ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun’ (RJ 2.1.45–6) is just as poetic in British Sign Language. It is, nevertheless, diVerent. More diYcult are the plays on words and malapropisms so often used by the comic characters. Dogberry’s ‘our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended two auspicious persons’ (MA 3.5.43–4) is, along with most of his speeches, very diYcult to deal with. The interpreter has little choice but to feign being unable to finger-spell or to use inappropriate signs and then correct them.

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So the language of Shakespeare is lost in translation but is the language the sole or even the main reason for the longevity of his works? It can be argued that the plays have survived and are still being performed despite the inaccessibility of the language to modern audiences. What the Deaf audience can and does have access to is the power of the plots, the nuances of the sub-plots, the richness of the characters, the tragedy of Lear and Cordelia, the menace of Richard III, the horror of Macbeth, the farce and slapstick of The Comedy of Errors, the twists of fate in Romeo and Juliet, the longing for love in As You Like It, the grandeur of Antony and Cleopatra and the magic and enchantment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And Deaf people, in common with other non-Englishspeaking audiences, do appreciate all of this. In 2000, the Deaf community held a festival at the Swan Theatre at Stratford where Deaf actors performed scenes from Shakespeare’s plays in sign language and the British Deaf News now devotes a page in every issue to reviews of interpreted performances. What pleases the author is that, although the interpreter is always mentioned, the reviews invariably focus on the performances of the actors and the success, or otherwise, of the productions. Theatres, too, appreciate the opportunity to make the works of Shakespeare accessible to a whole new audience. Since the early 1990s, the RSC, the Royal National Theatre, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and, since it opened, Shakespeare’s Globe have all been keen that at least one performance of all their productions is interpreted. Interpreted performances are now an established part of the arts scene in Great Britain. But the UK is not alone. From New York to Sydney, from Budapest to Tokyo, as is fitting for the works of such an important and influential writer, the plays of Shakespeare are now regularly interpreted into other sign languages around the globe.

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Pa r t I II POST-COLONIAL TRANSLATION, TRADAPTATION AND ADAPTATION

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12 Scots for Shakespeare J. Derrick McClure

The great tradition of Shakespeare translation is represented to an almost negligible degree in Scotland. Over the world, there can scarcely be a language with a developed literary tradition which does not include translations or adaptations of some or all of Shakespeare’s plays and poems: in some cases, the most outstanding probably being the Schlegel-Tieck version in Germany, Shakespeare in translation has become an integral part of other national literatures. In Scotland, however, we have one play (Macbeth) existing in two Scots versions, another (Julius Caesar) in a single Gaelic version, the merest handful of short extracts from other plays, and a small selection of the Sonnets rendered into the two national languages. In this essay, I will discuss only the Scots translations, leaving examination of the Gaelic for another occasion. At first sight, the surprising fact is not that there are so few Scottish translations of Shakespeare, but that Scottish writers should have made the attempt at all. From the first, Shakespeare’s plays have been performed, read, studied and discussed in Scotland precisely as in their homeland. One of King James VI’s first acts on arriving in London as James I of England was to take Shakespeare’s theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, under his patronage and protection: a list of prominent members of the company mentioned in the royal letters patent puts the name of William Shakespeare in second place. The favourable reception of Shakespeare’s troupe by this learned and literary v 217 v

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Scottish monarch set the precedent for Scotland’s reception of Shakespeare in all subsequent periods. His influence on Scottish writers, including the greatest and most archetypically Scottish, is as extensive and as pervasive as on his compatriots. Robert Burns was thoroughly versed in both plays and poetry. Sir Walter Scott’s novels not only abound in Shakespearean quotations as chapter headings but employ references to Shakespeare as easily and naturally as to characters from the Bible, history or classical mythology. The much-quoted call of an enthusiastic audience member after the first performance of John Home’s Douglas in 1756 – ‘Whaur’s your Wullie Shakespeare nou?’ – was no doubt an expression of patriotic pride that Scotland had (as was fondly dreamed) at last produced a dramatist to rival the English master; but it demonstrates the fact that in Scotland as in England Shakespeare’s plays represented the unchallenged benchmark against which all other dramatic works were measured. And yet, though there is obviously no need in a purely pragmatic sense for Scots translations of Shakespeare, this reluctance of Scottish poet-translators to engage with the greatest of English writers is, at another level, not without an element of curiosity. Literary translations in Scots, particularly in the twentieth century, are of suYcient quality, quantity and variety to be seen as an integral part of the national poetic achievement. Translations of lyric poetry are much more numerous than those of drama and represent a longer-standing branch of the Scottish literary tradition; but the middle of the century saw Douglas Young’s translations of two Aristophanic plays and Robert Kemp’s adaptations of two by Molie`re; more recent experiments include Edwin Morgan’s Cyrano de Bergerac and Phe`dre, Liz Lochhead’s TartuVe, and a whole series of translations of Michel Tremblay’s contemporary dramas, from Montreal joual into Glasgow demotic, by Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman. In this positive ferment of translation activity, it is at least worthy of note that translations of Shakespeare, and indeed of any English writers, have been so rare. A central part of the literary-political credo of the Scottish Renaissance, after all, has been the status of Scots as a

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separate language from English; and the successful presentation of originally English texts re-created as Scots would seem intuitively to be an admirable means both of demonstrating the autonomy and distinctiveness of the Scots language and of proclaiming its adaptability for all literary endeavours. The complete list of Scots translations, as far as I have been able to discover, is as follows: the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy from Hamlet and part of Act 3, scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (to the entrance of Puck) by Ellie McDonald; complete renderings of Macbeth by David Purves and Robin Lorimer; a short extract from the same play by Edwin Morgan; six sonnets and some extracts from Macbeth by Martin Allan; and a single sonnet (29) by Bill Smith. The fact that the two most substantial items in this list, the translations of Macbeth, both appeared in 1992 is not without interest.1 A desire for greater political autonomy in Scotland has existed since the loss of independence in 1707, and the entire twentieth century was marked by the waxing and waning of movements towards Home Rule. By the 1990s, the continuing vitality of the Scottish literary and cultural scene, and the slow but cumulative series of developments in the educational field which enhanced the place of Scottish literature and the Scots language in the curriculum to at least a ‘better than nothing’ status, had added strength to a powerful and broadly based movement exerting pressure on the Westminster government to establish a devolved parliament in Scotland. The appropriation into the field of Scottish drama of Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish’ play, at this precise juncture, had more than academic significance; and though the Home Rule movement was not to achieve success for several more years, the translations certainly made a contribution to the mood of cultural nationalism then (and still) prevalent in Scotland. Collectively, this corpus, despite its meagre bulk, illustrates a quite striking diversity both of registers of Scots and of approaches to the task of translation. One of the most individual and most poetically useful features of Scots, and one which has been recognized and exploited as such through the ages, is its abundant stock of highly distinctive and expressive lexical items.

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However, Smith’s version of sonnet 29 (‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’) is an illustration, and perhaps in intention a vindication, of a register which makes conspicuously little use of the exclusively Scots features of the language: Doun on my luck, by aa my freens miscried, I greet that, burd-alane I’m coost awaa, Fash the deif lift we scries that are denied, Seein mysel comin til nocht avaa, Wishin I was like this ane promised mair, Weel-faured lik him, or haein freens lik yon, Wishin I’d this ane’s chance, or that ane’s flair; Aathin I treisure maist, I luke doun on. In sic-lik thochts, my verra sel miscaain, Aiblins I think on ye, an my estate Like til the laverock’s liftin in the dawin Lofts fae the yird tae hymn the Makar’s yett; Thochts o thy luve sic treisures bring til me I wadnae be the king, nor hae him me. (son. 29, trans. Smith)

The Scots words are relatively sparse, and are not particularly evocative in any respect (phonaesthetic, metaphorical, reminiscent of literary models): ‘miscried’ [insulted], ‘greet’ [weep], ‘burdalane’ [all alone], ‘fash’ [annoy], ‘lift’ [sky], ‘aiblins’ [perhaps], ‘laverock’ [skylark], ‘yett’ [gate]. Other forms are Scots by virtue of phonological developments not shared with their English cognates: ‘doun’, ‘aa’, ‘freens’, ‘deif ’, ‘mair’, ‘faured’, ‘thochts’, and the like. To this extent, the language of the poem is a straightforward counterpart to that of the original (in which, characteristically of the Sonnets, the linguistic inventiveness and poetic merit do not inhere in the use of individually unusual words). Smith’s medium, then, may be seen as inherently fitting for its purpose, without the need for any special defence: the straightforward, familiar literary Scots as Shakespeare’s in this poem, Smith’s own individual use of it apart, is plain literary English. The sonnet, too, reads well as a passage in a Scots that is readily comprehensible to any reader acquainted with the core

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texts of Scots poetry. As a translation, however, on the assumed principle that a valid poetic translation must be a work of comparable literary merit to the original, it is open to criticism in several particulars. The very familiar, even colloquial, tone of ‘Doun on my luck’ is an obvious deviation from the more formal register of Shakespeare’s poem, and indeed scarcely in keeping with the rest of the translation. ‘Fash the deif lift’ for ‘trouble deaf heaven’ sacrifices the suggestion of an unheard prayer (or at best reduces it to an implication): ‘lift’ is simply ‘sky’. Later, the rendering of ‘heaven’s gate’ as ‘the Makar’s yett’ is open to criticism on another ground: ‘makar’, though a misunderstanding is scarcely conceivable, has always been used in Scots to mean ‘poet’; an inappropriate connotation in the context. ‘I wadnae be the king, nor hae him me’ is certainly acceptable for the last line, though weakened by the loss of ‘scorn’; but ‘me’ is the final word of the preceding line, in an almost redundant phrase (translating Shakespeare’s ‘brings’ as ‘brings til me’); and having ‘me’ rhyme with itself in the final couplet of a sonnet makes for a lamentably feeble conclusion. Poetic translations, by the nature of the art, must be measured against their originals; and translations in Scots must be seen in the context of a tradition which includes admirable renderings of some of the finest works in European literature. By those tokens, Smith’s sonnet cannot be reckoned a success. In itself it is not a bad poem; but a poet who ventures to translate Shakespeare must take the consequences; and Smith falls so far short of the Shakespearean standard that a harsh judgement is unavoidable. In a diVerent category are Martin Allan’s remarkable renderings of six sonnets into North-East Doric, written in an invented phonetic orthography and continuously revised over many years. Allan’s medium is more individual, and his choice of it more audacious, than Smith’s: linguistically his dialect is highly diVerentiated not only from any form of English but from other forms of Scots; and culturally it has the distinction of being developed, to an extent unique among the traditional dialects of the Scottish mainland, for a local literature substantial in bulk and impressive in quality, arising from the traditional farming culture

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of the region and reflecting it in intimate detail. The opening quatrain of Allan’s first translated Shakespeare sonnet at once demonstrates the individuality of his medium: Faan, tul lown saishoans oa dooce, seelint thoacht, Ah summoans up deep draachts oa days laang deen, Ah yairns foar yaicht oa moanay a gree sair soacht, Aan murns the mein oa moanay a secht laang geen.2 (son. 30, 1–4; trans. Allan)

The idiosyncratic spelling (particularly, in this extract, the use of the digraph oa, and of geminate letters to represent the characteristically drawn-out vowels of the dialect) is bound to deepen the opacity of the language for an uninitiated reader; but even apart from this, the presence of phonological features unique to the area – like initial f- corresponding to wh- (‘faan’ is ‘when’); development of a palatal on-glide before a historic a and its descendants (‘yaicht’ [possession] is pronounced aacht or aucht in other Scots dialects) – shows at once that the translator is insistently, not to say exultantly, presenting the full glory of what he calls ‘the plain, hard, strong, rough, rugged, the harshly guttural, the maximally, inexorably, broad-vowelled Buchan tongue’.3 The aim of Allan’s project is in fact to construct a showcase for his native dialect in which its proudly individual qualities of sound, rhythm and idiom may shine forth for all comers. On the level of sound-music and prosody, the translations and the originals could hardly be more unlike. This, of course, is no adverse criticism: part of a translator’s skill inheres in his ability to exploit the distinctive sound-patterns of his medium as the source-writer did the necessarily diVerent patterns of his. Allan, however, conspicuously makes more use than Shakespeare of alliteration, reverse rhyme and internal rhyme, while applying full end-rhyme only sporadically: his poems rely to a far greater extent for their eVect on sound patterning. Sometimes a sound-pattern in the original suggests a diVerent one in the translation, as for example when the line ‘When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so’ (son. 43, 8) becomes ‘Aan glaints thy vraith sae brecht tul

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sechtlaiss ee’); but often the Doric versions show patterns where the originals do not. The four lines of sonnet 30 already quoted provide several examples. In numerous cases, sound patterning is used to highlight or link together important words. Examples include: ‘Comes haim throwe your noo leelir deemin maaken’ [‘Comes home again, on better judgement making’, son. 87, 12]; ‘Gie nae a blaavee necht a bleetree moarra’ [‘Give not a windy night a rainy morrow’, son. 90, 7]; and ‘Time’s bowders blaads the braa bleem stailt on yowth’ [‘Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth’, son. 60, 9]. But also note the delicate cross-line rhymes of ‘Like iz the swaas maks yair tul peebilt shoar, / Sae caas oor yairen meenits tul thair straan’ [‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, / So do our minutes hasten to their end’, son. 60, 1–2]; and the frankly reckless ‘eivn brecht sechts lechtet’ (trans. son. 43, 4). But Shakespeare can get away with ‘when first your eye I eyed’ (son. 104, 2). Allan uses e to indicate the very open sound which the vowel in a word like ‘bit’ has in this dialect. It is distinct from the vowel in ‘bet’, which is more peripheral and more protracted, and which he represents (not entirely consistently) as eh. Rhythmically too, Allan’s lines are marked by a conspicuous preponderance of demoted syllables, often formed by adjectives or adverbs with no counterparts in the originals: the first four lines of sonnet 30 again provide examples (‘lown’, ‘deep’, ‘laang’ in lines 2 and 4, ‘sair’). Others are: Mars nair wull blaad, noar wull waar’s swack flaacht scaad (son. 55, 7, trans. Allan)

and: The nyoweboarn bairn, vraitht braa en moarnen’s lecht Craals tul eeld’s hecht aan macht, faan, noon’s lecht gien. (son. 60, 5–6, trans. Allan)

This is splendidly apposite for the slow pace and intonational weighting of unstressed syllables that characterizes Buchan Doric pronunciation; but the heavy feel which it imparts to the lines makes them utterly unlike Shakespeare’s graceful rhythms.

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On any showing, Allan’s skill in producing striking auditory eVects from his dialect deserves high praise. However, the question to be confronted is to what extent his memorable tracts of Doric have validity as translations of Shakespeare. Certainly, they do not at all points replicate the meanings of the originals, even to the extent that this is ever possible in poetic translation. In the four quoted lines of sonnet 30, ‘lown’ [quiet, peaceful] is an augmentation of the original line, though certainly not at variance with it; ‘deep draachts’ [deep draughts] alters the literal ‘remembrance’ to a metaphor, ‘yaicht’ [possession] has the opposite meaning to ‘lack’, though (oddly enough) the meaning of the line is not thereby aVected; ‘mein’ [‘recollection’: the spelling is intended to suggest a pronunciation like mine], though complementing the translator’s alliterative pattern, is not the same as ‘expense’. Throughout, much is added and much taken away: Shakespeare’s witty paradoxes in the opening quatrain of sonnet 43 are replicated with real ingenuity: En merkest sleep ma glaamert een sees baist, Sin the lee-laang day they glowms, eivn brecht sechts lechtet, Bit sein, come sleep, en draims sechts thy vraith glaiss, Aan, broadit-brecht, en sleep’s-merk glowes, glaig airtet. (son. 43, 1–4, trans. Allan)

A literal back-translation, however, reveals that Allan has pushed his version to the border of paraphrase: ‘In darkest sleep my bewitched eyes see best, / for all day long they frown, even bright sights being belittled, / but then, when sleep comes, in dreamvisions your spirit shines, / and shuttered-bright, in sleep’s darkness [my eyes] glow, adroitly directed.’ Occasionally he ventures on what can only be a deliberate departure from the original: ‘Noar graiven steen be lustrin weens made veev’ [‘Than carved stone made bright by burnishing winds’] may be both literally and poetically satisfactory in itself, as well as appealing to the ear; but it is the direct opposite of Shakespeare’s ‘Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time’ (son. 55, 4).

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Yet the verdict must surely be that this small set of translations is a monument, not only to the North-Eastern dialect, but to the potential of literary translation. Allan’s dialect, besides being highly idiosyncratic in itself, embodies a flourishing literary culture which presents a world about as remote from that of Shakespeare’s sonnets as it is possible to imagine. To translate those poems, with their introspective melancholy, their ingenious word-plays and conceits, their emotionally intense and imaginatively brilliant reflections on mutability and eternity, into the language of a determinedly earth-bound people concerned primarily, in literature as in life, with the physical struggles of day-to-day existence, is a venture audacious by any standards. And the translator has confronted it with undaunted nerve, showing that this dialect can, with reservations, step so far out of its normal literary bounds as to be a vehicle for translation, if only on a tiny scale, of some of the greatest lyrics in English. Allan’s six sonnets, should they ever come to public attention, will certainly stand ‘tul the einin Deem’, at least in the North-East, as a spark of unique individuality in the galaxy of Shakespeare translations. The Scots which Ellie McDonald uses for her two short extracts from the plays is, like Allan’s, firmly rooted in the ancestral vernacular and traditional in its grammar and vocabulary; but a much less localized form. The diVerent registers which she has chosen for her two Shakespearean extracts contrast as completely as the sources warrant. The easy conversational prose of the passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is natural to Scots, and from the opening ‘Is aabody here?’ – ‘Richt on time’ [‘Are we all met?’ – ‘Pat, pat’, 3.1.1–2] to the brisk and business-like ‘Pyramus, you stert, an efter ye’ve spak, gang ahent the busses. Syne we’ll gang aven on bi the cues’ [‘Pyramus, you begin: when you have spoken your speech, enter into that brake; and so every one according to his cue’, 3.1.69–71] with which the extract ends, the swift exchanges are maintained in a realistic vernacular. ‘What ails ye?’ conveys a hint of apprehension which the original ‘What sayest thou?’ does not suggest (3.1.7); but this is surely appropriate between this speaker and this addressee. Later on, Snout’s ‘You can never bring in a wall. What say you, Bottom?’

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(3.1.61–2) becomes ‘Ye cannae humph in a dyke, eh no, Bottom?’, with the strongly colloquial verb emphasizing the absurdity of the idea by its inappropriate sensory expressiveness, and the question to Bottom being reduced to a familiar tag indicating the expectation of immediate agreement. A miniature example of transculturation occurs with the substitution of ‘a puckle fails or twa-three chuckie-stanes or a bit harlin’ for ‘some plaster, or some loam, or some rough cast’ (3.1.64–5): ‘fails’ [turfs] were not used for the kind of ‘wall’ that Shakespeare presumably envisaged. Starveling’s ‘I’m feart onywey’ suggests a misunderstanding of the original ‘I fear it, I promise you’ (3.1.26), and Bottom’s ludicrous ‘wild-fowl’, referring to the lion (3.1.30), is disappointingly rendered simply as ‘baist’; but those tiny lapses apart, this short passage reads very well as a light-hearted interchange in modern Scots. Hamlet’s soliloquy is, of course, almost at the opposite end of the spectrum of Shakespearean linguistic inventiveness; and McDonald skilfully recreates the contrast in her Scots. The pervasive rhythm of her translation has more in common with that of medieval alliterative verse than with the Shakespearean iambic pentameter: it is not too fanciful to see in the prosody of the following lines a reminiscence of Hamlet in his ancient Nordic incarnation rather than as Shakespeare’s Renaissance prince: Wad that I kent the gait that’s richt . . . [Would that I knew the way that’s right . . .] That lowses the riven hert frae pain . . . [That frees the wounded heart from pain . . .] The mool maun haud sic wudden dreams . . . [The earth must hold such mad dreams . . .]. The impression of Nordic origins is confirmed by the frequent alliteration, seen in familiar tags like ‘gar ye grue’ [make you shudder], ‘gang far agley’ [go far astray] and one from medieval alliterative poetry rather than contemporary speech, ‘sturt an strife’ (‘sturt’ is trouble, contention, dispute; ‘sturt’ and ‘strife’ are virtually synonymous and frequently used as an alliterative tag).

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There is alliteration too in original phrases like ‘ilk skud an scart / o a fashious fate, gang tae war agin a wecht o waes, that wankent warld’ [every blow and cut / of a vexatious fate; go to war against a weight of sorrows; that unknown world] (wankent is ‘unknown’, wan- being a prefix). The elementary language of the first two lines modulates immediately to a short passage abounding in vigorous and pungent Scots words: if the imposing sonority of the Shakespearean lines, and the haunting elusiveness of their imagery, are sacrificed (as they indubitably are), the forceful physicality of the translation has its own merit. The potency of Scots vocabulary is again exploited in the rendering of the following lines: For wha wad thole time’s sturt an strife, illgaited tyrants, pauchty chiels, the hertache o begunkit luv, the frist o law, an aa the miscaains tholed frae orra misleart sumphs. (trans. McDonald)

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of oYce, and the spurns That patient merit of th’unworthy takes. (Ham 3.1.70–4)

At certain points an idea suggested by some detail of the Shakespearean grammar or lexis is conveyed by diVerent means in the Scots version. A good illustration is the rendering of the lines, ‘the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’ (3.1.84–5) as: an naitral virr gangs blae wi thochts wad gar ye grue. Here ‘gangs blae’ expresses in concentrated form the implications of ‘hue . . . sicklied o’er with the pale cast’ and those of ‘sicklied’ are reinforced by the uncompromisingly physical phrase ‘gar ye grue’ [make you shudder].

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Unquestionably, the full linguistic, intellectual and emotive range of Shakespeare’s lines is not even nearly approached by McDonald’s version (which is, in justice, sub-headed ‘efter the suddron o Wm Shakespeare’ [after the southern language of William Shakespeare]. The diminution of ‘enterprises of great pitch and moment’ to ‘skeely ploys’ [clever tricks] is, one might rather unkindly suggest, a not inappropriate summing-up of the whole attempt. Nonetheless, the translation is a daring project which she has accomplished with vigour, and her energetic passage of Scots verse, besides providing a noteworthy contrast to the easy colloquial prose extract from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, demonstrates the forcefulness of Scots if not the subtlety and delicacy of which the language is equally capable. The only complete translations of any Shakespeare play into Scots are both from the same original, Macbeth, one produced by David Purves and another by Robin Lorimer. Interestingly, these translations form a striking contrast in several respects.4 It is immediately obvious that they were written with diVerent intentions, predictably from the literary and academic backgrounds of the two authors. Purves is a poet and dramatist, and also a controversialist and activist in the cause of advancing the social, political and educational, as well as literary, status of Scots. Lorimer, who died in 1996, had no such standing: the branch of Scottish culture in which he had a scholarly reputation was ‘piobaireachd’ [pipe music], and his connection with the Scots language was principally through his father William Laughton Lorimer, a scholar of high distinction whose Scots translation of the New Testament, which Robin Lorimer edited for publication, ranks with Gavin Douglas’s Eneados among the greatest scholarly and artistic achievements ever produced in the Scots tongue (see Lorimer, W.L.). In view of this diVerence, it is not surprising that the approaches taken by the two translations are divergent: though perhaps there is an element of surprise in the fact that the less practised writer has acquitted himself with much the greater credit. Purves has chosen a register suggestive of the rural vernaculars of the South and South-East and the traditional vocabulary of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry, the register which he has generally used

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for his own plays and poems; Lorimer has used a somewhat more archaic Scots, ornamented with words taken from the Latinate register frequently employed by the medieval Makars and newly concocted words on the same model, and employing some of the obsolescent grammatical features (‘binna’ [be not] for ‘unless’; ‘dout-it-na’, ‘writ ye til him?’) frequent in the New Testament. Purves, concomitantly with his diminution of the language (since his technique necessarily involves this, as compared to the creative linguistic brilliance of the Shakespearean original) adopts a freeand-easy verse pattern of five-beat or occasionally four-beat lines with an irregular arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables; whereas Lorimer tries, with notable success, to imitate the original iambic pentameter. As further evidence of his scaling-down of the drama, Purves weakens the force of the characters’ pronouncements by an abundance of interpolated modifiers on the lines of ‘A think’ [I think], ‘A’m shair’ [I’m sure], ‘A wush’ [I wish], ‘shairlie’ [surely], a procedure corresponding to nothing in Lorimer; and in what can only be regarded as a culpable dereliction of responsibility as a translator, simplifies or omits entirely several of the play’s cruces and diYcult passages. Of the two, though it is possible that Purves’s translation would be more readily appreciated by an average theatre audience, there can be no question that Lorimer’s is by far the more ambitious endeavour and the more impressive performance. An achievement of a diVerent order of literary magnitude, however, is Edwin Morgan’s translation of a short passage from the same play. ‘The Hell’s-Handsel o Leddy Macbeth’ (1.5.16–55) appears in Morgan’s first collection of translations, Rites of Passage. A comparison of the three versions of this extract clearly illustrates the diVerent methods, and diVerent levels of accomplishment, of the translators. Lorimer’s version, here as throughout, is that of a skilled and careful craftsman, following the principle of maximum fidelity at all levels to the original. Changes to the syntax, whether enjoined by grammatical diVerences between the languages, diVering syllable structure of source- and targetlanguage lexemes, or considerations of rhetorical eVectiveness, are carefully incorporated into the metrical structure. Witness

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such examples as ‘O man-kin’s mither-milk it’s fulled owre fou . . .’ [‘It is too full o’th’ milk of human kindness’, 1.5.16], ‘Sae’s nane o naitur’s auntrin conscience-stangs . . .’ [‘That no compunctious visitings of Nature’, 1.5.44], and ‘Ye fettle naitur’s deiviltrie. Come, nicht . . .’ [‘You wait on Nature’s mischief! Come, thick night!’]. Lorimer’s distinctively Scots words are almost invariably one-toone counterparts of words in the original: in Lady Macbeth’s first speech, ‘fear’ (1.5.15) translates as ‘misdout’, ‘catch’ (1.5.17) as ‘cleek’, ‘ear’ (1.5.25) as ‘lug’, ‘chastise’ (1.5.26) as ‘screinge’, ‘valour’ (1.5.26) as ‘smeddum’, and so on; in the second, fittingly for its increased menace and portentousness, the vocabulary becomes more emotive: ‘naitur’s auntrin conscience-stangs, Hell’s maist keir-black reek, full my haill bouk frae heels tae heid pang-fou’ [nature’s occasional stabs of conscience; Hell’s most pitch-black smoke, fill my whole body from heels to head, brim-full]. Archaisms such as ‘fellon’ and ‘remord’, the Scottish architectural term ‘barmekin’ and the morphologically balanced word pair ‘ingate an througate’ [‘access and passage’, 1.5.43] increase the highly wrought character of the passage and heighten its emotive force. Lorimer is not concerned to underline the ‘Scottishness’ of his language: the vocabulary, though carefully chosen, is scarcely recondite or obscure and never obtrusively so (indeed, the consistency of register is maintained with remarkable tenacity throughout the play). Nor does he use orthography to emphasize the distinctiveness of Scots phonology: if anything he underplays this, using English spellings where the expected pronunciation is Scots (‘pour’ is [pur], and ‘wind’ is [win] etc.). The impression given by Lorimer’s translation is somewhat paradoxical. It is the most source-oriented of the translations discussed, following the original with notable and obviously deliberate fidelity, but by so doing it demonstrates the expressive potential of Scots: where Shakespeare leads, even to the sublime heights of linguistic inventiveness which he scales in Macbeth, Scots can follow, or almost so. The achievement of Lorimer, while not remotely comparable in scale to that of his father in his New Testament, is not dissimilar in kind: if one of the functions of literary translation is to prove that the target language can restate

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the poetic content of a source text in terms as similar as the diVerences between the languages will permit, while maintaining its own integrity, then Scots in Lorimer’s hands has surmounted as diYcult a challenge as the field of literary translation can oVer. The same cannot be said of Purves’s version. Lady Macbeth’s first speech is reduced from sixteen to thirteen lines, by the simple process of omitting some of the material. ‘Bouster up yeir speirit wi ma tongue’ [bolster up your spirit with my tongue] is much less than what Shakespeare’s character says in English (1.5.25–9); and ‘but it maun be ae wey or tither’ [but it must be one way or the other] simply will not do even as a summary of ‘thou’ldst have, great Glamis . . .’ (1.5.21). Two instances of ‘ferr owre’ [far too] in four lines, and two adjacent lines ending ‘for’t’ and ‘for it’, suggest carelessness. ‘Hap ye i the darkest plaid o Hell’ [Wrap you in the darkest plaid of Hell] for ‘pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell’ (1.5.50) is questionable: the overtones of ‘hap’ (‘wrap’, as in a garment or a blanket), and ‘plaid’ (piece of tartan cloth used as a garment) are of comforting warmth, conveying nothing of the nightmarish terror of Shakespeare’s image. It would be absurd to deny that Purves’s text has many felicities, such as the grating assonance on ‘The corbie himsell is hairse / that craiks the fatal entrie’ [‘The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance’ (1.5.37–8)], or the unpleasantsounding verb in ‘clag aw springheads o peitie or compassion’ [‘Stop up th’access and passage to remorse’ (1.5.43)]; or in general that it reads well as good workmanlike Scots. Purves, however, like Ellie McDonald but without her defence of oVering a work which is efter Shakespeare, has failed to accept the full implications of a translator’s role. In his preface Purves states that his translation has to be read ‘allowing for the constraints of the Scots language’; but the implied assumption, that Scots simply lacks the resources to provide a translation of Macbeth fit to compare with the original, is not warranted. Scots has proved equal to translating some of the greatest passages in European literature, starting in 1513 with Virgil and Gavin Douglas’s Eneados, universally recognized as one of the finest secular translations ever made. The limitations

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restricting Purves are in fact, as Douglas said of himself with much less justification, Nocht for our tong is in the selvyn scant, Bot for that I the fowth of langage want. (Eneados, Prologue, 1:119–20)

It must be repeated that Purves is a competent and experienced writer; and the charge of falling short of a Shakespearean level of accomplishment is one with which most writers can readily live. But since Lorimer aims directly for the goal of replicating Shakespeare in Scots and attains to an impressive level of success, the fact that Purves’s literary sights were set much lower cannot be excused as the necessary result of some inherent limitation in his medium. Morgan’s approach is in contrast to both the others. Neither deliberately fighting shy of his original nor succeeding by treading firmly in his footsteps, he allows the Shakespearean text to inspire him to the full creative flights of his own poetic talent, producing a passage which is both a superb piece of Scots poetry and a worthy tribute to its model. Morgan’s Scots vocabulary is the richest of the three, and unlike Lorimer his words do not stand in close correspondence to Shakespeare’s: But och, I traistna sic herts as yours: sic fouth o mense and cherity: ower-guid for that undeemous breenge! [But oh, I trust not such hearts as yours: such abundance of courtesy and charity, too good for that immeasurable plunge.] Often words are chosen not only for their semantic or phonaesthetic force but woven into sound patterns: ‘aa thae wanearthly warnishments and weird, The gorbie itsel / micht hauch and rauch to tell me Duncan’s come . . .; my fey and feindly thochts, to venim and to verjuice, the smeek and reek o daurkest hell’ [All those unearthly warnings and fate; The raven itself might cough and croak to tell me Duncan has come . . .; my fatal and devilish

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thoughts to venom and to verjuice; the smoke and fumes of darkest hell]. Rhetorical patterns not present in the original appear: Ye’d hae / the gloir, the gree, the tap-rung (corresponding to ‘Thou wouldst be great’ [Mac 1.5.17]) and Come ye, / come ye, I maun unfauld, maun speak, maun whup . . . (corresponding to ‘Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear, / And chastise . . .’ [Mac 1.5.24–6]). These two lines are from diVerent sections of the passage from Macbeth, and are not adjacent in Shakespeare. The first corresponds to ‘Thou wouldst be great’ (1.5.17), and the second to ‘Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear, / And chastise . . .’ (1.5.24–6). More than once, in a manner favoured by Scots poets during the high tide of the Renaissance, an expressive word is invented: the best is ‘circumgowdie’, for ‘the golden round’. ‘The Hell’sHandsel o Leddy Macbeth’ is poetic translation at its finest; and one can only wish that Morgan had produced, or would yet produce, a complete version of the play. (Characteristically, Purves avoids trying to convey the overtones of the Shakespearean phrase by writing simply ‘this gowden croun’; no less characteristically, Lorimer follows the Shakespearean suggestion exactly with ‘the gowden gird’: a ‘gird’ is a hoop, but the implications of the verb ‘gird round’ are present in Scots as in English.) Though their range is so limited, the tiny set of Scots translations from Shakespeare illustrates several diVerent approaches. The most venturesome form of poetic translation, and the one that shows the most complete understanding of the magnitude of the task – the one that represents the strongest claim to creative artistry on the part of the translator – is that of Morgan: his translation is a new work, oVered not as an imitation or re-statement but an independent poetic artefact, deploying the full resources of the target language for a transcreated work comparable in content and in literary merit to the original. To a limited extent, Allan could be said to be attempting the same. The

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bracketing is remarkable, for Morgan is by general agreement one of the most accomplished as well as the most versatile and most prolific poets that Scotland has produced in the twentieth century, and Allan is an amateur with no claim to any reputation outside the circle of North-East literary enthusiasts. Yet in both men’s works, the full challenge of translating literature of the highest quality has been confronted; and though it is not to be expected that Allan’s success would match that of Morgan, his Doric translations are on any showing an admirable accomplishment. Smith, McDonald and Purves are less ambitious, and their achievement is to that extent necessarily of a lower magnitude: as translators they do not claim to be doing all that their model has done. Finally Lorimer achieves undeniable and indeed highly creditable success by the method of following as closely behind his model as the language permits: a method which certainly would not always work (possibly the conditioning factor is the closeness of relationship between the source and the target languages), but has at least worked for him. The potential of Scots for poetic translation does not need to be argued or demonstrated, and the opportunities beckoning to our Scots poet-translators are limitless. The general cultural and political context, certainly, could still provide fertile ground for such developments. In May 1999 a Scottish Parliament was established, with extensive though restricted powers: a revolutionary success, which was hailed with great popular acclaim. Despite this, the feeling in Scotland at the date of writing (Autumn, 2003) is of acute frustration and disappointment, in that the executive has so far concerned itself mainly with relatively trivial issues rather than the vital need for reform in such fields as education and health, has failed to emancipate itself from the traditional and chronically unsuccessful assumptions and methods of (on the one hand) Westminster and (on the other) Scottish local government, and above all has shown a disgraceful lack of urgency in promoting Scotland’s languages and culture. Nevertheless, writers, scholars and educationists continue as active and as productive as before; and the liveliness of the Scottish cultural scene, including the production of literary translation, is

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undiminished. With the field of Shakespeare almost unexplored, one may hope for further developments in the future. v Here follow three renderings of the same passage from Macbeth translated into Scots. R.L.C. Lorimer, Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ Translated into Scots, 1.5: GRUOCH (MACBETH’S WIFE)

Glammis ye’r ense, an Cawdor, an will be what ye’ve been hecht. Yit I misdout your naitur, o man-kin’s mither-milk it’s fulled owre fou tae cleik the shortest road. Ye’r keen o gryteness – no scant o ambı´tion, but scant of th’illness o will tae gae wi’d. Ettlin tae mak out hı´elie, but haililie, ye’d ey play fair, an yit unfairlie win. Ye’d hae, gryte Glams, what cries, ‘Thusgate ye maun du’, gin ye’d hae’d, an what, I dout, ye’r feart raither tae du, nor wiss suid no be dune. Heast, heast ye back, man, sae’s I may pour my spı´rits in your lug, an wi the smeddum o my tungraik screinge aathing at hains ye frae the gowden gird the Weirds, wi mair nor naitural assistance, seems tae hae crouned ye wi. Ben comes a Messenger.] What tythance bring ye? MESSENGER

The King comes here the nicht. GRUOCH

Ye maun be gyte, man! Isna the maister wi him? Gin ‘t war sae, wadna he no hae sent me wurd bitimes tae readie his reception? MESSENGER

Sae may’d pleise ye, it’s true: our Thane he’s comin, an will shune

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be here. Ane o my marras had fore-rin him, but, nearhaund deid for want o wind, hed scairce eneuch tae mak his message. GRUOCH

Tent him weill: braw news he’s brocht! [But gaes the Messenger The vera corbie’s rauk at crowps the weirdit coming-in o Duncan aneth my barmekin. C’awa`, ye spı´rits at waits on mortal thochts, reive me my sex; full my haill bouk frae heels tae heid pang-fou o fellon crueltie; thicken my blude; stap aV ingate an througate tae remord, sae’s nane o naitur’s auntrin conscience-stangs can slack my ettle, nor mak trews twixt it an its eVeck. Come, fin’ my wumman’s breists, an tak my milk for gaw, ye ill-deed-duers, whauriver in your unseen essences ye fettle naitur’s deiviltrie. Come, nicht, shroud ye yoursel in Hell’s maist keir-black reek, latna my gleg knife see the wound it maks, not lift keek throu the plaiding o the mirk an skreich, ‘Haud sae!’ David Purves, The Tragedie o Macbeth, 1.5: LADY MACBETH

Glamis ye are, an Cawdor, an ye sal be wat is promised ye. Yit A am feart yeir naitur is ferr owre fou o the milk o human kyndness to uise the quickest wey. Ye wad be gret, ye hae th’ambeition for’t, but ye are ferr owre sachless for it. What ye desyre sae mukkil, ye wad hae richtlie; no play it fauss, great Glamis, yit win it wrangly, but it maun be ae wey or tither. Hoy hame at aince sae A can bouster up yeir speirit

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wi ma tongue. A’l dird awa for ye awthing that hauds ye frae this gowden croun that supernaitral pouers haes made yeir weird. [Enter messenger] What wurd dae ye bring? MESSENGER

The Keing cums here the-nicht. LADY MACBETH

Ye’re shuirlie gaen gyte ti tell me this! Is yeir maister no wi him? The Keing wad shuirlie gien me tyme for preparation gin this be true. MESSENGER

Please, ma Leddie, it’s true aneuch he cums. Ane o ma men ootran him here. He wes that oot o braith he’d mukkil adae ti speak his wurd. LADY MACBETH

Tend till him! He brings gret news. [Messenger leaves] The corbie himsell is hairse that craiks the fatal entrie o Duncan ablo ma battilments. Cum ben ye spreits that tends on deidlie thochts; tak awa ma sex an fill me pang fou frae croun ti tae wi utmaist crueltie! Mak ma bluid thick! Clag aw springheids o peitie or compassion in ma saul, latna ma naitur hinner me in ma fell purpose, an lat me hae nae peace or it’s fulfilled! Cum til ma wumman’s breists an chynge ma milk for gaw, ye murderin agents, whare’er ye byde ti steir up naitur’s mischief! Cum doun, mirk nicht, an hap ye i the derkest plaid o Hell, sae ma sherp knyfe wul no can see the wound it maks, nor Heivin keik throu the blanket of the derk an cry, ‘Haud on! Haud on!’

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And finally, the same passage from Macbeth, translated by Edwin Morgan as ‘The Hell’s-handsel o Leddy Macbeth’, in his Rites of Passage, 82–3: [Macbeth’s Castle. Enter Leddy Macbeth, with a letter Macbeth has scrievit her.] LEDDY MACBETH

Aye, ye are Glamis, ye are Cawdor, and ae thing mair ye sall be, ae thing mair. But och, I traistna sic herts as yours: sic fouth o mense and cherity: ower-guid for that undeemous breenge! Ye’d hae the gloir, the gree, the tap-rung, but ye want the malefice the tap-rung taks. Ye’d hae the pooer, gin pooer cam by prayin; ye carena for fause pley, but ye’d win whit’s no won fair. Yon thing ye’d hae, gret Glamis, that caas ‘Dae this to hae me, or hae nane’ – and then yon thing that ye mair fear nor hate to dae. Come ye, come ye, I maun unfauld, maun speak, maun whup wi this tongue’s dauntonin aa thing that hinners your progress to thon perfit circumgowdie aa thae wanearthly warnishments and weird shaw as your croon to be. [Enter a Castle Carle.] Ye bring me news? CASTLE CARLE

This nicht ye hae a guest – the king. LEDDY MACBETH

Are ye wud? Your maister’s wi the king. I’m shair he kens we maun mak preparations for the king? CASTLE CARLE

My leddy, it is true. Ye’ll see erelang oor laird hissel. The message cam fae him: wan o his men run on aheid, tellt me it aa pechin and forfochten.

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LEDDY MACBETH

Tak tent o’m, his news is guid. [Exit Castle Carle.] – Pechin? The gorbie itsel micht hauch and rauch to tell me Duncan’s come like a deid man in-through my castle-waas. Cwa sichtless cailleachs o the warks o daith, transtreind my sex, drive into ilka sinnow carl-cruelty allutterly, mak thrang my bluid, sneck up aa yetts whaur peety micht walk furth, that nae saft chappin o wemen’s nature shak my fey and fiendly thocht, nor slaw my steps fae thocht to fack! Cwa to this breists of mine you murder-fidgin spreits, and turn their milk to venim and to verjuice, fae your sheddows waukrife ower erd’s evil! Cwa starnless nicht, rowed i the smeek and reek o daurkest hell, that my ain eident knife gang blinly in, an heaven keekna through the skuggy thack to cry ‘Haud back!’

Notes 1 The excerpts from the various translations of Macbeth that have an immediate bearing on my argument may be found at the end of the chapter. 2 This line actually translates l. 8 of the original; the rendering of l. 4, which occurs at the end of the second quatrain, is ‘Wie aal waes wail aanyowe ma dear time’s blecht’. 3 In the preface of Allan’s as yet unpublished collection. 4 For a full discussion and comparison of the language and style of the two versions, see McClure (29–51); for an interesting comparison of Lorimer’s translation with one in Quebec joual, and with detailed reference to the political implications of the language used by the two translators, see Kinloch (73–100).

13 ‘A Double Tongue Within Your Mask’ Translating Shakespeare in/to Spanish-Speaking Latin America

Alfredo Michel Modenessi Muchos son los dan˜os, ´e inconvenientes que pueden resultar de que los Inte´rpretes de la lengua de los Indios no sean de la fidelidad, christiandad y bondad que se requiere, por ser el instrumento por donde se ha de hacer justicia . . . Mandamos que qualquier delito que se presumiere y averigu¨are contra su fidelidad, le castiguen con todo rigor. Consejo Real y Supremo de las Indias, 1583 Much harm and trouble may be caused if the Interpreters of the Indians’ tongue are not as faithful, Christian, and good as required, for they are the instruments whereby justice will be done . . . We therefore command that any oVence presumed and proven against fidelity be most severely punished. trans. Modenessi

The epigraph cites a mandate issued in 1583 by the Consejo Real y Supremo de las Indias, one of the laws regulating the crucial role of ‘interpreters’ in the Spanish colonies.1 Stressing punishment against corruption and lack of fidelity, these laws show how often those ‘instruments of justice’ became suspect, and how intercultural dialogue (and fair dealing) in colonial times was likewise frequently a fiction.2 Today’s Spanish-speaking Latin Americans are descendants of that and later processes of European occupation and migration. To varying degrees we are ‘hybrid’ due to ethnic and cultural mixture, but we nearly all express ourselves through multiple versions of the same language, and we face a similar challenge: can v 240 v

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we enable fair inter- and intra-cultural dealing in a ‘globalized’ world where dialogue is inevitably asymmetrical and we are the subordinate party? Of course, the question becomes more stimulating when we seek to translate the ‘Centre of the Western Canon’ in/to our interlocking but protean cultures. While our ‘hybridity’ legitimately invites an approach to the issue from a post-colonial perspective, this cannot happen without qualification. Post-colonialism is more significant as a narrative of consciousness than as a move past colonization. In Latin America ‘the categories shaped by European experience function in a space with a diVerent but not an alien sociological conjunction in which they neither apply properly nor can help but be applied’ (Schwartz, 79). Here the ‘post-colonial subject’ exists in neo-colonial frames as a metaphor – always provisional – from the need and ability to inhabit that space without reconciling itself with it but developing multiple tactics3 to engage it as a matrix of identity in cultural diVerence. For instance, the well recognized appropriation of Caliban by Ferna´ndez Retamar – his elaboration on mestizaje (originally ‘racial mixture’, now also used to signify the cultural hybridity that resulted from it) – has been described as ‘salutary in discussions of post-coloniality where linkages between colonial past and neo-colonial present are rarely made’ (Loomba, 175).4 However, it has also been undermined by the now transparent fiction of revolution that it advocated. While mestizaje inscribes Latin America as ‘post-colonial’, our multilayered realities problematize such inscription – social and economic distress, widespread racism and classism, delusions of belonging elsewhere and, above all, the fact that mestizos are hegemonic to the cultures that originally existed and survive in our countries. ‘Hybridity’ indeed applies, but the construction of mestizaje – the figure of speech, not the complex phenomenon – as an agent of liberation requires sites of metaphoric realization. Our arts have been such sites, rich in beauty not least because of our contradictions. And our literature has been at the forefront – written, indeed, in Spanish. But our Spanish is not the colonial language. It is our own language: one for all and many for each

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one of our regions. Our literatures live in them and make the language live – and our translations are part of these literatures. Translating cannot merely inscribe foreign literatures and cultures into our language, it must also bring them to our third space, a point of conversation and conflict where resistance and transformation merge. At sites of unequal exchange and complex resistance – such as the Mexico–US border – language and culture undergo creative transformations (Ashcroft, 157–81), yet many Latin Americans still regard ‘original’ texts as immutable authority. This provokes an abundance of literal translations whereby ‘global’ linguistic and cultural praxis penetrates daily experience in its original syntax but in the native lexis, often distorting and overwriting our eVorts at constructing identity. In the case of Shakespeare, of literature, this is complicated by a puzzling unawareness of the opportunities it aVords to diVer. There is a point, then, in employing double-tongued metaphors to approach the translation of Shakespeare in/to our periphery. If indeed ‘post-colonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss’, by embracing cannibalistic tactics we may realize that the issue ‘is not whether or how to speak to the subaltern’ (Spivak, 28) but to speak for and with them – that is, for and with us – in order to stress diVerence at the core of our representation of the other and of ourselves (see Lo´pez, 26).5

‘The play’s the thing’ Recent studies on Renaissance textuality have indirectly relocated Shakespeare’s texts close to what ‘subaltern’ and ‘hybrid’ imply by describing them, for instance, as ‘mobile, fluid and subject to change’ (Murphy, 196). The Shakespeare texts have, alternatively, been described as ‘occupying a unique “marginal position” . . . between oral and manuscript culture on the one side and typographic culture on the other’ (Elsky, 114). Finally, they have been perceived as belonging ‘in a milieu in which oral and written forms jostled up against each other and competed for allegiances and audiences’ (Marcus, 155).

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Originating through collaboration and operative inside a market outside London – meaning on the periphery of the metropolis – Shakespeare’s text emerged in a space of tension between hegemonic and subordinated social and cultural energies, but ‘what happened . . . by the end of the eighteenth century was that it had, in eVect, become fully translated from its ambiguous and indeterminate position . . . into a form fully harmonised with the textual conceptions of a print-centred culture’ (Murphy, 201). The outcome of a collaborative process was assimilated as authorial property through print, reprocessed unto fixity and refashioned as ‘higher art’ – and as an agent of hegemony. Simultaneously, translation was construed as ‘copy’ to adjust to the new culture of print and property, and thereby was deprived of its former freedom of transformative action.6 The same culture that sought to define texts as fixed and authorized by print, conceptualized translation as re-print by an un-author. Octavio Paz’s idea of translation as a creative act whereby signs ‘frozen’ in print are newly set in motion ultimately responds to this (Paz, 65–6). Translating Shakespeare in general, then, may be reconstrued as a step towards a post-print reanimation of the collaborative process whereby his texts came and come alive, a dialogue outside the walls of print seeking to achieve, even hypothetically, ‘a text that functions as a record of – reconstitution of – a theatrical performance’ (Masten, 115). More ambitiously, in a ‘post-colonial’ space such as Latin America, translating Shakespeare may epitomize a reformulation of the very terms in which that dialogue takes place, particularly because the Latin American translator is an/other, a third player in an otherwise supposedly symmetrical scenario for two where the languages and cultures in use stand in hypothetically equal terms. Translating into Spanish is diVerent from translating in/to Spanish otherness, that is, in/to our Spanish. DiVerence demands awareness. Translating Shakespeare ‘transparently’ in/to Spanish-speaking Latin America (see Venuti, History, Intr.) – to provide a selfeVacing translingual (mis-)reproduction of authority, inevitably employing a ‘colonial’ language – is futile, non-creative, and unjust to the talents of a live playwright. My practical premise is

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that the translator is a performer of the ‘original’, a player characterized by the fact that, in the end, all traces of a body at work become an/other text, not a ‘faithful rendering’ nor a ‘definitive’ one. The theoretical – and political – premise is that translating Shakespeare demands an awareness of diVerence to bring his work into mutually critical and enriching conversation with cultures that have developed valuable, though always provisional, identities from a history of mix, conflict and exchange, with former and present powerhouses.

‘Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler’ Why should translation diVer? The answer involves historical and political factors. Translating is not submissive but creative praxis: Translation is part of an ongoing process of intercultural transfer . . . not an innocent, transparent activity; . . . it rarely, if ever, involves a relationship of equality between texts, authors or systems . . . The close relationship between colonization and translation has come under scrutiny; . . . translation was for centuries a one-way process, with texts being translated into European languages for European consumption, rather than as part of a reciprocal process of exchange . . . the metaphor of the colony as a translation, a copy of an original located elsewhere on the map, has been recognized. (Bassnett & Trivedi, 2 & 5)

Translating is an act of liberation from cultural fixity for both ends of the process. In questioning the singularity of texts translatability plays a major role, and translation becomes re-defined (see Derrida, ‘Relevant’, 181).7 ‘To fix meaning, to arrest its process and deny its plurality is, in eVect, to confine what is possible to what is. Conversely, to disrupt this fixity is to glimpse alternative possibilities’ (Belsey, 166–7). Translating is an alternative. The threat of fixity is greater for originals because of the truism of untranslatability: since their ‘words’ are said to be

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‘irreplaceable’ they apparently support dreams of textual selfidentity. The transparent view of translation rests almost entirely on the same truism: translators must not ‘change’ the original. But herein ‘change’ is an absurdity. No magic can change one text out of writing this or that in a diVerent language as part of an/ other text. Translating generates otherness. To the eyes of common sense the idea of the immutable text looks convincing, especially in print. But to Lady Macbeth’s doctor, an original would be a patient who ‘more needs . . . the divine than the physician’ (5.1.76): it depends on complex, often abstruse, elaborations to be delivered from fixity – as witness the vastness of Shakespeare Studies. Conversely, a translation is totally replaceable; it does not demand exegesis but admits substitution. To the ‘good doctor’ translation would be a patient who ‘must minister to himself’. The more singular one desires a text, the greater its translatability, both inter- and intra-lingual – that is, both as translation and as object of study or performance. On the other hand, the more replaceable its signs, the more singular a text becomes: a translation is wholly discarded by another translation.8 Ironically, while Shakespeare’s texts grow increasingly less accessible to English users, translation and performance not only enable those texts to operate eVectively within less constraining conditions but also provide immediate, manifold, and mutually cancelling/enriching interpretations. Translating activates and contests the text made hegemonic by print through a self-directed provisionality largely unavailable to its source. It is not mere coincidence that views subverting the notion of translation as a subordinate activity have emerged from post-colonial cultures.9 In opposition to approaches that arrest performative choice, a translator aware of diVerence remains fairly unconfined: free to try any number of tactics to appropriate the energies inscribed in the original; to write a text virtually ad infinitum. Translating is an unending search for diVerentiation, not for oneness. In postcolonial contexts translating ‘for the page’ is barren without assuming diVerence with a double goal: freeing its object from singularity, and itself as a testimony of diVerence from its colonial constituents. Before its historical subordination, translating

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‘literally carried the dead across cultures’ (Maguire, 135–53). Latin American translators may choose between continuing to transport Shakespeare in a hearse or taking him live on a journey in ‘accents yet unknown’. So far, Shakespeare translation in Latin America, importing the debatable conflict between page and stage, has resulted in perpetuation of hegemonic paradigms in print, and creative appropriation in performance.

‘The world may witness that my end Was wrought . . . not by vile oVence’ Shakespeare arrived in Latin America in the beginning of the nineteenth century as a legacy of ‘high culture’ via translations and productions originating in Spain and, more to the point, already in print. Many theatre artists and most audiences and readers still approach Shakespeare through received notions of production and reception.10 Translations of Shakespeare, whether for publication or production, are rarely commissioned in our midst, and publishers or directors seldom seek academic advice. Due to budget constraints, honest ignorance or blind trust, most productions rely on translations made in Spain, adapted by directors, actors or, rarely, playwrights. A major factor in this is the existence of a ‘standard’ version of Shakespeare’s ‘Complete Works’ by the Spaniard Luis Astrana Marı´n, printed in the early twentieth century. However stiV they are to read or for stage use, Astrana’s versions are easily available, and readers and directors in need often turn to them. Less frequently, companies conflate his versions with texts by other translators. Most of them, however, are also Spaniards. The use of Astrana’s – or any other Spaniard’s – texts helps to perpetuate the common, crucial and broadly unacknowledged misconception that to ‘do’ Shakespeare Latin Americans must adopt the norms, forms and rhythms (though not the pronunciation) of Iberian (sometimes mock-Golden Age) Spanish. On stage, a tension between text and delivery is invariably felt. This practice cannot deliver Shakespeare from fixity nor audiences from commonplace.

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Printed translations of Shakespeare by Latin Americans are not altogether lacking but they are largely unknown or overlooked. Most translations for the stage remain unpublished. This stems partly from the near monopolization of our markets by Spanish publishers who oVer better distribution and lower prices. Perhaps the only systematic scholarly eVort to publish Shakespeare in Spanish-speaking Latin America is the ‘Proyecto Shakespeare’ of the Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico. But its volumes, written conventionally in Iberian Spanish and poorly distributed at higher prices, are no alternative to their counterparts. Recently, however, the Argentine branch of a Spanish publisher (Norma Editorial) launched the project ‘Shakespeare by Writers’, promising ‘rigorous yet modern versions’ by contributors from either side of the Atlantic.11 Relying on the prejudice that translating is not writing and the vagary that ‘writers who translate from English’ are ‘fittest to shed light on the classics’, the project’s only apparent policy is that scholarship is a disease: introductions are limited to five pages, notes kept to absurd minimums, source-texts unacknowledged, textual issues ignored, and nuances and simple passages more than occasionally misinterpreted.12 All versions combine verse and prose, are quite conventional and uneven and, despite claims to the contrary, hardly fit for stage delivery. More to the point, all but one follow Iberian Spanish. The Latin American contributors often interpolate distinctly local norms, however.13 At times relatively eVective (1 Henry IV), or frankly deplorable (Romeo and Juliet), this combination is clearly not the result of theory or policy and often seems to evince a limited command of Iberian Spanish. These versions do not make a diVerence either – with one exception: Como les guste [As You Like It], by the Cuban Omar Pe´rez, who uses Latin American Spanish throughout. Pe´rez’s work is an instance of full ‘domestication’ and, to my knowledge, the first printed translation of Shakespeare to apply these criteria – a rare case of resistance, tepidly theorized as such in his introduction (Venuti, History, 17–39). Outside these collections, printed Shakespeare translations by Latin Americans are the result of occasional interest. Virtually all,

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then, oVer little or nothing to set them apart from Spanish versions. Why bother to commission or look for a translation closer to the experience of Latin America, when our translators do not diVer from received authority but assume that Shakespeare in Spanish must sound like an ‘hidalgo’? Our printed Shakespeares remain ruled by former and present rules and rulers: by a pointless search for sameness instead of a creative drive towards diVerence. How does a Latin American translator aware of diVerence engage the powerful energies known as Shakespeare? I can only answer through personal practice; hence, I do not mean to be prescriptive. So, the first (hard) step is to get a job.

‘Give me a case to put my visage in’ When the outstanding director Jose´ Caballero was asked to stage a comedy in 2000, he felt it was time to produce Love’s Labour’s Lost for the first time in Mexico, and invited me as translator, dramaturg and adviser. Our views had much in common. To me, the play would be well served if staged with Noel Coward-like flare in high contrast with a roguish treatment of its ‘low’ characters, to highlight social, intellectual and sexual tensions embedded in its elaborate rhetoric, a surrogate for outspoken desire finally exposed and re-directed through empowerment of the female characters. Caballero imagined the action to take place in the 1950s, on a beach, with a group of fashionably bored wealthy moderns masking power and vanity as wisdom and desire as devotion, surrounded by the inevitable crew of irreverent underlings and a pair of time-servers needing acknowledgement. This was a threefold opportunity: I would prepare a Shakespeare text for the stage, put to use the above ideas, and publish a version in my university’s collection. Thus framed, the choice of a title became an issue. A major eVect of Astrana’s authority is that translators on either shore of the Atlantic have often given their versions somebody else’s titles – namely his. Latin American translators employing Iberian norms beginning with the title automatically subordinate the

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entire process to them, in blind denial of their own competence. From a de-centring stance, this is pointless. Iberian norms are diVerent and provoke diVerences. For example, not only conjugations and pronouns but tenses are conceptualized diVerently, which implies variations in perspectives on action and therefore in experience. We learn Iberian Spanish at school, read and enjoy it, but we do not use it; writing it may aim at parody, or evince unawareness, submission, or mimicry.14 I decided on a title that diVered from any other. My translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost is entitled El vano afa´n del amor.15 Renouncing Iberian Spanish in favour of a language more akin to Latin American is not a whim. A play is ‘written for mouths, lungs, and human breath’ (De´prats, ‘Stage’, 73). DiVerences between Iberian and Latin American Spanish entail major reading and performative dissimilarities – rhythms of speech, pitch, intonation, gestures. If Latin American translators submit to authority from Spain, they automatically renounce their own voices in favour of a close yet clearly alien ‘monarch’s voice’ and force the primary users of their texts to try and do the (impossible) same – not to diVer. Arguably, a creative translation of Shakespeare in/to Latin America could aim at absolute alienation from the languages of power. But in contrast to complete ‘domestication’ (such as Pe´rez employs) and simplified ‘foreignization’, my tactic is to bring to the fore my own Spanish while evading total assimilation of the original pragmatics into its fabric by means of covert estrangement eVects. In writing El vano afa´n del amor I adopted general Latin American usage while constantly counterpointing the expectations it promotes. For instance, the ‘high’ characters of El vano afa´n del amor never use the second person conjugations of Iberian Spanish but resort to a ‘literary’ use of the formal third person when addressing Highness, Majesty, or Grace. With one exception: Don Adriano de Armado. Callous but true, one of the pleasures of doing Love’s Labour’s Lost was that its main butt of jokes is a (fictional) Spaniard. Needless to say, Holofernes’s critique of Armado’s ‘orthography’ (LLL 5.1.16–25) proved invaluable:16

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HOLOFERNES

Tales fana´ticos de la faramalla me son aborrecibles; tipejos intolerables y puntillosos en sociedad; verdugos de la ortografı´a que dicen ‘costruyo’ y no ‘construyo’; ‘eda´’ cuando hay que decir ‘edad’: e-d-a-d, no e-d-a´; que llaman ‘salao’ a lo salado; ‘mita´’ a la mitad; ‘esistencia’ a la existencia, y ‘loja´rbole’ a los a´rboles. ¡Es una barbaridad! – lo cual e´l dirı´a ‘barbarida´’ – y me provoca magna exasperacio´n . . . ne intelligis domine?: irritacio´n, furia, ira. As a ‘hybrid’, I was in a position to see Armado not only from the standpoint of an outsider but also with a privileged acquaintance of the culture (mis)represented through him. I took pleasure in putting my intrabilingualism to full use in order to make his Spanish Iberian, aVected and silly – without reaching, say, the (wretched) Branagh extreme. Conversely, and deliberately, the ‘low’ characters of the play benefited from the craftiness of Mexican wordplay. Love’s Labour’s Lost had always attracted me for its relentlessly obscene punning. In El vano afa´n del amor, I inscribed a representative collection of the worst (i.e. best) items of our own vigorous tradition, which features ‘el gallito ingle´s’ (‘the little English cock’) among its favourites – a fact I considered it appropriate to acknowledge. The exchange following the entrance of Moth and Costard at 3.1.66 provided occasion for fluid transfer (for example, ‘l’envoy’ as ‘el colofo´n/el culofo´n’) while the fable of the fox and the ape oVered an irresistible ‘goose’ by which to introduce the ‘little English cock’ in typically Mexican fashion and verse: La zorra, el simio y el abejorro no hacı´an pareja, pues eran tres, hasta que, para su gran consuelo, los hizo cuatro el gallito ingle´s. The she-fox, the ape and the humble-bee made no couple, for they were three, until, to their great relief, the little English cock made them four.17

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Through 3.1.107, the text became a merciless flogging of Armado’s ‘l’envoy’ by a pair of Mexican rogues. Performers and audiences found it significant that Shakespeare’s Grande de Espan˜a could not make sense of his own tongue as it was perverted back at him. A more significant tactic emerged from Costard’s flawed speech, which resembles that of a famous Mexican comedian, ‘Cantinflas’, whose (mis)use of Spanish became a style. It seemed viable to write Costard’s part as if Shakespeare had seen a Cantinflas film – his parody of Romeo and Juliet, perhaps – and used it as a source for this ‘sourceless’ play. Such writing did not entail turning Costard into Cantinflas but using Cantinflas’s style as a matrix to give Shakespeare’s character a locally meaningful turn.18 Cantinflas was a ‘pelado’ (‘cynical rogue’), a standard type in Mexican vaudeville. What set him apart, however, was his talent with words: he wielded the Spanish language against its ‘higher’ self, twisting the tongues of former colonizers and today’s willingly colonized down their throats. Costard’s role was thus empowered by cultural specificity in El vano afa´n del amor. In fact, by rendering the ‘low’ characters close to domestication in contrast with the more ‘neutral’ treatment of the ‘high’, I meant to promote possibly politicized responses. Mexican spectators and readers will perceive a culture-specific implication in the fact that Jaquenetta’s child is Costard’s and not Armado’s. After completing a full-text version, I made a first cut following a workshop with the company and proceeded to write the stage script in keeping with Caballero’s layout. Budget constraints required the conflation of Dumaine and Longaville into one ‘Longamain’, and Katherine and Maria into one ‘Marı´a’. Names for stage use were established early. Costard became ‘Cabezo´n’ (‘Bighead’), a (nick)name with obscene overtones. For Moth/Mote I used ‘Mote’, literally ‘nickname’, not ‘the word’ but a playful surrogate – both a graphic coincidence with the alternative name of Shakespeare’s character and an adaptation echoing one of the play’s themes. Dull became ‘Chato’ – literally ‘dull’, the kind of ‘equivalence’ that translators sometimes stumble upon, but in Mexico also a term expressing condescension. Jaquenetta became a

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voluptuous root-worker from the gulf coast, and so ‘Santiaguilla’, an Iberian option far too bucolic, was dropped in favour of ‘Inmaculada Concepcio´n’, a usual proper (and here very appropriate) name in Mexico and the Caribbean. Adding to the obvious irony, this name is commonly shortened to ‘Concha’ (‘shell’) or ‘Conchita’ (‘little shell’), which in Latin America not only quibble with ‘vagina’ but have strong implications for Marian Catholics. Results were loud and clear from audiences. Moth, Holofernes, and Boyet were played by women. The former two delivered well, but our Boyet remained unconvincing. I rewrote the part as ‘Mercedes’, a lesbic lady-in-waiting whom the Princess – through an interpolation at 2.1.29 – ordered to disguise as ‘Marcade´’ so that s/he could enter the King’s mansion without violating his decree. This necessitated the rewriting of Berowne’s exchange with Boyet in the play’s final scene (5.2.470–83). I interpolated a brief scene where Longamain literally fulfilled his promise of pulling Marcade´/Mercedes’s (Boyet’s) beard oV. Apart from complicating comedic eVect and adding a layer of wordplay in strictly Shakespearean fashion – as in the exchange beginning ‘Who is the shooter? Who is the shooter?’ (4.1.107) – the transgendering of Boyet, initially ‘mere necessity’, reinforced female empowerment, already well served by the contrast between our older ladies and younger gentlemen. Some think this is not ‘Shakespeare’. I believe it is what Shakespeare has historically taught playwrights best to do. The scenery featured a beach with a dock running across and downstage to the right, along which a lifeguard’s tower could be brought in and out on rails. On the left a tent was installed after the Princess’ s arrival. The ‘high-born’ wore light beachwear: blue, white and red for the ‘French’ Ladies; red and yellow for the Gents from ‘Navarre’. The ‘locals’ wore distinctively gulf coast outfits, while Holofernes and Nathaniel featured gowns that easily turned into oversized, outdated beachwear. The match of wits preceding the gentlemen’s confession (5.2.337–84) was played as a beach-volleyball game. ‘Russian’ costumes looked even more ludicrous in the summer sun and added much sweat to the Gentlemen’s lost labours of love.

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After the ‘Worthies’ interlude (an apron puppet show), the foolproof eVect of Marcade´’s announcement (significantly by Mercedes undisguised) and the assignment of tasks for the men, El vano afa´n del amor closed on the musical eclecticism that characterized it throughout. The songs of spring and winter, originally translated as seventeenth-century lyrics, began slowly and then turned into lively rumba. The darkness at the un-ending of the play was thus seasoned with the ‘low’ characters’ transformation of Saturn into saturnalia, stressing the tensions that Caballero made the core of his staging. As far as I could tell, El vano afa´n del amor was enjoyed by both audiences and the handful of critics who took notice of it. In keeping with concepts above, I will supplement the printed text with an appendix documenting the stage text, to oVer readers a glimpse at alternative ways to conceive of a ‘canonical text’. I trust that my ‘page’ version – less aggressive but consistent with my tactical approach – will elicit some smiles from its (probably few) readers. Above all, I trust that whoever chooses to glance at it will find an intimation that Love’s Labour’s Won did exist and was diVerent from Love’s Labour’s Lost because it was the same play – only translated.19

Notes 1 In 1492 there were about one thousand languages in what would become Latin America. 2 A 1537 law provided that natives who did not speak Spanish could be accompanied in court by a ‘Christian friend’ to certify the interpreter’s accuracy. 3 Tactics as opposed to strategies. Strategy ‘is the calculation of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power can be isolated . . . A tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus’ (De Certau, 36 & 37). See also Ashcroft, 53–5. 4 On the appropriation of Caliban by Ferna´ndez Retamar, see Barker & Hulme (204, n. 16); Bate, ‘Caliban’ (157); Loomba & Orkin (8–10). 5 For a fundamental discussion of ‘cannibalism’, see de Campos (1–23). 6 For a substantial discussion of this, see Bassnett, ‘Meek’. 7 This issue has been dealt with in Shakespeare Studies, not always by addressing translation per se but the issue of ‘translatability’: see Elam (85–9); Evans

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8 Evidently underlying all this is Benjamin, ‘Aufgabe’ (76–99), which was originally published in 1923. 9 For instance, Annie Brisset asks, ‘What is the purpose of theatrical translations if not to create a diVerence wherein the distinct identity of the que´be´cois collectivity will be recognized?’ (Sherlow, 190). See also Bassnett & Trivedi (1–6); Johnston (62). 10 For an account of Shakespeare in Spanish-speaking Latin America, see Dobson & Wells (251–2). 11 Translated from the unsigned general preface to every volume. 12 Norma, RJ, for example, includes only two notes, both pointing out ‘mistakes in the original’ (sic); Norma, 1H4, has notes only to specify ‘location’; and Norma, AYL, has none. 13 The same happens in versions published independently by the Costa Rican Joaquı´n Gutie´rrez, who nonetheless shows greater textual rigour. 14 Or writing it may be a tactical exercise in transcultural fluency. I translated Arden of Faversham into Iberian Spanish for publication in Barcelona. 15 Literally, ‘The Vain Labour of Love’, or ‘Love’s Labour’s (in) Vain’. Vano means at once ‘fruitless’, ‘worthless’, ‘empty’ and ‘indulging in vanity’. Afa´n signifies ‘labour’, ‘desire’, ‘determination’ and ‘commitment’, likewise simultaneously. Naturally, amor evokes Cupid. This title is deliberately playful with regard both to Shakespeare’s original and to some of my ideas – afa´n is often used by Spanish ` -noaGolden Age writers, and the meter is also classic Spanish octosyllabic: el-vA ` n-del-a-mO ` r. fA An irony involving the strength of received authority is that I was asked to advertise and publish the play as Trabajos de amor perdidos – Astrana’s title. For a discussion of this and diVerences between Iberian and Latin American Spanish, see Modenessi (155–7). 16 My main source was LLL (Ard3) and all references are keyed to this edition. 17 In Mexican word-play, to give consuelo (relief, comfort, consolation) implies having sex. Conjointly, the penis – or any surrogate – is obliquely referred to as a consolador (reliever). The double meaning of ‘the little English cock’ is selfexplanatory, while zorra (she-fox, vixen) commonly denotes a malicious and/or ‘easy’ woman. Thus, the verse makes no specific sense, but carries a deliberately sexual innuendo. 18 All characters in my version derive from matrices of this sort, a tactic I systematically employ when translating drama. 19 This contribution is dedicated in memoriam to Fernando Michel. I am grateful to David Johnston and the Modern American School of Mexico City.

14 ‘Cette Belle Langue’ The ‘Tradaptation’ of Shakespeare in Quebec

Leanore Lieblein

In recent years, as the interest in various modes of Shakespearean adaptation has grown, care has been taken to explore the relationship between translation and adaptation.1 Joe¨l Beddows has summarized the protocols and norms of translation, and has argued that ‘it is increasingly possible to diVerentiate between adaptations and translations of plays produced in francophone Canada’ (12). (See also Beddows, ‘Poe´tique’, 35–51.) At one time the distinction was not so clear. In an important study of theatrical translation in Quebec, Annie Brisset has suggested that, for the period 1968–88, translation became adaptation.2 What Brisset, for whom translation took the form of adaptation, does not discuss is that this was the period that also saw performance of the first made-in-Quebec translations of Shakespeare, translations designed to replace those which previously had come from France.3 In this essay I look at the gulf between translation and adaptation of Shakespeare in Quebec in the 1960s and 1970s and focus on adaptation in order to explore the Quebec resistance to translating Shakespeare. I suggest that translation became both desired and problematic because of the ambiguous position occupied by the Quebec language, and I argue that tradaptation, to use the now-famous term of Michel Garneau, which is both translation and adaptation, came to exemplify what was experienced as a double colonization of Quebec. The period, bracketed at one end by the founding of the independentist Parti Que´be´cois in 1968 and at the other by the v 255 v

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first referendum on Quebec sovereignty in 1980, witnessed the emergence of language as central to the question of national identity. Quebec’s cultural identity was felt to labour under the external hegemony represented by the culture of France and the internal economic and political domination of English Canada. Both represented threats to the language spoken in Quebec, with important consequences for potential translators and adapters of Shakespeare. Shakespeare, English author par excellence, would become a site of resistance to the external authority of France, while a carnivalized Shakespeare would be used to mock a sacred cow of a resented English Canada. At issue was the language into which to render Shakespeare’s plays, especially given the disdain in which the language popularly spoken in Quebec was held. I examine what happens when a language associated with poverty, lack of education, and economic and political disenfranchisement becomes the language of Shakespeare. Unlike the francophone Shakespeares performed up to that time in Quebec, these Shakespeares perform their cultural and political work, I argue, by transposing Shakespeare to a linguistic and social register that associates him with the familiar, the low, the grotesque and the primitive. By 1978, however, with the MACBETH de William Shakespeare traduit en que´be´cois par Michel Garneau, both the Quebec language and the Quebec translator have become part of the play’s title, and the socially and politically alienated language of Quebec has become the language of Shakespeare.4 Although the universality of ‘Shakespeare’ was a precondition of its desirability in Quebec, it was in the disfiguring of Shakespeare by a scorned language and the demolition of his transcendence that national agency could be aYrmed. v In Canada, as Sherry Simon has suggested, language has been the defining category of diVerence (Simon, ‘Language’, 159). This has been especially true in Quebec where, since the defeat of the French by the British in 1759, the French language has been at the heart of Quebec identity. In the 1960s, however, the period that

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has come to be known as the Quiet Revolution, which saw Quebecers determined to overthrow the economic, political and social domination of the English and become maıˆtres chez nous [masters in our own house], the nature and complexity of the Quebec language was itself a subject of disagreement. In part, the debate hinged on the political implications of the relationship between the language widely spoken and the language promoted by oYcial organs of communication. While the language largely studied in schools, printed in books and pronounced on Radio Canada strove to resemble franc¸ais standard or franc¸ais international, the language of the streets was quite diVerent. For some that diVerence was a proof of the ignorance of its speakers and the need to change them and their language. They were, for example, the target of good-grammar campaigns: ‘Bien parler, c’est se respecter’ [To speak well is to respect oneself]. (See Homel & Simon, 56.) But as a term such as franc¸ais standard makes clear, what is taken to be a normative version of the French language is always created elsewhere, independently of local history and conditions. Deviations from the norm are taken in some sense to be deviant. From the perspective of the non-normative, however, that which distinguishes one from the normative becomes a source of one’s own distinction and a badge of one’s identity. In the words of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘popular’ language – the term he uses for the language of a social group which is deprived of authority in a given context – is ‘the product of a quest for distinction’. This quest is ‘governed by [the desire for] distinction [which] brings those who are dominated to aYrm that which distinguishes them, that is to say that very thing in the name of which they are dominated and constituted as vulgar’ (Bourdieu, 101). In 1960s Quebec, the language of the urban east end of Montreal, condescendingly given the name joual for its pronunciation of the word cheval [horse], became a banner. The scorned spoken language of urban working poor, a language that was seen as sloppy, devalued and demeaning, was to become an emblem of the banality of Quebec existence and the need to change it. Thus in a move generally described as the ‘oralization’

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of literary language, this spoken language was appropriated to represent to Quebecers in literature their own alienated condition. (See Ducrocq-Poirier, 79.) The debate on language was of course part of a larger debate on ‘national’ identity and culture. In Quebec, where the French language ran the risk of drowning in a sea of English, the creation of a national literature was particularly important. And drama, the literary genre characterized by its orality, was seen as a privileged site of this process. As Michel Be´lair wrote in 1973 in a polemical work on Le nouveau the´aˆtre que´be´cois: ‘In the last five years [i.e. since 1968] theatre has become one of the essential paths of que´be´cois aYrmation’ (Be´lair, 9). Theatrical language is written to be spoken. Theatre could aYrm, by aurally displaying them, the Quebec language’s characteristic forms, which included not only a distinctive lexicon but also characteristic constructions, rhythms, pronunciations, and the like. By becoming emblematic of the powerlessness of Quebecers, the language of the urban Montreal working class became an important badge of national self-assertion. It was by its sound that Que´be´cois as a language could be distinguished from other forms of French, and by its language that Quebec culture could be distinguished not only from anglophone culture but also from other francophone cultures, especially that of France. And it was on the stage that many literary artists chose to display with love and flaunt with defiance the abjection and abasement of an oppressed people and turn its language from a source of shame into a source of pride.5 As early as the 1970s the use of joual was being criticized, even by some who had promoted it, for its reductiveness and its eVect of isolating Quebecers from other francophones (see Major, 123–4); by 1979 Maurice Arguin had situated joual in a transitional period between the death of ‘Canadien franc¸ais’ and the birth of ‘Que´be´cois’ (58). Since then it has remained one of many linguistic registers available to authors but has ceased to have any even imagined currency as a possible ‘national’ language. Further, the distinction between the many forms of Que´be´cois, of which joual is only one, is not always clear. But the discussion that surrounded its use made clear that such elements as accent,

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pronunciation, diction and dialect were to be seen to be a product of a concrete historical situation and to have political resonance. Thus, although I do not wish to suggest that joual became the language of Shakespeare in Quebec, I do wish to suggest that the issues raised by the discussion surrounding joual had consequence for the form of Quebec Shakespeare between 1968 and 1980. v 1968 not only saw the founding of the Parti Que´be´cois and the electrifying first production of Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles Soeurs, a landmark play which represented with humour, love and sorrow the working-class women of Montreal’s impoverished east end and for the first time brought joual to the stage.6 It was also the year of two important Shakespeare-related events. In 1968 Robert Gurik’s immensely successful Hamlet, prince du Que´bec used the plot and characters of Shakespeare’s play to oVer an allegorical rendering of the relationship between a would-be independent Quebec and an anglophone federalist Canada. And in 1968 Jean-Louis Roux, who was subsequently to translate Hamlet in 1970, Julius Caesar in 1972, and other plays by Shakespeare in the decades to follow, created for performance the first made-in-Quebec translation of Shakespeare. Gurik’s Hamlet, prince du Que´bec was not written in joual but, in this wickedly clever appropriation of Hamlet, Gurik initiated a claim on Shakespeare to explore que´be´cois political issues and perform que´be´cois cultural work. Roux’s translation of Twelfth Night paid tribute to a universal Shakespeare, but repudiated non-Quebec ownership of the French-language version of that universality; it was intended to compete with, and indeed replace, translations previously made in France.7 Between them they embodied two diVerent approaches to a francophone Shakespeare in Quebec. Their competing approaches, as we shall see, had important ramifications for the future of francophone Shakespeare in Quebec. Roux’s Shakespeare was a universal author. From 1945, when the first francophone productions of Shakespeare by Quebec (as opposed to touring) companies began to be performed, it was

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precisely Shakespeare’s status as an international icon of high culture that enabled Quebec artists to demonstrate their ability to perform the classics of the world stage. Roux’s Twelfth Night and his numerous subsequent translations of Shakespeare strive to be ‘faithful’ to Shakespeare’s ‘genius’.8 His liberal humanist position aYrms the possibility of an autonomous and voluntarist participation in the grand re´pertoire. For Quebec sovereignists, however, an emerging Quebec theatre whose model was implicitly outside of Quebec would inhibit the development of an ‘authentic’ national culture. In this context Robert Gurik chose to parody Shakespeare. The precision with which his Hamlet, prince du Que´bec cites Shakespeare demonstrates his mastery of the Shakespearean tradition, while his deliberate appropriation of Shakespeare for his own political ends flaunts his independence of it. Gurik’s King (Le Roi) in his political allegory represents L’Anglophonie, ‘who holds the reins of political and economic power’ (Gurik, 21). L’Anglophonie in the play is associated not only with the British crown and the anglophone political power derived from it, but also implicitly with American capitalism and Canadian bureaucracy centred in Ottawa (12). At the same time, the ghost of Hamlet’s father is ambiguously represented as French president Charles de Gaulle. Shakespeare for Gurik is the sign not only of a British but also of a French cultural imperialism. Two works of the early 1970s by Miche`le Lalonde articulate the double colonization of the Quebec language that francophone Shakespeare in Quebec at the time was trying to resist. On the one hand, Lalonde’s ‘DeVence et illustration de la langue que´becquoyse’ [sic], modelled on Joachim du Bellay’s sixteenth-century defence of the ‘vulgar’ French against the tyranny of Greek and Latin, aYrms the independence of Que´be´cois from the canons of ‘correct’ French as defined in France (Lalonde, 9–34). On the other hand, the poem ‘Speak white’ takes a racist phrase current in Quebec at the time and associates the ‘langue douce de [sweet language of] Shakespeare’ not only with the historical suppression of the French language in Quebec, but also with political oppression and economic exploitation in whatever language they may occur (37–40).

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Hamlet, prince du Que´bec uses the voice of the colonial master to undermine the master’s voice, an example of canonical counterdiscourse as described by Gilbert and Tompkins (19–24), or, in the words of Richard P. Knowles, of counter-hegemonic Shakespeare (19–41). Subsequent appropriations of Shakespeare in Quebec strove specifically to substitute a Quebec voice for a Shakespearean one. Annie Brisset characterizes such appropriations as ‘traductions iconoclastes’ [iconoclastic translations] precisely because they break up the Shakespearean text and are an attack on Shakespeare as a cultural icon. In her study of theatrical translation in Quebec she documents the double process of claiming Shakespeare, as Gurik does, in the service of a Quebec agenda and repudiating the Shakespearean voice in order to speak in a que´be´cois voice. In what follows I look at three plays that invoke Shakespeare but use their language both to claim and resist the cultural authority of Shakespeare. In all three the language, which is marked by class, culture, region or historical period, is associated with the low, the grotesque or the primitive. It not only mocks the Shakespearean Other, but also displays the que´be´cois Self, and uses Shakespeare to make of that linguistic self-representation an instrument of self assertion. v The least Shakespearean and most explicitly que´be´cois of the three is Rode´o et Juliette (1970) by Jean-Claude Germain, a play which explores the diYculty of recognizing or creating the symbols of the cultural Self in a milieu already saturated with the cultural icons of the colonial Other. The Shakespearean ‘hook’ of the play’s title and other allusions to Shakespeare scattered throughout take their place among numerous other cultural references deliberately designed to threaten and put at risk the indigenous forms of cultural identity for which the play is reaching. At the same time, the language of the play is both an articulation of a cultural identity and the frustration of that identity, precisely because it is thwarted and invaded by the cultural Other. Thus the play’s language becomes one of the vehicles of its resistance to such cultural authorities as Shakespeare.

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The play is set, in its first version, in the relatively remote village of Saint-Tite, known worldwide for its production of cowboy boots and the site of an annual ‘Festival Western’ which was founded in 1968 and, at the time of the play’s creation in 1970, was still a source of controversy. The second version of the play, which is the version from which I am working, is set in the village of Saint Lin, ‘nulle part’ [nowhere] in the words of the ‘Fou de village’ (‘Village Idiot’, but also ‘fool’ or ‘madman’), and the equivalent of ‘nowheresville’ at the time, according to author Jean-Claude Germain.9 The play’s opening lines, spoken by three Old Men in rocking chairs on the veranda of the village’s one hotel, carry the phonetic markers of the local speech which is used by all the characters in the play. The following examples, taken from the first page of the script, give some idea of the play’s verbal texture: ‘ouais’ for ‘oui’ [yes], ‘aute’ for ‘autre’ [other], ‘pluss’ for ‘plus’ [more], ‘toue´’ for ‘toi’ [you], ‘chus’ for ‘je suis’ [I am], ‘ben’ for ‘bien’ [well], and ‘pus’ for ‘plus’ [no longer]. Such pronunciations, which have their roots in seventeenth-century Norman French suggest the rural and the conservative. Thus Saint Lin is an emblem of a Que´bec that is protected by its traditions and its isolation, while being locked into outdated cliche´s of habitant life. However, a giant wooden horse constructed by Rode´o Cadieux has turned the village into a tourist destination. Rode´o’s huge wooden horse is an attempt to turn the old forms to new uses. But it is an ambiguous symbol, contaminated by alien cultural forms. From one point of view the cheval is of course associated with the repudiated (by some) urban linguistic form of joual. But the horse has its roots in a way of life that actually once existed and is still visible in regional country fairs around the province today. It is both a return to the past and an attempt to break out of the past. But although Rode´o’s construction of the horse in the context of the play is a literal and figurative move toward independence in a context of material and linguistic disempowerment, it is derivative in form and evokes a gift that in Troy was an instrument of betrayal.10

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The broken English and poverty of the ‘Fou de village’ are emblems of this disempowerment: ‘I went mad because I was poor / I became poor because I was mad’ (21). In a scene between one of the old men and his son who stutters, the boy can only nod and stammer ‘YYYYYY’ (27), even when his head is signalling no. And when the Chief of Police wants to persuade Juliet of his fearlessness, he resorts to English for emphasis. Even when, as in the case of traditional proverbs, language is potentially a rich source of wisdom, the competition of proverbs between Juliette and one of the Old Men demonstrates its sterility, as each proverb in turn annuls the insight of the previous one. As a fuller discussion of the play would show, Jean-Claude Germain resists borrowed myths, including that of Romeo and Juliet, and finds in the depleted language of rural Que´bec alternative imaginative resources. Rode´o et Juliette describes a trajectory of taking the cultural forms at one’s disposal, whether they be local or imported, and turning them into the symbols of one’s own imagination. Claiming one’s own language, however depleted, and making it an instrument of one’s identity is part of that process. Before the habitants of Saint Lin can (or want to) speak ‘Shakespearean’, they speak Que´be´cois. v Unlike the characters of Rode´o et Juliette, the characters of Lear by Jean-Pierre Ronfard (1977) do not in their grammatical constructions and pronunciation speak ‘Que´be´cois’ if, as in Germain’s play, Que´be´cois is taken to be the language of a remote and rural Que´bec. Nevertheless, theirs is a lexicon laced with the argot, expletives and obscenities of a contemporary Que´bec from which all manners and civility have been stripped away. Through his language Ronfard renders the debasement and denigration experienced by and contemptuously attributed to an impoverished and disempowered community. In Ronfard’s derisory treatment of Shakespeare, Lear’s world is a carnivalesque inversion of a royal court represented by the detritus of urban life. The set is made of old newspapers.11 Lear’s throne is a tavern chair mounted on wooden Coca Cola cases. His

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kingdom is represented by a pizza, which he oVers to divide among his daughters Josette, Violette and Laurette. To claim her part of the pizza (kingdom), each of the daughters is required to declare her love ‘in this beautiful language [dans cette belle langue] which is still ours, the sign and symbol of our ancestral power’ (Ronfard, Lear, 7) The language in which the daughters respond, however, is far from beautiful and ultimately proves subversive of Lear’s power. By the end only silence reigns. Josette, the eldest and an iron lady, expresses her love in terms of her admiration for her father’s administrative and leadership skills in such spheres as war, industry and commerce. Violette, whose comment on her sister’s declaration in an aside is ‘The slut. She sure can talk’ (9), speaks the language of the incestuous body: You my fucking father [hostie de pe`re], my father, my great guy father [bonhomme de pe`re], you’re not my father, you never were. I always desired you like a woman desires a man. It wasn’t right, so I kept my trap shut. I saw you waste your time with cunts who weren’t worth a dime . . . (Ronfard, 9–10; trans. Lieblein)12

Laurette, like Cordelia, has only the word ‘Rien’ [nothing] (12). Ronfard carnivalizes Shakespeare with an emphasis on the orifices and activities of the grotesque body, especially eating, sex and defecation. The play thematizes the mouth and the tongue, with their essential relationship to language and culture.13 Corneille pleasures the doddering Lear with her tongue by licking his toes. The characteristic ‘language’ of Josette is heard in the sound of the typewriter at which she sits when she is not performing a scene, while that of Violette is the music of her salacious moans. Laurette’s silence is reinforced by the gesture of sticking out her tongue and holding it between her thumb and forefinger. It is with this same silent gesture that in the midst of carnage she ascends the throne at the play’s end. Lear’s last words before his exit, borrowed from Hamlet, are ‘Le reste est silence’ (68). The father (Lear? Shakespeare?) proves unable to empower his child’s speech. For Lear language and culture, ‘which binds us to the breath and blood of our ancestors just as in a hospital

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multcoloured tubes keep alive a dying person mummified in his bandages’ (28), turn out to be a futile life-support system as the patient approaches death. Fragments of Shakespeare, among them the dream of Clarence from King Richard III and bits of Hamlet, Othello and Romeo and Juliet haunt Ronfard’s Lear but are drowned out. While cannibalizing Shakespeare, Ronfard’s play inscribes the traces of a Shakespeare that is finally unable to give it a voice. The two ‘Shakespeares’ (figures in Elizabethan dress) who spend most of their time in the technicians’ booth drinking beer, colourless representatives of Shakespeare’s world who have succumbed to que´be´cois cultural habits, are the ironic creative motor that drives the alienated world of Ronfard’s Lear. Ronfard’s Lear is an anti-Shakespeare, in which Quebec is ironically celebrated in Rabelaisian language whose excesses are at the heart of its defiant audacity. Like a Robert Gurik or a JeanClaude Germain, Jean-Pierre Ronfard refuses to let the issues and language of Quebec disappear in his version of the plays of Shakespeare. v Michel Garneau’s translation (his word on the title page) of Macbeth into Que´be´cois in 1978 is a celebration of a diVerent kind, though one no less grounded in its language.14 Although, as a ‘translation’, it is much closer to Shakespeare’s text than the plays by Germain and Ronfard discussed above, its choice of Que´be´cois as its target language was, in its time, a political challenge and a rhetorical triumph which demonstrated that one could translate Shakespeare without leaving Quebec behind. The publication and performance of Garneau’s Macbeth was experienced as a politically significant act.15 In 1978, two years before the anticipated referendum on Quebec sovereignty, a translation into ‘que´be´cois’, which was clearly meant to be distinguished from ‘franc¸ais’, aYrmed that Quebec had a language of its own that was worthy of even le grand Will.16 As the authors of an article in Cahiers du the´aˆtre Jeu wrote at the time, ‘just as Shakespeare, through his work, gave poetic status to a language

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that did not yet have it, Garneau wishes to demonstrate the richness of the Quebec language and place it on equal footing with other languages’ (Andre`s & Lefe`bfvre, 84). Thus the language of Garneau’s Macbeth was meant explicitly to serve as a ‘langue le´gitime’ (Thaon, 207), ‘the language of a people, and not the anemic instrument of an oppressing elite’ (Larue-Langlois). Garneau himself explained that his translation aYrmed the right of Quebecers to the masterpieces of world dramaturgy in their own language, rather than in, say, contemporary European French. Garneau’s Que´be´cois was not a language that was actually spoken in 1978 Quebec. Although it was based on the form of French then in use in the rural Gaspe´ peninsula which was hypothesized to be close to seventeenth-century French, it was enriched by deliberate archaisms and neologisms.17 In part, therefore, it was an act of retrieval of what was asserted to be the Edenic, pre-lapsarian language of ‘our great grandfathers’ in order to make it a vehicle for Shakespearean English of the same period.18 At the same time, such elements of the language as its rhythms, its shaping of certain vowels and consonants, and its use of recognizably local and regional words and expressions, resonated aurally with the forms of Que´be´cois widely spoken. And because it was familiar to its Quebec listeners, it served to historicize the language they actually spoke.19 However, Garneau’s Macbeth was more than an exercise in nostalgia or historicization. Not only did Garneau’s text render Shakespeare into Que´be´cois; it also appropriated Shakespeare in an act for which Garneau has invented the word ‘tradaptation’. Annie Brisset (109–61) demonstrates how the Garneau translation explicitly conflates the Scotland of Macbeth with the New France of Quebec history, and refigures the struggle to overthrow the tyrant Macbeth as a struggle for the national liberation of ‘not’pauv’pays’ [our poor country]. Garneau’s rendering of Shakespeare inscribed itself in the separatist political discourse in circulation at the moment of its creation and publication. But it also problematized the notion that translation, as practised in the same period by Jean-Louis Roux, could be transparent or ideologically neutral. As Denis

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Salter has written, ‘Garneau’s twofold project of translation and adaptation is a sustained exercise in linguistic preservation . . . Tradaptation . . . discloses the kind of prodigious doubling to which the translator’s identity . . . is necessarily subjected’ (Salter, ‘Between’, 63). With Gurik, Germain and Ronfard before him, Garneau shared the adapter’s impulse to impose his own vision upon Shakespeare and insist upon his own authorship, even to the extent of making his own name part of the translation’s title. Translation, especially in a post-colonial context, will always taste of adaptation. At the same time, by calling his Macbeth a translation, Garneau insisted that his was a face-to-face encounter with Shakespeare, that Que´be´cois was a language into which Shakespeare could be translated, and that, even with its unfamiliar words and pronunciations, and its associations with the ‘primitive’, Que´be´cois was a language that resisted marginalization. Though Garneau has translated other plays by Shakespeare into a language that is less conspicuously historicized or popularized, he has permanently linked the activity of translation to adaptation in the word tradaptation, which has since become part of the Que´be´cois language.

Notes 1 Fischlin & Fortier provide an overview of approaches to Shakespearean adaptation, in their introduction (1–22). 2 Brisset describes three types of ‘translation’: iconoclastic translation, which uses fragments of the source text to produce a diVerent work; perlocutory translation, which is written from an identifiable ideological position and has the force of propaganda; and identity-forming translation, which ‘elevates a dialect to the status of a national and cultural language’ (10 & 165). 3 Brisset does not, for example, mention the important translations by Jean-Louis Roux alluded to below. 4 Garneau’s Macbeth has become the translation of choice. According to David (117–38), Macbeth has been performed five times since 1978. Only one of these productions did not use the Garneau translation. 5 I develop some of these ideas at greater length in Lieblein (261–77). 6 In the same year, Eloi de Grandmont used joual for George Bernard Shaw’s cockney in his version of Pygmalion (see Brisset, 33–4).

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7 Though Roux’s was the first translation made in Quebec to be performed by a Quebec company, it was not made into Que´be´cois: The first reason why I decided to translate Twelfth Night myself is merely that I wasn’t happy with the existing translations . . . Secondly, if you consider the business angle of our craft, I cannot understand why we should pay French people to make our own translations in French, particularly since all (or practically all) of them know less about English than we do. So, I decided to translate Twelfth Night – not, let us say, in a particular ‘French’ – I did not translate Twelfth Night in ‘French-Canadian’ or ‘North-American’ French. I translated it in French. But I tried to make it understandable to an audience living in 1968–9 (see Bolster, 108). Nevertheless, Roux’s comments recognize that theatrical language is contingent upon what its audience can understand, and that language changes through time. 8 Roux and novelist/playwright/translator Antonine Maillet reiterated his position at a roundtable discussion on the 1999 The´aˆtre du Rideau Vert production of Hamlet, for which Maillet did the translation. See also Roux (40). 9 The play remains unpublished. My comments are based on a typescript of the (revised) 1971 version, provided by the Centre des Auteurs Dramatiques with the permission of Jean-Claude Germain, who generously answered my questions. I am also grateful to Daniel Gauthier of CEAD. 10 This is certainly the sense in which it was taken in a review of the first production; see Michel Be´lair, ‘St.-Tite a` la Terre des homes’, Le Devoir (Montreal), 16 July 1970. 11 Brisset (160) associates the style of Lear with the journalism of such scandal sheets as the National Enquirer or, in Quebec, Alloˆ Police. 12 My translation takes into account the fact that in Que´be´cois, blasphemies carry the force of obscenities in English. 13 As in English, the word ‘langue’ (‘tongue’) in French also means ‘language’. 14 For a more detailed discussion of what follows, see Lieblein, ‘Theatre’, 164–80. 15 See Martial Dassylva, ‘Ce “Macbeth” qui est d’abord de William Shakespeare et ensuite de Michel Garneau’, La Presse (Montreal), 23 October 1978. 16 See Robert Le´vesque, ‘Asselin et Gaudin s’accaparent bellement William Shakespeare’, Le Devoir (Montreal), 16 April 1988; and Aline Ge´linas, ‘La feˆte des rois’, Voir (Montreal), 5–11 May 1988. 17 For examples of the play’s linguistic range, see Salter, ‘Between’ (64). 18 See Michelle Talbot, ‘“Macbeth” . . . une grimace a` l’impossible’, Dimanche-Matin (Montreal), 5 November 1978; see also Brisset (235). 19 As these citations suggest, the response to Garneau’s version of Macbeth in 1978 was extremely positive. A more recent comment by actor Anne-Marie Cadieux on the experience of performing the Garneau version in Robert Lepage’s 1993 Cycle Shakespeare suggests the way in which Garneau’s language continues to resonate:

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‘That type of language is very hard for us, because it is so loaded with memories of things we, in some ways, have tried to forget. When we played it in France, audiences and critics found the language refreshingly diVerent. Here in Montre´al, however, the critical reaction has been mixed. Some people think the language is great – a recuperation of our heritage – but others think it’s terrible to listen to characters speaking like Que´be´cois peasants. In performance we have to be very careful not to let the language become patently folkloric.’ See Salter, ‘Borderlines’ (71–9).

15 ‘I am the Tusk of an Elephant’ – Macbeth , Titus and Caesar in Johannesburg

Martin Orkin Citing George Steiner, Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead suggest that translation involves not only an ‘heroic (exacting) search for semantic and functional equivalence between diVerent languages and cultures’ but also a ‘quixotic . . . quest for identity of meaning . . . necessitating changes . . . creatively essential if the transfer is to be successful’ (Chew & Stead, 2). Such changes are always partly a function of the terrain of cultural encounter within which translators operate, an area analogous, perhaps, to what Mary Louise Pratt in her study of travel writing calls ‘contact zones’: ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’ (Pratt, 4). While translation may aspire towards what Steiner calls successful transfer, as simultaneously entailing a set of cultural negotiations, it is accordingly complicated by problems of adaptation (see Fischlin & Fortier, 14 & 17). I want to explore some of the consequences that result from the proposition that translators, mediators on a target audience’s behalf, perforce negotiate and engage from within their particular cultural location with a source text and its diVerent cultural location. Of course, translators have long since known that, as in the case of reading itself, translation entails cultural negotiation. It always becomes ‘a rewriting of the original text’, one which, as Susan Bassnett and Andre´ Lefevere point out, will ‘manipulate literature to function in a given society in a given way’ and if it v 270 v

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can, ‘in its positive aspect . . . help in the evolution of a literature and a society . . . can also repress innovation, distort and contain’ (Preface, viii).1 Translation is thus always informed by the cultural infiltrations each translator might eVect as well as by the particular conditions of the target location in which the translation event is presented. Three relatively recent South African productions, all performed after the African National Congress became the first democratically elected government of South Africa, suggest the multilayered, complicated and unpredictable occurrence that translation, in the particular event, always is. In what actual ways, then, do generalized expectations of a putatively ‘post-colonial’ location inform the transformations evident in each of them? v The signification ‘post-colonial’ invites expectation of a move in imaginative, epistemological and pedagogic conceptualizations from the ‘colonial’ or ‘global’ towards the ‘local’. While the very choice of a Shakespeare text in the three South African productions I want to look at remains undeniably Eurocentric – so that their occurrence in a new, putatively post-apartheid society argues, at least in part, an ongoing desire for aYliation with Western knowledges – to what extent does each also manifest a translated Shakespeare that targets a ‘new’ South Africa? Shortly after coming to power in 1994, President Nelson Mandela specifically called for the revival of uMabatha, a Zulu translation of Macbeth. This play had originally been produced in the early 1970s, achieving much success within South Africa as well as in subsequent tours abroad to the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Why should a translation engendered well within the period of apartheid suddenly, at the beginning of the new dispensation, have fresh appeal? Welcome Msomi, in his translation of Shakespeare’s play into Zulu, had represented it in the context of the nineteenth-century rule of the great Zulu leader, Shaka, prior to Zulu defeat and the advent of European colonization. The recently published English version of Msomi’s Zulu translation, shows that Msomi in other ways too eVected a

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measure of Zulu acculturation for his version of Shakespeare’s text (see Fischlin & Fortier, 168–87). Praise singers (imbongi) precede the entry of Dangane (Duncan) and then, when he has become Chief, also Mabatha (Macbeth). The witches are presented as sangomas (positive healers in the Zulu system). Protocols of praising as well as references to the royal kraal and to the councillors of the chief, evoke in the play a non-colonized political system. Perhaps most important, the use of Zulu itself – instead of the oYcial apartheid languages of Afrikaans and English – hints at an inherent ‘decolonizing potential’ for the editors of the collection which includes the English translation of Msomi’s Zulu version (166). Msomi’s translation also at times manifests a shift away from seventeenth-century Jacobean Christianity towards African conceptualizations of consciousness and action. A case in point is the following speech of Lady Macbeth: Yet do I fear thy nature: It is too full o’th’ milk of human kindness, To catch the nearest way . . . What thou wouldst highly, That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, And yet wouldst wrongly win. (Mac 1.5.15–21)

In Msomi’s Zulu translation this becomes: But yet I fear The gentle dove that nestles in your heart, Where I would have the wind-swift hawk That falls like lightning on his prey. What can you grasp Without the strong claws of the hawk And what advantage take Without his sharp eye and his swift flight. Yes, my Khondo, The prey that lies in wait was meant for you. And therefore I have called On all the spirits of my ancestors

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To breathe fire in your heart And burn away your fears. (uMabatha, 2.1, in Fischlin & Fortier, trans., 172–3)

Kamadonsela’s (Lady Macbeth’s) language works here within a warrior/agricultural, oral culture, informed by ancestor/shade conceptualization.2 The fact that in Zulu thinking ancestors are ‘believed to exercise legitimate anger in support of the moral code of law that lineage survivors are expected to observe’ confirms that Kamadonsela appropriates Zulu belief here, but for her own treacherous purposes. Her subsequent imagery also suggests conceptualizations diVerent from the theological concern with ‘conscience’ that informs Lady Macbeth’s utterance, a strong privileging of materiality, a stress on physical, corporal, external visibility rather than on interiorized conscience and a system, furthermore, where verisimilitude is grounded in resemblance rather than in representation (Nethersole). However, this shift to Zulu cultural practice does not invite further meditation on diVerences between Jacobean and Zulu culture in a way that would impact upon the (apartheid-located) target audience for whom Msomi was translating. In contrast, early in the twentieth century, Solomon T. Plaatje used his translations of Shakespeare to elevate the contemporary importance of Tswana against the colonial and segregationist prioritization of English and Afrikaans.3 The Zulu dramatist, essayist and journalist, Herbert Dhlomo, who had as one of his ambitions the dream of becoming the African Shakespeare, wrote several plays in the 1930s situated in the same period of history as that into which Msomi translated the events of Macbeth.4 Although Dhlomo did not translate Shakespeare so much as model himself on him, his highly complex presentation of this period of history oVers a sharp critique of white hypocrisy in the clash between British and indigenous peoples during the period, and works simultaneously in almost epic Brechtian mode vigorously to attack the problematic laws the segregationists in South Africa were instituting in the 1930s at the time he was writing (see Orkin, Drama, 22–53). Set against Dhlomo’s militant presentation of Zulu history and culture

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in order to interrogate his own (segregationist) moment, Msomi’s project, despite its potential for address of its target culture, emerges as highly muted and, in terms of Dhlomo’s insistent contemporaneity, completely depoliticized. Msomi introduces elements of Zulu culture as well as the Zulu language, but he does so in a predominantly uncontentious and antiquarian way that avoids engagement with its own moment. Why then did President Mandela suggest a revival for uMabatha in 1995? The play was notoriously ambiguous and had been received in some anti-apartheid quarters as an entirely commercial public relations exercise for apartheid notions of ‘tribalism’.5 Mandela’s suggestion came in the context of the complicated and recently bloody history of rivalry between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party. The latter, founded in 1976 by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, although claiming to be open to all South Africans, was promoting its own version of Zulu nationalism. In the 1990s increasingly murderous violence between supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party (sometimes working with the help of the apartheid police who exploited what were seen as ethnic and separatist tendencies) and followers of the African National Congress, particularly in Natal, threatened plans for a unified and democratic South Africa. In a speech on Shaka Day 1992, Buthelezi had declared: Zulus today are the product of a warrior nation, a nation that no force in history has ever been able to cower. We will not cower to the demands and threats of the ANC in the same way as the [Afrikaner Nationalist] government cowers to their demands. We are Zulu and we will fight for the preservation of the Zulu nation. (Buthelezi)6

Although, after emerging victorious from the South African General Election of 1994, President Mandela had managed to persuade Buthelezi to join his cabinet, the dangerously divisive potential of the often violent proclivities of followers of the Inkatha Freedom Party remained powerfully present throughout the 1990s, paralleling the potential dangers latent within the

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white South African Right. In such conditions, Mandela’s decision to recommend and promote a revival of uMabatha bespeaks, before all else, a canny instance of his well-known advocation of reconciliation. Msomi’s play did provide acknowledgement of Zulu history. At the same time the depoliticized nature (so far as its original apartheid target-location was concerned) of its translation of Macbeth – itself a play resonating anxiety about contemporary Jacobean politics – now proved newly, if ironically, convenient. Msomi’s translation of Shakespeare’s play into a relatively anodyne and antiquarian presentation of Zulu culture, oVered a blander nationalism than the particularly threatening kind of contemporaneity that Buthelezi and the Inkatha Freedom Party were insisting on in their versions of Zulu history. (Mandela’s well-known support of the traditionally white Afrikaner love of rugby during the World Cup manifests a similar strategic move in the projected formation of what was simultaneously being referred to as the birth of the Rainbow nation.) v When Greg Doran and Antony Sher came to Johannesburg to produce Titus Andronicus in the same year that uMabatha was revived, they were, in contrast to Msomi, actively interested in translating the play in performance into contemporary local terms. As part of this aim, they decided to perform Shakespeare’s text in South African accents, a decision which challenged dominant notions about accent in Shakespeare as well as prejudices against the localization of pronunciation in the performance of his plays.7 For at least a decade before the African National Congress took over as the first democratically elected government in South Africa, literary and cultural critics within the country had been preoccupied with the project of validating the local against an erstwhile colonial centre, and the debate about accent intersected with this. Describing their first visit to South Africa to give acting workshops, Doran recalls the opinion of one of their voice coaches who argued that accent is a question of

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‘“vocal imperialism . . . the dominant forms of spoken English that are deemed right and acceptable” and which have been used in the process of colonization’ (Sher & Doran, 14). Sher notes his own submission to this vocal imperialism and finds it common as well amongst the actors with whom he works. As he puts it: Although we stress that we want to find a South African way of playing Shakespeare, practically every actor does his or her speech in an assumed English accent . . . I’m on the edge of my seat, fascinated and tense – because, of course, that’s me on the stage. I’ve spent a lifetime burying my South Africanness, in the belief that good acting, proper acting and certainly Shakespearean acting has to be English. (Sher & Doran, 13)

Prescriptive attitudes to accent in the performance of Shakespeare’s plays can of course be challenged, as is suggested by Doran’s reference (96) to John Barton’s opinion that in the performance of Shakespeare’s plays ‘there’s no empirical reason why modern English RP should be adapted’. Elsewhere, John Russell Brown notes that we can never experience the plays as Shakespeare thought an audience might . . . Many elements of speech have changed beyond recall: pronunciation, dialect, class distinctions, idioms (especially conversational ones) . . . Among Englishspeaking productions there are many varieties of speech, and each has its own resonance, impression of naturalness, distinction between characters. (Brown, ‘Foreign’, 25–6)

The decision to use the South African accent was perceived as a means to authenticity unimpeded by the particular implied social structures that (British) Received Pronunciation might entail. One actor averred, ‘I want to find a way of doing Shakespeare in my voice, using my Africanness’ (Sher & Doran, 13), while Sher, deciding to base his own speaking voice on his late father’s strong Afrikaans accent,8 notes at another rehearsal:

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As soon as Greg encourages the actors to try again, using their own accent, their own energy, their own center, they transform. Suddenly they become the actors who amazed audiences around the world on those Fugard tours, those Market tours – amazed audiences with their rawness, their passion. (Sher & Doran, 45)

But reception of the use of South African accents in the production at the Market Theatre, which during the rule of the apartheid regime had a proudly contestatory record, was, despite this optimism, and also unexpectedly for a country that was just beginning its transition to a state of post-coloniality, critical of this move towards localization. Barney Simon, one of the founders of the theatre and himself a director of famous anti-apartheid plays, observed at an early stage, ‘People are very worried about you doing Shakespeare in South African accents’ while Sher also sensed actor resistance to the proposal (107). Once the play opened widespread criticism erupted.9 It is true that the unexpected reaction the production unleashed was complicated by the problematic and contradictory political resonances that the production encouraged by means of its use and mix of South African accents: that of right-wing Afrikanerdom (Sher’s Titus), that of sub-income Cape teenage delinquents or skollies (Charlton George’s Chiron and Oscar Peterson’s Demetrius), and that of Sello Maaka ka Ncube who played Aaron.10 Even so, the primary ‘post-colonial’ impulse Sher and Doran manifested, to connect by means of accent with the target culture for whom they were hoping meaningfully to perform the text of Titus, ironically clashed, as Barbara Hodgdon (187) puts it in another context, with a lingering aYliatory and colonial desire to invalidate ‘the sound of the other’ – an ‘other’ in this case providing a local South African rather than a colonial/‘English’ timbre to Shakespeare’s text. v By early 2002 when Yael Farber produced her first Africanized version of Julius Caesar, entitled SeZaR, at the Market Theatre, the South African accents of her black performers were no longer an

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issue, partly at least because they oVered a less politically contradictory blend of local accents than had the earlier production of Titus. Far more interesting, Farber had invited her actors to use Shakespeare’s text but, when they felt uncomfortable or needed to switch, either to draw on Solomon T. Plaatje’s Tswana translation of Shakespeare’s play (1937), or to translate Shakespeare’s lines into their own spoken Zulu or Tswana. I quote here almost the whole of the domestic scene between Porshia and Brutas taken from Act 1, scene 3 of SeZaR, in which neither are using Shakespeare’s text directly. Brutas speaks in Zulu and Porshia in Tswana:11 PORSHIA

Brutas, moratiwa [Brutas my love]. BRUTAS

Portia, kwenzenjani uvuke Ekuseni kangaka. Uyazi awaphi langa Kungani uvuke uphumele emakhazeni. [Portia, why are you up so early? You know you are not well. Why expose yourself to the outside cold weather?] PORSHIA

Le wena botsididi bo ga bo a go siamela [You don’t deserve a cold response]. You have ungently, Brutas, Stole from my bed; maabane erile re lalela wa Tlogela dijo wa nnela go ronoka O phuthile matsogo o bile o fegetswe; [last night you went to bed without having your meal, folding your arms in deep contemplation]; And when I ask’d you what the matter was, You stared at me with ungentle looks. I urged you further; wa nnela go ingwaya tlhogo [you kept scratching your head, in deep thought], And too impatiently stamp’d with your foot. Ka tswelela go go botsa [I enquired why you were so contemplative], yet you answer’d not, But with an angry waiver of your hand

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Gave sign for me to leave you. So I did, Ke tshaba go gakatsa bogale le go ngala ga gago [So I left because I didn’t want to inflame your temper, lest you decide to ignore my concerns about you], Which seem’d too much enkindled, and withal Hoping it was but an eVect of humour, Which sometime hath his hour with every man. It will not let you eat, nor talk, nor sleep, And could it work so much upon your shape As it hath much prevail’d on your condition, I should not know you, Brutas. Brutas tlhe A o ko o mpolelele se se go tshwenyang [Please Brutas, tell me what’s troubling you]. BRUTAS

Engingakusho ukithi angiphilanga [What I would say is I am not well]. That’s all. PORSHIA

Brutas ke letlhale, fa a bobola a Ka potlaka a bitsa dingaka [Brutas if you are not well, say so, let me rush to get medical assistance for you]. BRUTAS

Ngiyazi. Sithandwa sami ngicela hambe uyolala [I know. Please go to sleep my love].12 The movement to Zulu and Tswana in this passage, away from but then repeatedly back to the text of Julius Caesar, provides almost an object lesson in the aspect of translation as a multilayered and unpredictable process of cultural encounter, when a (European) text is taken up within a culture (outside Europe) that is located, in turn, within its own particular contemporeneities and from within its own particular languages. The way this happens in Farber’s text is significantly diVerent from what emerged in Msomi’s translation of Macbeth as a deliberately bland and non-contemporaneous (Zulu) homage to a colonial ‘universal’ Shakespeare.

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SeZaR challenges the sense that the first-language speaker’s language (Shakespeare’s or any other) is, at least in working usage, transparent. In performance, its actors become themselves translators, using the text as linguistic resource when it seems appropriate but also, when they need to, switching to their own contemporary language in a way that might for them give optimum eVect as to its meaning – as they (culturally) perceive it. This interplay between Shakespeare’s language, which remains insistently a part of the transaction, and the language of the actors argues dialogue across cultures and periods, and between equal partners: Shakespeare’s language as frame, response to or intersection with African languages/culture, and African languages/ culture as frame, response to and intersection with Shakespeare’s. Furthermore, in this theatrical situation, no target audience is likely to be in charge of all the languages it hears. The eVect of this is to disable any sense of either ‘colonial’ linguistic superiority on the one hand, or single-minded ‘post-colonial’ subversion or adaptation on the other, for no one language attains absolute dominance in the dramatic flow of languages back to or away from one another. At any moment in performance, diVering members of the audience will be denied access to the spoken language they are hearing. All are accordingly at times disempowered, obliged to depend upon body language and visual eVect, and at other times are again empowered, fully comprehending that language utterance naturally at their disposal. Thus all are temporarily forced into a position of subordination to utterance in language other than their own. By such means, the audience is made to experience in the theatre one touchstone in translation: understanding of the relativity of claims to cultural dominance by any one language as well as, in Shakespeare performance, the flawed nature of colonial insistence on the primacy of ‘Shakespeare’s’ language, accent or meanings. What results for the audience-experience of a performance of SeZaR partly enacts within the theatre, then, Steiner’s ‘heroic (exacting) search for semantic and functional equivalence’ on the one hand and the sometimes necessary ‘changes’ that are part of this search on the other.

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v Dennis Kennedy has argued that in ‘foreign’ Shakespeares, the cultural attitudes that inhere in the work, and that the Anglo-centered approach has assumed to be the common heritage of Shakespeare’s art, require not only linguistic translation but also cultural adaptation when they are transferred to a foreign environment. (Kennedy, Foreign, 2)

Much work on the aspect of transculturation in translation indeed focuses on the dimension of adaptation.13 This work explores how adaptation might evidence ‘appropriations’ in which ‘both the subject (author) and object (Shakespeare) are changed in the process’ (Desmet, 4), or the extent to which, using the Shakespeare text, productions may or may not also be appropriations that result in something entirely diVerent from ‘Shakespeare’,14 or the extent to which they are a talking back ‘aggressively to Shakespeare’s plays, to earlier interpretations of them, and to patriarchal and colonialist attitudes that the plays have come to symbolize’ (Novy, 17). These aspects of adaptation can be explored in SeZaR too. But what I want to focus on here is a less explored and rarely acknowledged dimension, the possibility that the act of translation might also produce fresh readings for the source-text as well. I note here briefly two ways in which SeZaR, by way of its particular linguistic/cultural transactions sometimes oVers readings of Julius Caesar that in turn explicate and enrich our sense of the signifactions of Shakespeare’s text. Although both translators of the above extract have indicated to me that the complexity of some of the Zulu and Tswana linguistic currency is inevitably lost in the translation, the English versions supplied suggest that the actors in their translations have kept fairly closely to Shakespeare’s text. While this might suggest a similarity with Msomi’s translation of Macbeth which, apart from the instances of Zulu acculturation I cite, oVers an unimaginatively close adherence to storyline and utterance, there are a number of important diVerences. The most obvious is to be found in the fact

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that Porshia’s voice, speaking Tswana to Brutas’s Zulu, has equal authority with his, supplying a separate cultural resonance that is set against his as well as against that of the Shakespeare text. That Porshia also interacts with the Shakespeare text in her own cultural terms and according to her own discretion towards it and away from it into her own linguistic terrain when this proves preferable (more eVective), establishes her voice as the equal of Brutas’s as well as Shakespeare’s. Again, the added intimacy suggested when husband and wife in their interactions with one another move to their own contemporary Zulu or Tswana as more potent expressions of that intimacy has, as one of its eVects, the highlighting of Porshia’s feelings and active partnership as the equal of Brutas’s in the marriage. This reminds us in turn of the extent to which Julius Caesar’s focus on political action presents a masculinity that operates in spite of the femininity it exists amongst and with which it is mutually entwined. These several linguistic tactics connect, furthermore, with Farber’s general production strategy of framing the masculinist discourse and action by a strong and ongoing critical feminine presence. I cannot explore this any further here, except to note that it culminates in this particular scene in Porshia actively stabbing her thigh in front of Brutas, in contrast to what is only a report of the deed both in Shakespeare’s text and in its source. In this and other ways, the insistence in SeZaR upon a discriminate and critical active feminine vision and presence invites renewed attention to the extent to which in Julius Caesar the potentials for violence, error and unruliness – as much the centre of its concern as the more usually explored intellectual debates around republicanism and nobility of action – have to be marked as masculine. Exploration of the non-rational dimensions of masculinity – framed by use of an assertive, critical and rational feminine presence – is complemented by Farber’s translation/transculturation of Caesar into SeZaR. As in the case of uMabatha, Farber introduces into her version of Shakespeare’s play the cultural practice of praising. But whereas Msomi’s presentation of praising suggests a putatively pre-colonial politics that in no way bears on the South African present in which it is performed, SeZaR’s opening speech

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in Julius Caesar goes straight to the play’s central concerns with political rhetoric and action. When they enter the theatre, members of the audience are greeted by women cleaners, a common sight in South African cities, with the plastic bags of their trade used as aprons or wound round their heads, in orange cleaning uniforms sitting in the auditorium or sweeping it clean. These women play the part in Shakespeare’s text of the plebeians or commoners, throughout. And as the play begins, their leader, Mashanela, leads them onto the stage, to the voice-over of a contemporary radio report about SeZaR’s recent conquests. This is followed by the entrance of SeZaR himself, through billowing smoke, gyrating with staggered movements suggesting the ritual dance of a praise singer and delivering the following: SEZAR

A . . . Gee, a . . . ge ge Ke nna segope sa ditlou potokgolo ya ngwana mabokela Mma nkapeele bogope ke ya gonona. O tla ba mphemtsha basimanyana ba dipodi. Ke thaka komiki ya makgowa wa gata ya phatlega Ke morwa manthekge ka lebota mathaka mangwe a thekgwa. Ke motho wa bo sekororo meetsi a noka hlabakwane ramarumo mabe. Wa bo Mmapalekokotlo, wa bo kwatlakwatla. Wa bo maphumthe wa bo Mothapo monyelele mothapa thala la tsoku banna ba kgalabje. Wa bo Mahlodi wa bontelele golla ke golisana wa bo khethekhene sewele se gana banna sekata le pitsi nageng. Morongwa wa go be go dumela. Makgwara banna wa bo mosibudi, wa bo Mmanaila ka dinala, wa bo matsie, wa bo Mmapori sa maeba. Ke tswa ke le ka kua bja tladi ba Mmamerela bo a na kolobe. Maune boroka a fenya dintwa tse dikgolo ba re ke Malatjie le mogoboa le sekgobela sa mareka patse le le fole.

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Faseng la dipholofolo tsohle botau. Bophiri bonkwe ba lotsha mo. Bai . . . bai ba ba bai . . . SEZAR

Hello . . . hello I am the tusk of an elephant Mom dish out pap for me I’m getting impatient I am the son of the concrete wall Supported by other walls I am of the great river that flows through valleys A river with no source or ending I am of the stock that support each other in times of trouble I am from the great lands, Bjatladi, where a pig is a totem of the tribe The land of warriors Where victory in every war is a certainty They call me Malatjie, coming from the lands All sorts of beasts like lions, wolfs, tigers pay their respects15 Bye bye bye bye. Followed as it is by the scepticism of Kassius, this opening utterance speaks to the question of political (self-)representation. SeZaR’s speech exemplifies this partly because of its juxtaposition not only with Kassius’s interrogative language following it, but with the voice-over radio commentary preceding it, which suggests Western sensationalist incomprehension of present-day Africa. This is a device Farber uses repeatedly throughout the play, the language being punctuated by allusions to present-day South African political issues, particularly in the assassination scene. SeZaR’s language also locates him within the oral, agricultural culture of an African, ‘Azanian’ context, his sense of identity articulated in terms of the imagery of material urban and animal power resonating both strength and danger, together with the imagery of communal ownership of land.16 In a striking move, Farber cast Hope Sprinter Sekgobela, a professional praise singer, as SeZaR. Framed by an observing group of silent women, as well

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as by Kassius in the background, and amplified by Sekgobela’s often dramatically compelling physical movements, SeZaR’s performance thus postulated for himself compelling skill as a praise singer. In this way the play’s opening event emphasized the extent to which political rulers are themselves powerful imagemakers. SeZaR’s physical performance on stage, even for those members of the audience who did not understand his language, suggested the impenetrabilities of power and the reliance of political leaders on the language of (unconfirmable, constructed, obfuscatory) myth, on the process of (physically contrived) ritual and on a remarkable bodily agility that might signify violence as easily as it signifies potency. Furthermore, Sekgobela’s sometimes dissonant and strange physical movements on stage had a suggestion of physical unpredictability, which anticipated the play’s subsequent presentation of unfolding (masculine) variability and uncontrollability. This, in turn, pointed to a related motif in Shakespeare’s play, underlying and perhaps informing its more commonly acknowledged investment in rhetoric, ‘noble’ action and political (‘rational’) power (see Orkin, ‘Proverbial’, 213–34). v Msomi’s uMabatha and Doran and Sher’s Titus Andronicus suggest some of the multilayered ways in which Shakespeare and the language of translation is always partly a matter of specific cultural encounter. In a putatively post-colonial location such as present-day South Africa, the impulse towards translation, and sometimes adaptation, from the global to the local is also not without contradiction – for particular readers and audiences as well as translators. However, if much work on translation in the context of the post-colonial concentrates on ‘how metropolitan modes of representation’ are ‘received and appropriated on the periphery’, as Mary Louise Pratt puts it in terms of a still-colonial context, this may tend to hide the additional possibility of ‘transculturation from the colonies to the metropolis’ (Pratt, 6).17 I suggest that in this respect Farber’s SeZaR, interesting in terms of translation and questions of cultural encounter and adaptation, is potentially seminal not only in that it engages unusually in

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what might be called dialogic post-colonial cultural encounter, but also in that, with its own achieved knowledges, it reverses the traYc of signification to provocatively intersect once more with the very source text on which it draws.

Notes 1 This has long been a concern within literary theory and criticism too. See, for example, Hawkes; Halpern. 2 See Berglund, 29V.: ‘The term ancestor is avoided in the study and the word shade used instead’. 3 See Schalkwyk & Lapula, 9–26; Kahn, ‘Remembering’, 456–78. 4 See Dhlomo, Cetswayo (Shaka was assassinated by his half-brother Dingane, who in turn was killed by his half-brother Mpande, and the successor to Mpande was Cetshwayo.) 5 See Stuart Huntley, ‘Umabatha’, SA Panorama, 8 (1972), 36. 6 M.G. Buthelezi, speech on Shaka Day, Hlabisa District, KwaZulu, 4 October 1992; cited in Golan (15). 7 See Sher & Doran. All citations from Sher, Doran, or other members of the company, come from this volume. 8 On the strong Afrikaans accent of Sher’s father, see Sher & Doran (117). 9 See Ellen Smith, Weekly Mail and Guardian, 13–20 April 1995, Letters, 26. See also Sher & Doran, 223 & 226. 10 The contradictory mix of the production’s other cultural allusions, also problematic, cannot be discussed here. 11 Because the playtext of SeZaR has not yet been published, all quotations are taken from an original script very kindly given to me by Yael Farber. 12 I would like to express here my very grateful thanks to Bongani Majola and Jubie Matlou for their translations of these lines. 13 For an account of various kinds of adaptation, see the introduction to Fischlin & Fortier. 14 See, for example, Loomba, ‘Mizoram’ (227–49); Loomba, ‘Local’ (143–63). 15 A reference to Kruger Park, the lands of the Malatji tribe. 16 The play is located in ‘Azania’, the name sometimes given by radical opposers of the apartheid government to what they hoped would become one day the new South Africa. 17 On the appropriation of metropolitan modes of representation on the periphery, see for example Banham & Jones (121–36).

Pa r t IV Further Reading

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16 SHAKESPEARE AND TRANSLATION A GUIDE TO FURTHER READING Updated Edition

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Abend-David, Dror, ‘Scorned My Nation’: A Comparison of Translations of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ into German, Hebrew, and Yiddish (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003) This book looks at Jewish responses to The Merchant of Venice. It reveals a range of interpretations that manifest themselves through a large selection of translations and adaptations in German, Hebrew and Yiddish. Agarez Medeiros, Helena, Voltaire’s ‘La Mort de César’: A Play ‘entirely in the English taste’? (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012) This study sheds new light on the well-known antagonism between Voltaire and Shakespeare by creating a double focus on Shakespeare’s famous Roman tragedy. The first chapters examine French perceptions of ‘English taste’ from the late seventeenth century onwards and French translation theories and practices in the eighteenth century, including Voltaire’s rendering of Hamlet. The book goes on to give a detailed analysis of La Mort de César, Voltaire’s rewriting – allegedly ‘entirely in the English taste’ – of Julius Caesar. It then examines the polemical way in which Aaron Hill re-adapts and reclaims La Mort de César for the English audience, showing his disagreement with French perceptions of English taste. Baker, Mona, and Gabriela Saldanha (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Second edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2009) Part I of this reference work explains the central issues, concepts and approaches in the discipline of Translation Studies. One entry is specifically v 289 v

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devoted to the translation of Shakespeare. Part II covers the history of translation in major linguistic and cultural communities across the globe. The surveys of the various traditions (African, American, Arabic, Brazilian and so on) are unavoidably concise but provide essential background to the study of Shakespearean translations worldwide. Bauer, Roger, Michael de Graat and Jürgen Wertheimer (eds), Das Shakespeare-Bild in Europa zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik (Bern: Peter Lang, 1988) A well-documented volume on Shakespeare’s reception in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Translations are examined along with other forms of rewriting (including stage adaptations, criticism and imitations). Blinn, Hansjürgen, Der deutsche Shakespeare/The German Shakespeare (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1993) A partly annotated bibliography of Shakespeare’s reception in Germanspeaking countries, listing both primary materials and scholarly publications on the Bard’s presence in translation, literature, the theatre, the mass media, music and the fine arts. Bonnefoy, Yves, Shakespeare and the French Poet. Ed. John Naughton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) This book includes twelve essays from one of France’s greatest critics, poets and Shakespeare translators of the twentieth century. Several essays deal with the task of translating Shakespeare as understood by a philosophically minded poet-translator. Borgmeier, Raimund, Shakespeares Sonett ’When forty winters’ . . . und die deutschen Übersetzer: Untersuchungen zu den Problemen der ShakespeareÜbertragung (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1970) Borgmeier’s study of the German translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets focuses on sonnet 2. It is indebted to the methods of text-internal formal analysis and close reading fashionable during the 1960s and 1970s. This may limit the usefulness of the work today, but many readers will still find it helpful and attractive. Bradshaw, Graham, and Tetsuo Kishi, Shakespeare in Japan (London: Athlone, 1999) This book investigates the conditions of Shakespeare’s reception and assimilation into Japanese literary and theatrical culture. It considers

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cultural and linguistic problems of translation, includes an illustrated survey of the most significant Japanese Shakespearean productions and adaptations, and compares responses of Japanese and Western critics. Brisset, Annie, A Sociocritique of Translation: Theatre and Alterity in Quebec, 1968–1988. Trans. Rosalind Gill and Roger Gannon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) English translation of the author’s acclaimed Sociocritique de la traduction (1990). Brisset investigates French-Canadian translations made for the Quebec theatre between 1968 and 1988, during a period characterized by growing nationalist sentiment and by the search for a specific québécois language. She shows how translations of Shakespeare (but also of Molière, Anton Chekhov and Bertolt Brecht) were used to furnish the Quebec theatre with materials to build a national tradition. Brown, John Russell, New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) A personal testimony as much as an exercise in comparative drama, this book reports on theatre productions and performance styles observed in India and the Far East, presenting them as a challenge to the established Western ways of staging and reading Shakespeare’s plays. The emphasis is firmly on performance and drama, not on language or translation, but those studying Shakespeare translations beyond Europe will find the book of interest. Buffery, Helena, Shakespeare in Catalan: Translating Imperialism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007) A history of Shakespearean translation and reception in Catalonia. The book highlights his importance for the Catalan cultural revival since the nineteenth century and his contribution to the vitality of contemporary Catalan culture. Many responses to his work are discussed (translations, performances, original works inspired by Shakespeare’s life and works) and interpreted in terms of cultural politics. Carlson, Marvin, The Italian Shakespearians: Performances by Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi in England and America (Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1985) An overview of nineteenth-century English and American Shakespeare productions featuring Italian star actors who performed their roles in Italian translation with the rest of the cast playing in English. These

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linguistically hybrid performances provide a curious example of incomplete translation. Carvalho Homem, Rui, ‘Memory, Ideology, Translation: King Lear Behind Bars and Before History’, in Alternative Shakespeares 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson (Abingdon, UK and New York: 2008), 204–20 A study of the translation of King Lear by Portuguese politician Álvaro Cunhal, written when he was put behind bars by the Salazar regime, published under an assumed name in 1962, and finally reissued successfully in his own name in 2002. The history of this version is interpreted as a mode of commemoration and political representation. In the two earlier volumes of Alternative Shakespeares (edited by John Drakakis [1985] and Terence Hawkes [1996] respectively) translated Shakespeare had remained absent. His introduction in the third volume through Rui Carvalho Homem’s essay represented a breakthrough in Shakespeare Studies. Carvalho Homem, Rui, and Ton Hoenselaars (eds), Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-first Century (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004) (Rpt. New Delhi: Overseas Press, 2008) This collection of essays provides an excellent survey of the state of the art at the beginning of the third millennium, looking at contemporary translation practices from a wider historical perspective as well as exemplifying several theoretical approaches ranging from semiotics to theatre studies. The second part of the volume focuses on Shakespearean translation into the specific language and the culture of Portugal. Cetera, Anna, Enter Lear: The Translator’s Part in Performance (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 2008) This book describes King Lear’s entry into the Polish cultural system from the eighteenth century down to the present day. The author is particularly interested in the translator’s intervention in the performance potential of the Shakespearean text: how can we trace the relationship between translation strategies and the stage history of King Lear? Chaudhuri, Sukanta, and Chee Seng Lim (eds), Shakespeare without English: The Reception of Shakespeare in Non-Anglophone Countries (Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2006) An excellent collection of essays, covering translations, adaptations and borrowings in nine countries and three continents, and thus presenting a truly global outlook on Shakespeare’s function in a postmodern and

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post-colonial world. Much attention is given to Shakespeare on the foreign stage and in non-English classrooms. Chew, Shirley, and Alistair Stead (eds), Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999) This volume is dedicated to Inga-Stina Ewbank (below), one of the few established Shakespearean scholars so far to have included translation in her research agenda. Much of the book uses the translation concept in an extended sense, for example construing translation as metaphorical expression, as a process of creative transposition, or as a paradigm of intertextuality. Topics discussed include translation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Laurence Olivier’s film ‘translation’ of Henry V, ‘translating’ Shakespeare’s characters from page to stage, and Shakespeare translations in Africa. Classe, Olive (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Literary Translation into English, 2 vols (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000) A survey of the field of literary translation into English, covering in principle all source literatures across space and time, and discussing a number of theoretical issues. The entry ‘Influence of Translations on William Shakespeare’ briefly surveys the Elizabethan translations through which Shakespeare got to know the Bible, Montaigne and the classics. Cohn, Ruby, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976) An exercise in comparative drama which looks into mainly twentiethcentury adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays (especially Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear and The Tempest) in English, French and German. ‘Offshoots’ are rewritings whose creative use of the originals goes beyond the general notion of how much freedom translators or theatre directors can be allowed to enjoy. Shakespeare rewriters discussed include Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Eugène Ionesco, Alfred Jarry, Charles Marowitz, Heiner Müller, George Bernard Shaw and Orson Welles. Dávidházi, Péter, The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare: Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998) Focusing mainly on England and Hungary in the period 1769–1864, the author re-examines the growth of Bardolatry, describing it as a cult revealing latent religious patterns. Religious psychology and anthropology

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provide the framework within which translations and other manifestations of this cult are contextualized. Delabastita, Dirk, There’s a Double Tongue: an Investigation into the Translation of Shakespeare’s Wordplay, with Special Reference to ‘Hamlet’ (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1993) After presenting definitions of translation and the pun, this book tackles the translation of wordplay, first in terms of theoretical possibilities and obstacles, then in terms of concrete historical realities. Illustration is provided from Hamlet and other Shakespearean texts and many of their Dutch, French and German renderings. The volume contains an anthology of the attested puns in Hamlet, including a brief semantic analysis of each, and a selection of diverse translations. Delabastita, Dirk, and Lieven D’hulst (eds), European Shakespeares: Translating Shakespeare in the Romantic Age (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 1993) This book sets out a programme for a more systematic study of Shakespearean translation. It concentrates on the romantic period, during which various cultural constituencies across Europe enlisted Shakespeare in their struggle for political emancipation, greater national identity and aesthetic innovation. Survey articles are combined with specific case studies, dealing with France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Low Countries, Portugal, Russia, Scandinavia and the West Slavic cultures. Delabastita, Dirk, ‘A Great Feast of Languages: Shakespeare’s Multilingual Comedy in King Henry V and the Translator’, The Translator 8:2 (2002), 303–40 Henry V exploits multilingualism for both comic and non-comic purposes. These are described before the paper moves on to explore the unique challenges that this polyglot play poses to the translator both by its French/English bilingualism and by the politically motivated recourse to regional accents. Delabastita, Dirk, Jozef De Vos and Paul Franssen (eds), Shakespeare and European Politics. With a foreword by Ton Hoenselaars (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008) This collection of essays grew out of the 2003 ESRA conference in Utrecht. It looks at Shakespearean culture across Europe from a specifically political angle. Not surprisingly, translation, of the ‘linguistic’ and the ‘cultural’ varieties alike, is a permanent concern.

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Delisle, Jean, and Judith Woodsworth (eds), Translators through History (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 1995) This book results from a collaborative international effort sponsored by the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs and by UNESCO. It aims to provide the groundwork for a study of the major contribution made by translators to the intellectual and cultural history of the world, for example in areas such as the invention of alphabets, the emergence of national literatures, the propagation of religious texts, and so on. One of its subsections is devoted to the international spread of Shakespeare. Dente, Carla, and Sara Soncini (eds), Crossing Space and Time: Shakespeare Translations in Present-Day Europe (Pisa: Plus/Pisa University Press, 2008) A carefully presented collection of essays mainly dealing with German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish translations, and also raising the more general issue of the place of translation within the Shakespeare industry. Déprats, Jean-Michel, ‘A French history of Henry V’, in Shakespeare’s History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad, ed. Ton Hoenselaars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 75–91 A detailed study of French translations of Shakespeare’s most polyglot play. The essay is informed by the author’s personal experience of rendering the play into French twice, once for the release of Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V movie in 1989 (with Gérard Depardieu’s voice dubbing the English king), and for the play’s stage premiere at the Avignon Festival of 1999. It takes its cue from Roman Jakobson’s argument that intersemiotic translation (from word to gesture, from speech to acting) takes up where interlinguistic translation leaves off. Dobson, Michael, and Stanley Wells (eds), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) This reference work has an insightful article on ‘translation’ in addition to some forty concise entries on individual translators of Shakespeare (from Luis Astrana Marín to Shenghao Zhu). Particularly stimulating for the student of Shakespeare translation are the entries on the reception of Shakespeare in thirty-five countries and regions, ranging from ‘Arab world’ to ‘West Africa’. Erckenbrecht, Ulrich, Shakespeare Sechsundsechzig. 3., erneut erweiterte Ausgabe (Kassel: Muriverlag, 2009)

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This unusual book offers a compilation of no fewer than 168 German translations of sonnet 66 (‘Tired with all these . . .’). The ‘anthological’ presentation of different versions of the same source text creates a multifaceted prism through which the textual density and the semiotic productivity of the original stand out no less clearly than the endless resourcefulness of the successive German translators. It also prompts multiple comparisons between the translations, an exercise started by Erckenbrecht’s long introductory essay, which matches philological scrupulousness with a more personal touch. Espasa Borràs, Eva, La traducció dalt de l’escenari (Vic: Eumo Editorial, 2001) This Catalan study aims to come to grips with the specific problems involved in translating for the theatre. The author develops a comprehensive semiotic model of theatrical communication which accommodates and interconnects two types of translation: the rendering of a foreign play in the receptor language and the transposition of the written script into the performance text. Besides some non-Shakespearean examples (The Mikado, A Taste of Honey, Guys and Dolls), Espasa studies stage versions and Catalan translations of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure. Études anglaises (Paris: Didier, 1947–) This well-established journal publishes at least one article on Shakespeare per year. The editors brought out a special issue on Shakespeare’s presence in France, Shakespeare en France (13:2 [1960]), followed by Shakespeare 1564–1964 (17:4 [1964]). The former especially has helpful material on the French translators. Ewbank, Inga-Stina, ‘Shakespeare Translation as Cultural Exchange’, Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995), 1–12 This essay develops the metaphor of translation as a mutually beneficial cultural exchange and urges the community of Shakespearean scholars to give up their customary insularity. Ezpeleta Piorno, Pilar, Teatro y traducción: aproximación interdisciplinaria desde la obra de Shakespeare (Madrid: Catedra 2007) The book offers a detailed study of the language of the theatre and its translation, informed by a functional approach and taking examples from Hamlet and Macbeth.

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Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier (eds), Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) An attractive anthology which brings together twelve theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare’s work from around the world and across the centuries, beginning with John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize and ending with the late-twentieth-century Othello rewriting Harlem Duet by Djanet Sears. The work of the non-English adapters – Federico García Lorca, Bertolt Brecht, Welcome Msomi and Heiner Müller – has been backtranslated into English so unobtrusively as to make them look like English authors. The introduction and commentaries lean towards Gender Studies and post-colonial theory without entering into a dialogue with Translation Studies. Folio (Utrecht: Shakespeare Society of the Low Countries, 1994–) Folio is the biannual (and bilingual, English-Dutch) journal of the Shakespeare Society of the Low Countries. It keeps its finger on the pulse of Dutch translations and productions and shows a consistent interest in the international spread of Shakespeare more generally. France, Peter (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Despite its smaller size, this reference work is in several respects comparable to Classe’s Encyclopedia (above). There is a scattering of indexed references to Shakespeare, who is viewed not as a translated author but as a user of Elizabethan translations of classical and European works. Frank, Armin Paul, et al. (eds), Übersetzung: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungswissenschaft. 3 vols (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, 2007, 2011) This ambitious encyclopedia of Translation Studies, with articles in German, English and French, aims to be a comprehensive and critical account of the current state of knowledge and research. A section of essaylength entries in the third volume investigates the worldwide reception of Shakespeare as a major instance of international dissemination through translation. Gambier, Yves, and Luc Van Doorslaer (eds), Handbook of Translation Studies. 3 vols (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2010, 2011, 2012), also online at http://benjamins.com/online/hts/

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An authoritative survey of the state of the art of Translation Studies as a research discipline, presented in dozens of concise and readable articles. There are occasional references to Shakespeare. The online version is to be updated annually. Gebhardt, Peter, A. W. Schlegels Shakespeare-Übersetzung: Untersuchungen zu seinem Übersetzungsverfahren am Beispiel des ‘Hamlet’ (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970) This book is a rare example of a monograph entirely devoted to a single Shakespeare translation. The first part sketches the historical and general aesthetic background to Schlegel’s famous translation. The second part looks in a detailed manner at his 1798 translation of Hamlet specifically, including the textual problems that it poses, and a range of special translation issues such as verse, syntax, taboo words, wordplay, and so on. Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive, online at http:// globalshakespeares.org/# This collaborative project provides online access to performances of Shakespeare from many parts of the world. It offers fascinating video material for those who wish to study translated Shakespeare in theatrical action, as well as interesting discussions in essays and posts. Golder, John, Shakespeare for the Age of Reason: The Earliest Stage Adaptations of Jean-François Ducis, 1769–1792 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1992) A thorough discussion of the notorious French versions by Jean-François Ducis which were hugely influential in the French and, more widely, European reception of Shakespeare. Ducis served as a negative model for Letourneur and other translators who aimed to stay closer to Shakespeare. Gonzáles Fernández de Sevilla, José Manuel (ed.), Shakespeare en España: Crítica, traducciones y representaciones (Zaragoza: Libros Pórtico and Universidad de Alicante, 1993) A collection of essays (all written in Spanish) dealing with the Spanish reception of Shakespeare and divided into three parts: criticism, translations and stage history. The section on translation features essays by leading translators as well as two papers focusing on the Basque and the Catalan traditions. The volume includes a helpful bibliographical section.

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Gregor, Keith, Shakespeare on the Spanish Stage, 1772 to the Present (London and New York: Continuum, 2010) A convincing discussion, based on archival research and involving ample cultural and political contextualisation, of the history of the engagements of the Spanish theatre with Shakespeare. Gregor, Keith, and Ángel Luis Pujante (eds), More European Shakespeares (special issue of Cuadernos de Filología Inglesa, 7:2) (Murcia: Departamento de Filología Inglesa de la Universidad de Murcia, 2001) A selection of eight papers presented at the 1999 Murcia conference on ‘Four Centuries of Shakespeare in Europe’. Topics discussed include the divergent perceptions of Isabella (Measure for Measure) in criticism, translation and production, Polish appropriations of Shakespeare, Romanian productions of the romances, the Spanish tradition of translating Shakespeare, and the Spanish response to film and television adaptations of Shakespeare. Guntner, J. Lawrence, and Andrew M. McLean (eds), Redefining Shakespeare: Literary Theory and Theater Practice in the German Democratic Republic (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998) A stimulating collection of essays and interviews focusing on how Shakespeare was performed, translated, criticized and understood within the cultural context of East German social history. Hattaway, Michael, Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper (eds), Shakespeare in the New Europe (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994) This collection of essays is based on a conference, held near Sofia in 1993, which had been planned shortly after the collapse of the communist regimes in middle and eastern Europe and with nationalist fervour and hostility in the Balkans building up. The collection conveys the thrill and the insecurities of the moment, with half of its twenty or so essays exploring the often contradictory functions of Shakespeare in countries or regions such as East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the (former) USSR, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia; other essays deal with the reception of Shakespeare in post-Franco Spain or with themes such as nationhood, tribalism and ideology. Several translations are discussed in terms of the diverse functions Shakespeare fulfilled in a period of rapid change, political turmoil, growing internationalism and cultural instability.

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Heylen, Romy, Translation, Poetics, and the Stage: Six French ‘Hamlets’ (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) Heylen defends a socio-cultural model of translation, focusing on how translations function in the receiving culture through a process of ‘acculturation’. Her book consists of six case studies, each one representing a step in the French translation of Hamlet, starting with JeanFrançois Ducis’ 1769 neoclassical version of the play and ending with the postmodern stage production of Daniel Mesguich from 1977. Hoenselaars, Ton, ‘Translation Futures: Shakespearians and the Foreign Text’, Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009), 273–82 A position paper on the relationship between translation, international Shakespeare and the academic Shakespeare industry, calling for a mutual rapprochement. Historical examples include the case of Jan Vos, whose Aran and Titus in Dutch (1641) was a very early instance of a foreign adaptation or translation extending the theatrical life of Shakespeare beyond the Channel. Hofmann, Norbert, Redundanz und Äquivalenz in der literarischen Übersetzung dargestellt an fünf deutschen Übersetzungen des ‘Hamlet’ (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1980) The author sets up a complex model for the study of theatrical translations which incorporates components of linguistics, information theory and cognitive psychology. He examines various forms of linguistic and aesthetic redundancy within a literary and dramatic text and argues that these should be taken into consideration in the assessment of the equivalence between originals and translations. The model is applied to five translations of Hamlet (August Wilhelm Schlegel, Hans Rothe, Richard Flatter, Rudolf Schaller and Erich Fried). Horstmann, Gesa, Shakespeares Sonette in Deutschland: Zur Geschichte der Übersetzungen zwischen dem 18. Jahrhundert und den Übertragungen von Stefan George und Karl Kraus (PhD thesis, TU Berlin, 2002), online at http://opus.kobv.de/tuberlin/volltexte/2002/32 A historical survey and critical analysis of the translations of the Sonnets into German from the beginning – the prose translations by J. J. Eschenburg (1787) – until the versions of Stefan George (1909) and Karl Kraus (1933). Most attention is given to the nineteenth-century versions and to the controversy between George and Kraus.

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Hortmann, Wilhelm, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), translated into German as Shakespeare und das deutsche Theater im XX. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 2001) A worthy sequel to Simon Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage. Volume 1 (below), with special emphasis on the broader cultural and political contexts of Shakespearean practice in Germany in the twentieth century. The book features a special section by Maik Hamburger on Shakespeare performances in the German Democratic Republic. Huang, Alexander Cheng-Yuan, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) This richly illustrated volume conveys a vivid sense of the variety of Chinese responses to Shakespeare. It shows multiple Shakespeares and multiple Chinas interacting in many different contexts. Being a study in cultural translation, it provides theoretical and historical contexts for the study of the translated texts themselves. HyperHamlet: the cultural history of Shakespeare’s play in quotations, online at http://www.hyperhamlet.unibas.ch/ A unique database of quotations from Hamlet in English and a wide range of other languages, offering evidence of the pervasive effect of Shakespearean translation operating below the level of complete texts through isolated phrases and quotations. Index Translationum: World Bibliography of Translation, online at www.unesco.org/culture/xtrans/ This online, regularly updated comprehensive list of translations is a powerful tool to identify foreign-language renderings of Shakespeare, especially more recent ones. In the current ranking [Spring 2012] the Bard occupies the third position following Agatha Christie and Jules Verne, and preceding Enid Blyton and Lenin. Jansohn, Christa (ed.), William Shakespeare. ‘A Lover’s Complaint’: Deutsche Übersetzungen von 1787–1894 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1993) After a discussion of the original poem, Jansohn quotes and analyzes the twelve German translations she managed to unearth: the first one, in prose, by J. J. Eschenburg (1787), the last one, in verse, by Alfred von Mauntz (1894). This is one of the very few studies dealing with the renderings of Shakespeare’s narrative poetry.

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Johnson, Lemuel A., Shakespeare in Africa (and Other Venues): Import and the Appropriation of Culture (Trenton, NJ, and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 1998) Johnson moves freely between criticism (with Othello and The Tempest receiving most attention), discussions of Shakespearean appropriations worldwide, and diverse other, more or less related issues. Its postmodern élan prevents the work from delivering the systematic survey that the title may have led the reader to expect, but there are several useful starting points for the student of African Shakespeare translations. Kahn, Ludwig, Shakespeares Sonette in Deutschland (Strassburg: Heitz & Co., 1934) A historical survey and stylistic analysis of German translations of the Sonnets. Sidelining the eighteenth-century efforts (like the prose renderings by J. J. Eschenburg), the author begins his narrative with the ‘romantische’ [romantic] translations of the early nineteenth century; he goes on to discuss a number of ‘bürgerliche’ [bourgeois] translations from later in the century before zooming in on the ‘aristokratisch-unbürgerliche Antinaturalismus’ [aristocratic-non-bourgois antinaturalism] of Stefan George’s versions. The versions by Karl Kraus are acknowledged but were too recent to be discussed at the time of writing. Kennan, Patricia, and Mariangela Tempera (eds), International Shakespeare: The Tragedies (Bologna: CLUEB, 1996) The fourteen papers collected here express a common interest in processes of cross-cultural appropriation and share a conviction that Shakespeare Studies would be better off without British blinkers. The papers look into a variety of themes including the challenge posed by the international Shakespeare traditions to the myth of Englishness, the political significance of German Hamlet appropriations, the ideological background of Bulgarian productions of Macbeth, the history of Hamlet in Poland, the theatrical career of Macbeth in Milan, and the difficulty of staging Coriolanus in Italy. Kennedy, Dennis (ed.), Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) This pioneering collection of essays claims attention for modern Shakespearean theatrical productions outside the English language. Translations are mainly viewed from the performance angle.

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Kennedy, Dennis, ‘Shakespeare Worldwide’ in: de Grazia, Margreta, and Stanley Wells (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 251–64. A few case studies are selected and analysed in such a way as to create a spatio-temporal and a cultural-ideological framework for the worldwide reception of Shakespeare. Ranging translation along with other modes of reception, Kennedy looks into the cases of Germany (which illustrates how nationalist motives played an important part in the eighteenth century), India (illustrating colonial and post-colonial strategies from the nineteenth century onwards) and Japan (where Shakespeare was discovered more recently in the context of an interculturalist agenda). Kennedy, Dennis, and Yong Li Lan (eds), Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) This sequel to Dennis Kennedy’s Foreign Shakespeare (above) focuses its attention on modern Shakespearean theatrical productions outside the English language and outside Europe. Much valuable attention is devoted to interlingual and intercultural translation in performance. Kerr, Heather, Robin Eaden and Madge Mitton (eds), Shakespeare: World Views (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1996) A wide-ranging collection of essays, dealing with ‘translations’ as diverse as Bertolt Brecht’s Hamlet, Jean-François Ducis’ Othello, and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. International performances of Shakespeare receive much attention. Kob, Sabine, Wielands Shakespeare-Übersetzung: Ihre Entstehung und ihre Rezeption im Sturm und Drang (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000) Christoph Martin Wieland’s prose translations of Shakespeare – the first comprehensive Shakespearean translation project in German (eight volumes, 1762–1766) – were to be eclipsed by the Schlegel-Tieck versions. This study puts Wieland centre stage and examines more in particular the intricate relations between Wieland’s translation and the Storm and Stress movement, concluding that there has indeed been influence in several ways. Kocourek, Rostislav, Michael Bishop and Lise Lapierre (eds), Le Shakespeare français: sa langue/The French Shakespeare: His Language (special issue of Alfa, vol. 10/11) (Halifax: Dalhousie University, 1997/ 1998)

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No fewer than twenty-five conference papers are brought together in this volume, addressing various aspects of French (including FrenchCanadian) Shakespeare translation past and present. Despite the absence of an index and other forms of editorial guidance, this volume should be compulsory reading for all those interested in French translations of the Bard. Lambert, Ladina Bezzola, and Balz Engler (eds), Shifting the Scene: Shakespeare in European Culture (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004) The proceedings of the 2001 Basel ESRA conference, which gave central attention to historical, linguistic and cultural differences in the European afterlives of Shakespeare, and to translation as a way to bridge or negotiate them. Larson, Kenneth E., and Hansjoerg R. Schelle (eds), The Reception of Shakespeare in Eighteenth-Century France and Germany (special issue of Michigan Germanic Studies, 15:2) (Ann Arbor, MI: Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 1989) This slim volume offers a well-documented and level-headed scholarly discussion of early translations and criticism in the two nations which led continental Europe in the discovery and appreciation of Shakespeare. Kenneth Larson’s two contributions are particularly worthwhile. Leek, Robert H., Shakespeare in Nederland (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1988) This Dutch book is based on an English PhD thesis defended at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1972. It is a comprehensive and well-documented survey of Shakespeare’s translations and theatrical career in the Netherlands from the seventeenth-century beginnings all the way into the 1980s. The author’s stance is that of the evaluative critic. LeWinter, Oswald (ed.), Shakespeare in Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 [1963]) A well-known anthology bringing together in English translation long extracts of Continental Shakespeare criticism, with French (from Voltaire to Jean-Louis Barrault) and German selections (from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to Hugo von Hofmannsthal) dominating the field. The editor’s emphasis on canonized culture, coupled with a neglect of ‘minor’ European cultures, and his belief in the relative autonomy of the aesthetic response are hardly convincing today. In neither the editorial matter nor

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the selections much importance is attributed to translation as such. Helpful background reading. Litvin, Margaret, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011) The book examines the many reworkings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait. The author’s journey of discovery starts in 1952. The use of Hamlet in the theatre and in political discourse involves linguistic and cultural translation. The book traces the distinct phases of Hamlet’s naturalization as an Arab, using personal interviews as well as scripts and videos, reviews, and detailed comparisons with French and Russian Hamlets. Loomba, Ania, and Martin Orkin (eds), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 1998) In an effort to bring about a rapprochement between Shakespeare Studies and Post-colonial Studies, the fourteen essays in this collection discuss issues of race and nationhood, showing the emergence of colonial practices and discourses in early modern Britain, the appropriations of Shakespeare within both colonial strategies and strategies of resistance, and the Bard’s positions in the so-called post-colonial world of today. Most essays show a strong theoretical commitment to Gender Studies. On the whole, little thought is given to the politics of translation between hegemonic English and the various colonized languages, but students of Shakespeare translation, especially those working in a non-European frame, will find this book very stimulating. Matei-Chesnoiu, Monica, Shakespeare in the Romanian Cultural Memory. With a foreword by Arthur F. Kinney (Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006) A study of Shakespeare’s cultural and political functions in Romania, including a close examination of productions, translations, literary adaptations and criticism. Matei-Chesnoiu, Monica (ed.), Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century Romania. With a foreword by Ton Hoenselaars (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2006) and Matei-Chesnoiu, Monica (ed.), Shakespeare in Romania, 1900– 1950. With a foreword by Stanley Wells (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2007) These twin books are carefully edited collections of essays discussing the emergence of a Shakespearean culture in Romania as a cultural model and

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an inaugurator of modernity, later drawn into political conflicts. Translations are discussed along with critical and theatrical appropriations. Mateo Martínez-Bartolomé, Marta, La traducción del humor: las comedias inglesas en español (Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo, 1995) Combining insights from Descriptive Translation Studies, pragmatics and humour studies, the book investigates the specific problems involved in translating comedies. Two twentieth-century translations of Much Ado About Nothing are discussed (besides plays by Ben Jonson, William Wycherly, R. B. Sheridan, Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward). Mathijssen, Jan Willem, The Breach and the Observance: Theatre retranslation as a strategy of artistic differentiation, with special reference to retranslations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1777–2001) (Utrecht: s.l., 2007), also online at http://www.dehamlet.nl/ Mathijssen studies why Hamlet has been retranslated for the Dutch theatre so many times between 1777 (first Dutch Hamlet performances in The Hague and Rotterdam) and 2001 (six versions and adaptations performed in the Netherlands alone). The author deals with retranslation in and for the theatre specifically: the translator is networked interactively with other social agents who are involved in the theatrical process such as the director (often the commissioner of the translation), other members of the production crew, the dramaturge and even the audience and the critics. Monaco, Marion, Shakespeare on the French Stage in the Eighteenth Century (Paris: Didier, 1974) This important book provides a detailed discussion of French stage adaptations from the siècle des lumières, illustrating the wide gap that existed between the published translations (which were showing increasing levels of philological rigour: e.g. Pierre Le Tourneur) and the versions intended for the stage (which entailed far-reaching modes of adaptation: e.g. Jean-François Ducis). Mooneeram, Roshni, From Creole to Standard: Shakespeare, Language, and Literature in a Postcolonial Context (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009) This sociolinguistically inspired study describes the history of the national – Creole – language of Mauritius and the process of standardization that it is undergoing in post-colonial times. It focuses on the work of Dev

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Virahsawmy, who, particularly through his Shakespeare translations, has been an active agent in this process of standardization. Morse, Ruth, ‘François-Victor Hugo and the Limits of Cultural Catalysis’, Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011), 220–30 This paper offers a reassessment of the cultural significance and the tremendous (but often overlooked) impact of François-Victor Hugo’s translation of the complete Shakespeare canon into French (1859–1865). Müller-Schwefe, Gerhard, Corpus Hamleticum: Shakespeares Hamlet im Wandel der Medien (Tübingen: Francke, 1987) A semiotically inspired study which considers the extraordinary range of cross-genre and/or cross-media ‘translations’ that Hamlet has given rise to, including ballet, film, opera, parody, performance, and so on. Traditional interlingual translations are touched on occasionally. Multicultural Shakespeare. Translation, Appropriation, Performance (Lodz: Lodz University Press, 2003–) An international journal devoted to Shakespeare as a global phenomenon. Multicultural Shakespeare appeared for the first time in 1972 as Shakespeare Translation (Japan). Since then it has undergone various changes: in 1986 it became Shakespeare Worldwide: Translation and Adaptation and in 2003 it took on its present title. Oakley-Brown, Liz (ed.), Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England (London and New York: Continuum, 2011) Humanism and the reformation were closely intertwined with the Early Modern regime of translation, and the essays in this volume of criticism demonstrate just how intensely these processes informed the shaping of identities and discourse in the period. The chapters variously use translation as a trope, consider Shakespeare’s translated afterlives, or consider the traces left by his classical sources, by the language of Tyndale’s Bible, or by the harsh routines of teaching Latin through translation in Elizabeth’s grammar schools. All highlight translation as a key concept that reveals fascinating subtexts for Shakespeare and unlocks a range of original readings. O’Shea, José Roberto (ed.), Accents Now Known: Shakespeare’s Drama in Translation. Special issue of Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies (nr 36) (Florianópolis: Editora da UFSC, 1999)

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For non-Brazilian readers this volume may be difficult to obtain, but it generously repays the effort. It combines survey papers as well as more specific case studies, being rather unique in the impressive range of target cultures it manages to span: Scotland, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Finland, Russia, Quebec, Brazil, South Africa, and Japan. Most papers come with an excellent bibliography. O’Shea, José Roberto, and Daniela Lapoli Guimarães (eds), Mixed with Other Matter: Shakespeare’s Drama Appropriated. Special issue of Ilha do desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies (nr 49) (Florianópolis: Editora da UFSC, 2005) A follow-up to O’Shea (1999) (above), this volume offers a generous collection of case studies looking at instances of Shakespearean appropriation through translation (e.g. the translation of Shakespeare’s sexual puns into Spanish, the rendering of Henry V’s multilingualism in Portuguese) or otherwise. Paul, Fritz, and Brigitte Schultze (eds), Probleme der Dramenübersetzung, 1960–1988: Eine Bibliographie (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1991) An indexed listing of scholarly studies of drama translation. Offering no annotations and operating within much narrower constraints (translationrelated and scholarly work only), this bibliography is much slimmer and less ambitious than that of Blinn (see above), but it casts its net wider in other respects. Dealing with drama translation generally, it does not confine itself to Shakespeare. It also covers research done on Shakespeare translations into a variety of target languages other than German. Paulin, Roger (ed.), Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007) A collection of papers which studies the influence of Shakespeare on European national literatures in the eighteenth century as well as on music and the visual arts. The main focus is on England, France and Germany. Pemble, John, Shakespeare Goes to Paris. How the Bard Conquered France (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005) A reader-friendly but idiosyncratic and selective account of Shakespeare’s conquest of France, which the author describes as ‘a cardinal event in the secular traffic of European culture’. The narrative begins in the early eighteenth century and ends in the recent past; besides Shakespeare himself, Voltaire is its main character.

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Petrone Fresco, Gaby, Shakespeare’s Reception in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Case of ‘Hamlet’ (Bern: Peter Lang: 1993) The reception of Hamlet is discussed as a representative case of Shakespeare’s appreciation in eighteenth-century Italy. While part I sketches the general context, with anglomania budding despite the dominance of neoclassical poetics, part II homes in on Hamlet and reviews the panorama of critical opinions (including Antonio Conti, Augustus Ralli, Voltaire, Giuseppe Baretti), and part III considers the translations of the play, giving special attention to Alessandro Verri’s unpublished Hamlet. Pfister, Manfred, and Jürgen Gutsch (eds), Shakespeare’s Sonnets For the First Time Globally Reprinted: A Quatercentenary Anthology, 1609–2009 (Dozwil TG Schweiz: Edition SIGNAThUR, 2009) An anthology of hundreds of translations and versions of the Sonnets in over seventy languages and dialects. The book is subdivided into 73 alphabetically arranged ‘contributions’, each dealing with a particular area or target language and being prefaced by an informative headnote which sets the translations in their literary and historical contexts. The anthology covers a range of dialects and minority languages as well as major target languages and furthermore renderings into visual languages, sign languages, Esperanto, Latin and Klingon. The book comes with a data-disc with audio recordings, among many other features. Pujante, Ángel Luis, and Laura Campillo (eds), Shakespeare en España: textos 1764–1916 (Granada: Universidad de Granada, and Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 2007) This book does for Spanish what Brian Vickers’ William Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 1774–1801 (6 vols. Rpt. London and New York: Routledge, 1996) did for English-language critical responses to Shakespeare. It is an indispensable background to the history of Spanish Shakespeare translations. Pujante, Ángel Luis, and Ton Hoenselaars (eds), 400 Years of Shakespeare in Europe. With a foreword by Stanley Wells (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003) A record of the proceedings of the important 1999 Murcia conference on ‘Four Centuries of Shakespeare in Europe’. Three papers deal with translation specifically; the others investigate related forms of cultural appropriation. The book comes with a comprehensive bibliography on ‘Shakespeare in European Culture’.

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Pujol, Dídac, Traduir Shakespeare: Les reflexions dels traductors catalans (Lleida: Punctum & Trilcat, 2007) The author gives an introductory chapter on the reception of Shakespeare in Europe (England, France, Germany) and on the history of Catalan translations of Shakespeare, before presenting sixteen fully annotated prefaces and essays by Catalan translators, who reflect on the task of rendering Shakespeare’s plays and poems into their language. This anthology begins in the late nineteenth century when the Catalan Shakespeare tradition emerged and goes as far as 2004. Roger, Christine (ed.), Shakespeare vu d’Allemagne et de France des Lumières au Romantisme (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2007) This volume brings together thirteen papers delivered at a conference at the University of Amiens in April 2006. It focuses on a key period in the European reception of Shakespeare, when the first complete translations start appearing and Shakespeare finds his way to the stages of France and Germany. The papers look at different dimensions of this process: the translations and adaptations, criticism and debate, and the complex influence on local aesthetic norms and practices. Roger, Christine, La Réception de Shakespeare en Allemagne de 1815 à 1850: Propagation et assimilation de la référence étrangère (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008) A lengthy monograph which takes a close look at the absorption of Shakespeare into mainstream German culture in the decades leading up the failed March 1848 revolution. In that period debates continue about the conditions which are necessary for a national German theatre to take shape and about the role a German Shakespeare can play in this process. The cultural transfer of Shakespeare comprises a surprising range of manifestations: editions, translations, journals, almanacs, anthologies, iconographic documents, critical essays and books. Ryuta, Minaim, Ian Carruthers and John Gillies (eds), Performing Shakespeare in Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) The introduction and fourteen papers in this book investigate a number of key aspects, moments and personalities in Japan’s theatrical reception of Shakespeare, with special emphasis on Japan’s modern and postmodern theatre from the 1970s onwards.

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Sanchez, Nicolas, L’Étoffe dont sont faits les sous-titres. 3 vols (PhD thesis, Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, 2009) This is the first full-length study to be devoted to the translation of Shakespeare for the screen. A wide range of Shakespearean and other examples are used to explore the specificities of subtitling as a heavily constrained and therefore rather special, but also increasingly important form of Shakespeare translation. The thesis then zooms in on the French subtitles made by Jacqueline Cohen for three Shakespearean films: Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet (both Kenneth Branagh), and Titus (Julie Taymor). The author of ‘The Stuff that Subtitles are Made of ’ concludes that a good subtitled version amounts to a perfectly valid form of translation, indeed to a truly artistic and creative achievement, and is therefore worthy of greater visibility and respect. Sanderson, John D., Traducir el teatro de Shakespeare: Figuras retóricas iterativas en ‘Ricardo III’ (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2002) The book’s first part covers theoretical issues including the specificity of translating for the theatre and the importance of classical rhetoric for Shakespeare. The descriptive part then concentrates on the rendering of iterative rhetorical figures such as alliteration, anaphora, epanalepsis, and so on, in eight Spanish translations of Richard III, the most recent of which being the author’s own version from 1998. Sasayama, Takashi, J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (eds), Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) No student of Japanese Shakespeare translations can afford to overlook the cross-cultural analyses and comparisons presented here between Japanese and Western conceptions of Shakespeare. The eighteen contributions include a chronological table of Shakespeare productions in Japan (1866–1994) and discussions of a wide range of translations or adaptations, viewed in theatrical terms. Schabert, Ina (ed.) Shakespeare-Handbuch: Die Zeit, der Mensch, das Werk, die Nachwelt. Fourth edition (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000) While representing an older stage of scholarship, this German reference work remains an authoritative survey of Shakespeare Studies written from a European viewpoint. The fourth part of the book discusses Shakespeare’s reception in Britain, the United States and Europe. In addition to tracing the international Shakespearean traditions in critic-

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ism, the theatre, painting, film and music, this Handbuch also covers the major translations in Germany and (to a lesser extent) beyond. Schwerin-High, Friederike von, Shakespeare, Reception and Translation (London and New York: Continuum, 2005) This book provides a comparative analysis of Shakespeare’s reception and translation in Japan and Germany, focusing especially on twelve translations of The Tempest produced in the two different languages from 1798 to 1994. It uses a target-oriented focus inspired by polysystem theory. Semenenko, Aleksei, ‘Hamlet’ the Sign: Russian Translations of ‘Hamlet’ and Literary Canon Formation (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2007) This semiotically inspired study examines the history of Hamlet in Russia from 1748 until the present with special attention given to the analysis of the canonical translations, the theatre productions of the Shakespearean classic and the phenomenon of Hamletism. Intersemiotic translations are discussed too, like the 1964 film by Grigori Kosintsev. Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (1865–) (between 1964 and 1992 published separately in West and East Germany) Published by the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, this German annual is the oldest Shakespearean periodical still in existence. Its volumes contain a wealth of information on Shakespeare’s translations and reception in (and, occasionally, beyond) Germany. Shakespeare Worldwide: Translation and Adaptation (formerly Shakespeare Translation) (Tokyo: Yushodo Shoten, 1974–2003) This periodical, born out of the first World Shakespeare Congress (Vancouver 1971), never quite managed to establish itself as an important research forum, but, despite its erratic rhythm of publication and its inconsistent level of scholarship, it has over the years made available an abundance of material, much of it documenting the reception of Shakespeare beyond Europe. See also Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation, Performance (above). Shakespeare Yearbook (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990–) The series deals with all aspects of Shakespeare and his period, with particular emphasis on theatre-oriented, comparative and interdisciplinary studies. From its fourth issue (1993) onwards each volume of this

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annual has a main theme. Translations and other aspects of Shakespeare’s reception abroad have been given considerable attention in several of the themed volumes which have focused on France, Hungary, Japan, Italy, the Low Countries, Asia, and so on. Smidt, Kristian, Shakespeare i Norsk Oversettelse: En Situasjonsrapport (Oslo: University of Oslo, Institute for British and American Studies, 1994) A normatively oriented assessment of all published Norwegian-language Shakespeare translations since 1923. This report was authored in Norwegian by one of the doyens of European Shakespeare Studies. Str˘íbrný, Zdene˘k, Shakespeare and Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) This compact volume manages to give a comprehensive account of Shakespeare’s way into the whole of Eastern and East Central Europe, starting with the visits by the English strolling players during Shakespeare’s lifetime up to the post-communist present. Translators and translations are discussed along with other aspects of reception, including film (Grigori Kozintsev), music (Sergei Prokofiev), theatre (Bertolt Brecht) and criticism (Jan Kott). Symington, Rodney, The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare: Cultural Politics in the Third Reich (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006) This monograph brings together the results of comprehensive research into Nazi cultural policy and its effect on the works of Shakespeare in the period 1933–1945. The author explains how the Nazis took over the Shakespearean heritage (presenting Shakespeare as a Germanic, Nordic figure celebrating ideals of heroism, leadership and community) and made it work for them through their translation policy (as well as through performances and even the scholarship done at German universities). Target (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 1989–) This refereed journal covers all aspects of the discipline of Translation Studies, including literary as well as non-literary translation. The articles, discussions and book reviews in Target play an important part in reflecting and fuelling the discipline’s methodological and theoretical debates, thereby presenting concepts and issues that invite application to Shakespearean translation.

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The Translator (Manchester: St Jerome, 1995–) Along with Target (above), this journal is among the most dependable and lively forums for translation research today. A number of articles have specifically addressed aspects of Shakespearean translation: Susan Bernofsky’s ‘Schleiermacher’s Translation Theory and Varieties of Foreignization: August Wilhelm Schlegel vs. Johann Heinrich Voss’ (3:2 [1997], 175–92), Rui Carvalho Homem’s ‘Of Negroes, Jews and Kings: On a Nineteenth-Century Royal Translator’ (7:1 [2001], 19–42), and David Kinloch’s ‘Questions of Status: Macbeth in Québécois and Scots’ (8:1 [2002], 73–100). The Yearbook of English Studies 36:1 (2006) This issue of The Yearbook of English Studies (ed. Nicola Bradbury) explores the theme of translation in English literary texts, film, dance and drama from the Greek classics, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the Bible, to Kenneth Macmillan, Tolkien, and Tony Harrison. Four contributions are specifically devoted to Shakespeare (Rodney Stenning-Edgecombe, Ton Hoenselaars, Raphael Lyne and Ruth Morse). Toury, Gideon, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 1995) This book is the most powerful statement of the ideas of Gideon Toury, one of the pioneers and leading thinkers in Translation Studies. Among other things, Toury makes a case for descriptive, empirically-oriented translation research, he stresses the importance of duly contextualising translations within the receiving culture, and he posits the fundamental importance of norms in translation. His theoretical argument is systematically backed up by case studies, some of them dealing with Hebrew translations of Shakespearean texts: the Sonnets, the tragedies, and Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. Translation Studies Abstracts (Manchester: St Jerome), online at https://www.stjerome.co.uk/tsa/ This online abstracting service is a comprehensive resource for scholars and students working in translation and intercultural studies. It provides quick and reliable access to research on Shakespearean translation published in the Translation Studies literature. Translation Studies Bibliography (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins), online at http://benjamins.com/online/tsb/

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Like Translation Studies Abstracts (above) this is a very powerful research tool. The search word ‘Shakespeare’ yields no fewer than 250 hits. Trivedi, Poonam, and Dennis Bartholomeusz (eds), India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005) A fundamental collection of papers on diverse aspects of the interaction between Shakespeare and India, a process embedded in the contradictions of colonialism and post-colonialism. The essays are grouped around the key issues of translation, interpretation and performance. The many topics dealt with include Shakespeare’s perception of India, the teaching of Shakespeare in India, and the catalyzing effects of Shakespeare in Indian theatre and cinema. Venuti, Lawrence (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader. Third edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) A carefully edited and commented collection of ‘classic’ essays on translation and translation theory. There are a few occasional references to Shakespeare. Weber Henking, Irene (ed.), Translating Shakespeare. Traduire Shakespeare. Tradurre Shakespeare (Lausanne: Centre de traduction littéraire, Université de Lausanne, 2001) This fortieth issue of the Travaux du Centre de traduction littéraire contains four substantial papers on Shakespeare in translation. One essay focuses on the Italian translator Eugenio Montale. The renowned French translator Jean-Michel Déprats contributes a wide-ranging essay on various problématiques de la traduction shakespearienne. Two further essays deal with Italian, French and German renderings of the Sonnets. Weiss, Wolfgang, Shakespeare in Bayern – und auf Bairisch (Passau: Verlag KarlStutz, 2008) The first monograph to deal with dialect translation of Shakespeare. It focuses on renderings in Germany’s regional languages and dialects, especially on Bavarian ones. Williams, Simon, Shakespeare on the German Stage. Volume 1: 1586–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) An illustrated history of the performance and reception of Shakespeare’s plays on the German stage from the English strolling players in the late

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sixteenth century until the outbreak of World War I. Stage history being the author’s main concern, most attention is given to translations and adaptations that made an impact in the theatre. For the sequel to Shakespeare on the German Stage. Volume 1, see Hortmann (above). World Shakespeare Bibliography, online at www.worldshakesbib.org/ Besides a wealth of other items, this standard reference tool lists translations of Shakespeare worldwide, as well as scholarly studies on the translation and reception of Shakespeare. Zaro, Juan J., Shakespeare y sus traductores: análisis crítico de siete traducciones españolas de obras de Shakespeare (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007) The author discusses seven Spanish Shakespeare translations covering a wide time span from Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s Hamlet (1798) until El mercader de Venecia (The Merchant of Venice) by Vicente Molina Foix (1995). Zhang, Xiao Yang, Shakespeare in China: A Comparative Study of Two Traditions and Cultures (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1996) Despite their late introduction, Shakespeare’s works soon exerted a massive influence upon Chinese theatre and culture. This monograph traces this process, starting from a comparative study of the Shakespearean and Chinese dramatic traditions and moving on to examine the interactions between the two. Theatrical, cultural, philosophical and political perspectives help define the contexts in which the translators worked to produce a Chinese Shakespeare.

Abbreviations and References

Abbreviations ABBREVIATIONS USED IN NOTES ann. ed. eds EU V. n. rev. edn rpt. trans.

annotated editor/edited editors European Union following pages note revised edition reprinted translator/translated

ABBREVIATIONS FOR WORKS BY AND PARTLY BY SHAKESPEARE AC AW AYL CE Cor Cym DF E3 Ham

Antony and Cleopatra All’s Well That Ends Well As You Like It Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Double Falsehood King Edward III Hamlet v 317 v

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1H4 2H4 H5 1H6 2H6 3H6 H8 JC KJ KL LC LLL Luc MA Mac MM MND MV MW Oth Per PP PT R2 R3 RJ Son STM TC Tem TGV Tim Tit TN TNK TS VA WT

King Henry IV, Part 1 King Henry IV, Part 2 King Henry V King Henry VI, Part 1 King Henry VI, Part 2 King Henry VI, Part 3 King Henry VIII Julius Caesar King John King Lear A Lover’s Complaint Love’s Labour’s Lost The Rape of Lucrece Much Ado about Nothing Macbeth Measure for Measure A Midsummer Night’s Dream The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor Othello Pericles The Passionate Pilgrim The Phoenix and Turtle King Richard II King Richard III Romeo and Juliet Sonnets Sir Thomas More Troilus and Cressida The Tempest The Two Gentlemen of Verona Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Twelfth Night The Two Noble Kinsmen The Taming of the Shrew Venus and Adonis The Winter’s Tale

References

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References NOTE ON EDITIONS USED References to Shakespeare’s works are to the Arden Shakespeare, except where a particular textual point necessitates quotation from another edition, or where a translator may have relied on another edition. Unless otherwise stated, all Arden references are to The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, edited by Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan (Walton-on-Thames, 1998). WORKS REFERRED TO Aaltonen, Finnish Aaltonen, Time-Sharing Abbott Alekseev A´lvarez & Vidal Anderson

Andre`s & Lefe`bfvre Anzai Arens

Arguin Ashcroft

Sirkku Aaltonen, Acculturation of the Other: Irish Milieux in Finnish Drama Translation (Joensuu, 1996) Sirkku Aaltonen, Time-Sharing on Stage: Drama Translation in Theatre and Society (Clevedon, UK, 2000) E.A. Abbott, A Shakespearian Grammar, 2nd edn (London, 1870) M.P. Alekseev (ed.), Shekspir I Russkaya Kultura [Shakespeare and Russian Culture] (Moscow, 1965) Roma´n A´lvarez and Carmen A´frica Vidal (eds), Translation, Power, Subversion (Clevedon, UK, 1996) Judith H. Anderson, ‘Translating investments: the metaphoricity of language: 2 Henry IV, and Hamlet’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40:3 (1998), 231–67 Bernard Andre`s and Paul Lefe`bfvre, ‘“Macbeth” / The´aˆtre de la Manufacture’, Cahiers de the´aˆtre jeu 11 (1979), 80–8 Tetsuo Anzai, ‘Directing King Lear in Japanese translation’, in Sasayama, Mulryne & Shewring (124–37) J.C. Arens, ‘Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1–810): a Dutch translation printed in 1621’, Neophilologus 52 (1968), 421–30 Maurice Arguin, ‘Le joual les quat’fers en l’air’, Que´bec franc¸ais 35 (Oct. 1979), 56–8 Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London and New York, 2001)

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Ashcroft, GriYths & TiYn Astrana Marı´n Axton & Williams AYL (Ard2) AYL (Oxf1) Bagno

Baker Baker, Encyclopedia Banham & Jones Barker & Hulme Barnstone Bartenschlager

Bartlett

Barton Bassnett Bassnett, ‘Meek’

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Thomas & Flamand TN (Ard2) Tornqvist Toury Translation Theories Explained The Translator

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inde x

Aaltonen, Sirkku 62 Abbott, E.A. 81n, 198n Abend-David, Dror 289 Accents Now Known (ed. José Roberto O’Shea) 307–8 Adaptations of Shakespeare (ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier) 15 Africa 16, 24, 25, 270–86, 290, 293, 295, 302, 308 African National Congress (ANC) 271, 274, 275 Agarez Medeiros, Helena 289 Agincourt 35 Ahrens, Rüdiger 196 Albrecht Knaus Verlag 161–2 Aljubarrota, battle of 122 Allan, Martin 219, 221–5, 233–4 Allô Police (Quebec) 268n All’s Well That Ends Well 49–51, 59–60 Alternative Shakespeares (ed. John Drakakis) 292 Alternative Shakespeares 2 (ed. Terence Hawkes) 292 Alternative Shakespeares 3 (ed. Diana E. Henderson) 292 Amiens 310 Andrews, John F. 183n Anouilh, Jean 26n Anti-During (Friedrich Engels) 87 Antony and Cleopatra 46, 63, 64–5, 139, 213 Antwerp 5, 292 Anzai, Tetsuo 13, 303 Aran and Titus (Jan Vos) 300

Archer, William 64 Arden (third series) 184, 191 Arden of Faversham 254n Arden Shakespeare, The 184, 191 Argentina 247 Aristophanes 218 Aristotle 112 Arles (France) 147 Around the Globe 19, 66n Asia 16, 23, 291, 303, 313 As You Like It 58, 63, 77–80, 81n, 87, 90, 205, 213, 247 As You Like It (trans. Omar Peréz) 249 Austria 184 Authorized Version. See King James Bible Avignon. See Festival d’Avignon A.W. Schlegels Shakespeare-Übersetzung (Peter Gebhardt) 298 Ayer, Jacob 6 Babbitt, Irvine 108, 112, 113n Baker, Mona 201, 289–90 Balkans 299 Baranczak, Stanisław 95 Barcelona 254 Baretti, Giuseppe 309 Barnstone, Willis 2 Barrault, Jean-Louis 304 Bartenschlager, Klaus 193 Bartholomeusz, Dennis 315 Bartlett, John 187 Barton, John 276 Basel 198n, 304

v 343 v

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Bassnett, Susan 19, 23, 25n, 53–67, 116, 126, 135, 270 Bassnett-Maguire, Susan. See Bassnett Susan Bataillon, Michel 147n Bate, Jonathan 2 Baudissin, Count Wolf von 153, 188 Bauer, Roger 290 BBC Shakespeare 95 Beardsley, Aubrey 64 Beckett, Samuel 293 Beddows, Joël 255 Beijing University 109 Bélair, Michel 258 Bellay, Joachim du 260 Belles Soeurs, Les (Michel Tremblay) 259 Belsey, Catherine 58 Benhamou, Anne-Françoise 147n Benjamin, Walter 25n, 54 Bergson, Henri 102 Berlin 159, 163 Berlioz, Hector 13–14 Berne Convention (1886) 165n Bernofsky, Susan 314 Besson, Benno 90, 158 Bestrafte Brudermord, Der [The Fratricide Punished] (Anon.) 6 Bian, Zhi Lin 99–101 Bible, The, 2, 44, 218, 293, 307, 314. See also Geneva Bible, King James Bible, Luther Bible Billings, Timothy 27n Billington, Michael 20, 21 Bishop, Michael 303 Blake, N.F. 198n Blakemore Evans, G. 101 Blinn, Hansjürgen 290 Blyton, Enid 301 Bogdanov, Michael 56 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas 112 Boito, Arrigo 64 Bojilov. Bojidar 94 Boleyn, Anne 51 Boltz, Ingeborg 193–4 Bonnefoy, Yves 26n, 290 Borgia, Lucrezia 64 Borgmeier, Raimund 290 Böttger, Adolph 152, 165n Bouchet, André du 135 Bourdieu, Pierre 257 Bowman, Martin 218

Bradbury, Nicola 314 Bradley, A.C 63 Bradshaw, Graham 290-1 Branagh, Kenneth 250, 295, 311 Brandenburg 156 Brasch, Thomas 156 Brazil 301 Brecht, Bertolt 12, 13, 20, 53, 106, 110, 111, 140, 158, 273, 291, 293, 296, 297, 303, 313 Breffort, Alexandre 80n Brennecke, Ernest 5 Brewster, Yvonne 65 Brisset, Annie 254n, 255, 261, 266, 267n, 268n, 291 British Deaf News 213 British Sign Language (BSL) 2, 199–213 Brönnimann, Werner 24, 26n, 184–98 Brook, Peter 80n, 90, 147n Brown, John Russell 20, 276, 291 BSL. See British Sign Language Buffery, Helena 291 Bulgaria 23, 82–97, 293, 299, 302 Burbage, Richard 172, 180 Burke, Peter 2 Burne-Jones, Edward 59 Burns, Robert 218 Burton, Richard 56 Buthulezi, Chief Mangosuthu 274, 286n Byatt, A.S. 19 Caballero, José 248 Cadieux, Anne-Marie 268n Cahiers du théâtre Jeu 265 Campbell, O.J. 123–4 Campillo, Laura 309 Canada 15, 255–69 Candidus, Irmentraud 152 Cantinflas 251 Cao, Wei Feng 99–101 Capell, Edward 202 Carlson, Marvin 291–2 Carribean 252 Carrière, Jean-Claude 135, 145, 147n Carruthers, Ian 310 Castilia 122 Celan, Paul 17 Centre des Acteurs Dramatiques (CEAD) 268n Centre de traduction littéraire (Lausanne) 315

Index Cetera, Anna 292 Chambers, E.K. 183n Chaucer, Geoffrey 314 Chaudhuri, Sukanta 292–3 Chekhov, Anton 53, 291 Chew, Shirley 270, 293 China 98–113, 301, 316 Chinese Shakespeares (Alexander C.Y. Huang) 301 Christie, Agatha 301 Cinthio, Giambattista Giraldi 106 Classe, Olive 293 Claus, Hugo 26n Clavel, Maurice 142 Clemen, Wolfgang 193, 195 Clytemnestra 64 Cohen, Jacqueline 311 Cohn, Albert 5 Cohn, Ruby 293 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 59, 63 Comedy of Errors, The 72–4, 87, 213 Come les guste [As You Like It] (trans. Omar Peréz) 247 commedia dell’arte 124 Commercial Press (China) 99 Communist Manifesto, The (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) 87 Communist Party Press 87 Complete Works (eds Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor) 124, 171 Concordance (John Bartlett) 187 Confucius 98 Consejo Real y Supremo de las Indias 240 Conti, Antonio 309 copyright and translation 148–66 Copyright Court (Leipzig) 158–9 Coriolanus 63, 198n, 302 Coriolanus (Bertolt Brecht) 111 Corpus Hamleticum (Gerhard MüllerSchwefe) 307 Costa Rica 254n Courtship of Miles Standish, The (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) 188 Covent Garden 63 Coward, Noël 248, 306 Creede, Thomas 149 Critique of the Gotha Program (Karl Marx) 87 Croatia 299

345

Croll, Dona 65 Crossing Space and Time (eds Carla Dente and Sara Soncini) 295 Cruz, Ramón de la 26n Cuba 247 Cunhal, Álvaro 292 Cunningham, Henry 202 Curtis, Jean 142 Cycle Shakespeare (dir. Robert Lepage) 268–9n Cymheline 51 Cyrano de Bergerac (trans. Edwin Morgan) 218 Czechoslovakia 84, 89, 299 Czech Republic 95 Danter, John 148 Darnton, Robert 55 Davenant, Sir William 8, 15, 164 Dávidházi, Péter 293–4 Decline of Feudalism and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie (Friedrich Engels) 87 Défense et illustration de la langue québécoise (Michèle Lalonde) 260 Delabastita, Dirk 5, 18, 23, 25, 27n, 31–52, 289–316, 294 Delisle, Jean 295 Dent, R.W. 194 Dente, Carla 295 Depardieu, Gérard 295 Déprats, Jean-Michel 12, 13, 24, 133–47, 147n, 295, 315 Derrida, Jacques 6, 12, 21–2, 25n, 26n Description of England, The (William Harrison) 198n Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Gideon Toury) 314 Deutsche Shakespeare, Der (Hansjürgen Blinn) 290 Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft 312 Deveson, Tom 19 Dhlomo, Herbert 273–4, 286n D’hulst, Lieven 294 Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales 60 Dimitrov, Ludmil 97n D. Luís de Bragança, King of Portugal. See Luís de Bragança, King of Portugal Dobson, Michael 295 Dolle Bruyloft, De [The Mad Wedding] (Abraham Sybant) 6

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Doorslaer, Luc van 297–8 Doran, Greg 275–7, 285 Douglas (John Home) 218 Douglas, Gavin 228, 231–2 Drakakis, John 292 Dresen, Adolf 155, 158, 163 Dryden, John 8, 15, 164 Ducis, Jean-François 8, 60, 61, 298, 300, 303, 306 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 292 Duse, Eleonora 64 Duthie, G.I. 183n Eaden, Robin 303 Eagleton, Terry 3 Early Modern English Dictionaries Database 198n East Berlin Volksbühne 158 Eco, Umberto 11 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Karl Marx) 105 Edmondson, Paul 19, 27n Edwards, Gale 56 Edwards, Philip 101, 102, 183n Egypt 305 Elam, Keir 115, 121, 123 Eliot, T.S. 113n Elizabeth I, Queen of England 58 Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English (ed. Olive Classe) 293 Eneados (trans. Gavin Douglas) 228, 231–2 Engels, Friedrich 87 Engler, Balz 187, 189 Enter Lear: The Translator’s Part in Performance (Anna Cetera) 292 Erckenbrecht, Ulrich 10, 295–6 Eschenburg, J.J. 9, 300 Espasa Borràs, Eva 294 Essais (Michel de Montaigne) 4 Études anglaises 296 European Shakespeares (eds Dirk Delabastita and Lieven D’hulst) 294 Evans, Edith 58 Every Man out of his Humour (Ben Jonson) 183n Ewbank, Inga-Stina 18, 22, 293, 296 Ezpeleta Piorno, Pilar 296 Faerie Queene, The (Edmund Spenser) 192

Farber, Yael 24, 277–86, 286n Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs 295 femme fatale 64–5 Festival d’Avignon 142 Filippo, Eduardo de 26n Findlay, Bill 218 Finland 308 Finnegans Wake (James Joyce) 26n Fischer, Andreas 196 Fischlin, Daniel 8, 15, 267 Fitz, Linda 63 Flatter, Richard 152, 155, 300 Flaubert, Gustave 160 Fletcher, John 297 Florio, John 149 Foakes, R.A. 113n Foix, Vicente Molina 316 Folio 295 Fontane, Theodor 155 Foreign Shakespeare (ed. Dennis Kennedy) 302 Forest, The (Alexander N. Ostrovsky) 162–3 Fortier, Mark 8, 15, 267 Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (eds A. Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars) 309 France 26n, 44, 55, 134, 255–6, 259, 290, 294, 296, 304, 308, 310, 313 France, Peter 297 ‘François-Victor Hugo and the Limits of Cultural Catalysis’ (Ruth Morse) 307 Frank, Armin Paul 297 Frankfurt 162, 163 Franssen, Paul 294 Franz, Wilhelm 187, 198n ‘French history of Henry V, A’ (JeanMichel Déprats) 295 Fried, Erich 153, 155, 300 Fritz, Ulrike 197n From Creole to Standard (Roshni Mooneeram) 306–7 Fugard, Athol 277 Fukuda, Tsuneari 81n Gambier, Yves 297–8 Garneau, Michel 16, 255, 256, 265–7, 267n, 268n Garrick, David 8, 13 Gaulle, Charles de 15, 260

Index Gauthier, Daniel 268n Gebhardt, Peter 298 Geertz, Clifford 54 Geneva Bible 4 Gentzler, Edwin 116 George, Charlton 277 George, Stefan 26n, 165n, 300, 302 Gerbel, Nikolay 96 Germain, Jean-Claude 261–3, 265, 267, 268n German Democratic Republic (former) 299, 301 Germany 26n, 151, 153, 154, 155, 184, 217, 294, 299, 301, 303, 304, 308, 310, 312, 315 ‘Gestus and the Popular Theatre’ (Maik Hamburger) 140 gestus-theory 12–13, 140–1 Gide, André 26n, 135, 137, 142, 145 Gilbert, Helen 261 Gillies, John 310 Gjuzel, Bogomil 95 Glasgow 218 Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive 298 Globe theatre 58 Goebbels, Joseph 164 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 9, 17, 155, 164, 293 Goldberg, Jonathan 6, 25n Golder, John 298 Golding, Arthur 4, 51 Goldoni, Carlo 53 Gomez da Torre, Manuel 129n Góngora, Luis de 122–3 Gonzáles Fernándes de Sevilla, José Manuel 298 Gower, John 46 Graat, de, Michael 290 Grandmont, Eloi de 267n Granville-Barker, Harley 139 ‘Great Feast of Languages, A’ (Dirk Delabastita) 294 Greece 45 Greenaway, Peter 303 Greenblatt, Stephen 183n Greg, W.W. 170 Gregor, Keith 299 Greifswald 158 Guardian 56 Guimarães, Daniela Lapoli 308

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Gulf War (Desert Storm) 65 Gundolf, Friedrich 152, 155, 165n Günther, Frank 26n, 153, 155, 156 Guntner, J. Lawrence 299 Guo, Mo Ruo 111 Gurik, Robert 16, 259–61, 265, 267 Gutsch, Jürgen 309 Gutiérrez, Joaquín 254n Habicht, Werner 193 Haefs, Hanswilhelm 161–2 Hague, The 4, 306 Hall, Edward 149 Hall of Healing (Sean O’Casey) 161 Hallström, Per 26n Hamburger, Maik 12–13, 24, 140, 148–66, 301 Hamlet 6, 17, 23, 51, 60–1, 63, 67n, 83, 84, 87, 95, 98–109, 135, 142, 152, 154–5, 169–83, 188, 197n, 203, 219, 226–8, 264, 265, 289, 293, 294, 296, 298, 300, 301, 302, 303, 305, 306, 307, 309, 311, 312, 314, 316. See also the following (tr)adaptations: Bestrafte Brudermord, Der (Anon.); Hamlet, prince du Québec (Robert Gurik); Ur-Hamlet Hamlet (dir. Kenneth Branagh) 311 Hamlet (trans. Yves Bonnefoy) 145 Hamlet (trans. Bertolt Brecht) 303 Hamlet (trans. Adolf Dresen and Maik Hamburger) 158–9 Hamlet (trans. Jean-François Ducis) 300, 303 Hamlet (trans. Leandro Fernández de Moratín) 316 Hamlet (trans. André Gide) 135, 137, 139, 140–1, 142, 145, 154–5 Hamlet (trans. François-Victor Hugo) 145 Hamlet (trans. Matthias Langhoff and Heiner Müller) 158–9 Hamlet (trans. Antonine Maillet) 268n Hamlet (trans. Ellie McDonald) 219, 226–8 Hamlet (trans. Jean-Louis Roux) 259 Hamlet (trans. Alessandro Serpieri) 169–83 Hamlet, prince du Québec (Robert Gurik) 16, 259–61 Hamlet’s Arab Journey 305

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‘Hamlet’ the Sign (Aleksei Semenenko) 312 Handbook of Translation Studies (eds Yves Gambier and Luc Van Doorslaer) 297–8 Harlem Duet (Djanet Sears) 297 Harrison, Tony 314 Harrison, William 198n Hart, A. 183n Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, The (Marvin Spevack) 187 Harvard University 95, 112 Hattaway, Michael 299 Hawkes, Terence 52n Hazlitt, William 114 ‘Hell’s-Handsel o Leddy Macbeth, The’ (trans. Edwin Morgan) 219, 229, 232–4, 238–9 Henderson, Diana E. 292 Heneker, David 80n Henry V (dir. Kenneth Branagh) 295 Henry V (dir. Laurence Olivier) 293 Henschel (publishers) 158–9 Hermans, Theo 116, 305 Heylen, Romy 300 Hibbard, G.R. 124, 125, 183n Hill, Aaron 289 Hilský, Martin 95 Hodgdon, Barbara 277 Hoenselaars, Ton 1–27, 292, 300, 314 Hofmann, Norbert 300 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 304 Holinshed, Raphael 149 Holst, Adriaan Roland 26n Home, John 218 Homem, Rui Carvalho 23, 114–29, 292 Horstmann, Gesa 300 Hortmann, Wilhelm 301 Householders Philosophic, The (Thomas Kyd) 179 Huang, Alexander C.Y. 301 Hughes, Arthur 61 Hugo, François-Victor 9, 138, 145 Hugo, Victor 112 Hungary 84, 89, 293, 294, 313 Hussey, S.S. 198n HyperHamlet 301 Ibsen, Henrik 53, 110 Iliad (Homer) 103 Iliad (trans. Alexander Pope) 94

‘Illustrators, Actors and Translators’ (Luigi Pirandello) 62 Independent 19, 66n Index Translationum 301 India 291, 303, 315 India’s Shakespeare (eds Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz) 315 Inkatha Freedom Party 274, 275 International Shakespeare (eds Patricia Kennan and Mariangela Tempera) 302 Ionesco, Eugène 293 Irace, K. 183n Iraq 305 Ireland 35 Irma la Douce (Alexandre Breffort) 68–9, 80 Iser, Wolfgang 116 Italian Shakespearians, The (Marvin Carlson) 291–2 Italy 26n, 44, 64, 126, 170–83, 294, 302, 309, 313 Jakobson, Roman 168 James I and VI, King of England and Scotland 217–18 Jansohn, Christa 301 Japan 23, 68–81, 110, 290–1, 303, 307, 308, 310, 311, 312, 313 Jarry, Alfred 293 Jenkins, Harold 173, 183n Johannesburg 270–86 Johnson, Lemuel A. 302 Johnson, Samuel 59, 112 Johnston, David 254n Jonson, Ben 183n, 306 Jordan 305 Jouve, Pierre Jean 135, 142 Joyce, James 26n Julius Caesar 18, 24, 31–2, 33, 82, 152, 217, 259, 277–80, 281–3. See also SeZaR (trans. Yael Farber) Julius Caesar (trans. Solomon T. Plaatje) 278 Julius Caesar (trans. Jean-Louis Roux) 259 Kahn, Ludwig 302 Kaut-Howson, Helena 60 Kellner, Leon 187 Kelly, Jude 56

Index Kemp, Robert 218 Kennan, Patricia 302 Kennedy, Dennis 20, 281, 302–3 Kerr, Heather 303 Kerrigan, John 124, 125 Ketcher, Nikolay 84 King Henry IV, Part 1 5, 41–2, 247. See also Ten Oorlog (Tom Lanoye) King Henry IV, Part 2 32. See also Ten Oorlog (Tom Lanoye) King Henry V 5, 12, 21, 35–9, 40–1, 46, 49, 58, 190–1. See also Ten Oorlog (Tom Lanoye) King Henry VI, Part 1 47, 49, 51. See also Ten Oorlog (Tom Lanoye) King Henry VI, Part 2 34, 47, 52. See also Ten Oorlog (Tom Lanoye) King Henry VI, Part 3 47. See also Ten Oorlog (Tom Lanoye) King Henry VIII 5, 43, 51, 60 King James Bible 25n King John 60 King Lear 15, 63, 83, 87, 166n, 190, 191–3, 198n, 202, 263–5, 292. See also Lear (tradaptation Jean-Pierre Ronfard) King Lear (dir. Grigori Kosintsev) 111 King Lear (trans. Álvaro Cunhal) 292 King Lear (Nahum Tate) 15 King Richard II 32, 34, 94, 139–40, 142, 189. See also Ten Oorlog (Tom Lanoye) King Richard III 17, 195, 265, 311. See also Ten Oorlog (Tom Lanoye) Kinloch, David 314 Kinney, Arthur F. 305 Kinoshita, Junji 81n Kishi, Tetsuo 23, 68–81, 290–1 Klein, Holger 197n Klingon Language Institute 26–7n Knowles, Richard P. 261 Kob, Sabine 303 Kocourek, Rostislav 303–4 Kosintsev, Grigori 111, 312 Kott, Jan 20, 66, 313 Koviloska-Poposka, Ivanka 95 Kraszewski, Jósef Ignacy 84 Kraus. Karl 26n, 300, 302 Krontiris, Tina 25n Kruger Park 286n Kuwait 305

349

Kyd, Thomas 5, 175, 179 Kyle, Barry 56 Lalonde, Michèle 260 Lambert, Ladina Bezzola 304 Lancashire, Ian 198n Langhoff, Matthias 158–9 languages Afrikaans 272, 273, 275–8, 286n Arabic 21 Basque 298 British Sign Language (BSL) 199–216 Bulgarian 82–97, 302 Castilian 123 Catalan 291, 296, 298, 310 Chinese 23, 98–113, 301, 316 Creole 306 Czech 84, 95 Dutch 4, 5, 6, 17, 294, 297, 300, 304, 306 English 1, 5, 18–19, 41–2, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 69, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 126, 133, 137, 138, 151, 161, 168, 205, 210, 258, 272, 273, 276–7, 291, 293, 294, 297, 301, 302, 303, 304, 307, 308, 309 English, American 17 English, broken 35, 50, 263 English, Early Modern 18, 20, 69, 134, 168, 169, 266 Esperanto 309 Flemish 16–17 French 46, 48, 49, 69, 80, 83, 90, 119, 123, 125, 126–7, 133–47, 256–60, 266, 290, 291, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300, 303–4, 304–5, 306, 307, 311, 315 French-Canadian 255–69, 291, 304 Gaelic 217 German 5, 9, 10, 69, 83, 87, 88, 140–1, 149–66, 184–98, 289, 290, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 308, 311–12, 313, 315 Greek 2, 44, 118, 128, 260 Hebrew 2, 21, 289, 314 Italian 46, 64, 90, 123, 124, 125–6, 170–83, 291, 295, 315 Irish 35 Japanese 23, 68–81 joual (Quebec) 15–16, 218, 239n, 257–69

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Klingon (Star Trek) 18 Latin 3, 4, 18, 42, 44, 47, 48, 51, 116, 118, 120, 260 Norwegian 313 North-East Doric (Scotland) 221–25 Polish 292, 299 Portuguese 118–29 Québécois 255–69, 291, 314 Romanian 299, 305 Russian 83, 90, 96, 163 Scots 16, 24, 35, 39, 217–39, 314 Spanish (Iberian) 119, 125, 240–54, 295, 298, 299, 308, 309, 311, 316 Spanish (Latin American) 240–54 Swahili 18 Tswana 273, 278–80, 281–2 Welsh 35, 41–2 Zulu 24, 271–5, 278–80, 281–2 Lanoye, Tom 16–17, 26n Lamprière’s Dictionary (Lawrence Norfolk) 161–2 Lapierre, Lise 303 Larson, Kenneth E. 304 Latella, Antonio 173 Latham, Agnes 81n Latin America 16, 250–4 Lavia, Gabriele 173 Lear (tradaptation Jean-Pierre Ronfard) 263–5, 268n Leek, Robert H. 268–9n, 304 Lefevere, Andre 25n, 116, 270 Le Havre 126 Leipzig 163 Leisi, Ernst 186 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 301 Lepage, Robert 268–9n Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 304 Le Tourneur, Pierre 13–14, 298, 304 LeWinter, Oswald 304–5 Lewis, C.S. 186 Liang, Shi Qiu 98–113 Liebermann, Rolf 162–3 Lieblein, Leanore 24, 255–69 Lim, Chee Seng 292–3 Literature Online (Chadwyck-Healey) 187–8 Litvin, Margaret 305 Llewellyn-Jones, Peter 2, 24, 199–216 Lochhead, Liz 218 London 80n, 151, 243 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 188

Loomba, Ania 305 Lorca, Federico Garcia 297 Lord Chamberlain’s Men 217 Lorimer, Robin LC. 16, 219, 228–36, 239n Lorimer, William Laughton 228, 229, 230 Lover’s Complaint, A 95 ‘Lover’s Complaint, A’ (Christa Jansohn) 301 Love’s Labour’s Lost 23, 48, 63, 114–29, 137, 248–54 Love’s Labour’s Lost (trans. Alessandro Modenessi) 248–54 Love’s Labour’s Lost (trans. Luis Astrana Marín) 254 Love’s Labour’s Lost (dir. Kenneth Branagh) 250 Love’s Labour’s Won 253 Low Countries, the 26n, 294, 297, 313 Lozinsky, Michail 93 Ludwig Feuerbach (Friedrich Engels) 87 Luís de Bragança, King of Portugal 17 Lu, Jiu Yuan 98 Luther Bible 159 Lüthi, Roland 198n Lu, Xun 103, 107, 109 Lyne, Raphael 314 Macbeth 16, 24, 39, 63, 83, 87, 88, 103, 110–11, 155, 160, 203–4, 217–19, 228–39, 245, 266, 271–5, 293, 296, 302, 314. See also ‘Pretender to the Throne, The’ (Anon.) Macbeth (trans. Martin Allen) 219 Macbeth (trans. Robin L.C. Lorimer) 16, 219, 228–36 Macbeth (trans. Edwin Morgan) 219, 229, 232–4, 238–9 Macbeth (trans. Welcome Msomi) 271–5, 279, 281, 297 Macbeth (trans. David Purves) 16, 219, 228, 231–2, 233, 236–7 Macbeth (trans. Friedrich von Schiller) 155 MACBETH de William Shakespeare (trans. Michel Garneau) 16, 256, 265–7, 267n, 268n Macedonia 95 Machiavelli, Niccolò 106 Macmillan, Kenneth 314

Index Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) 160 Maillet, Antonine 268n Majola, Bongani 286n Malone, Edmond 202 Mandela, Nelson 271, 274 Marín, Luis Astrana 246, 248, 254n, 295 Market Theatre (Johannesburg) 277 Marowitz, Charles 293 Marti, Markus 198n Marx, Karl 87, 105 Mary Tudor, Queen of England 122 Matei-Chesnoiu, Monica 305–6 Mateo, Martínez-Bartolomé, Marta 306 Mathijssen, Jan Willem 306 Matlou, Jubie 286n Matsuoka, Kazuko 81n Matthiessen, F.O. 4 Mauntz, Alfred von 301 McClean, Andrew M. 299 McClure, J. Derrick 24, 217–39 McDonald, Ellie 219, 225–8, 231 McDonald, Russ 19 McMillin, Scott 176 Measure for Measure 32–33, 63, 294, 296, 299 Medea 64 Meltke, Martin 156 ‘Memory, Ideology, Translation’ (Rui Carvalho Homem) 292 Merchant of Venice, The 17, 18, 21, 55 Merchant of Venice, The (trans. Vicente Molina Foix) 316 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 43, 44, 48, 87, 296 Mesguich, Daniel 142, 297 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 4, 51 Mexico 24, 240–54 Middleton, Thomas 5 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 4, 43–44, 58, 90, 141, 152, 156, 201–2, 213, 219, 293. See also When the Roses Dance (Valery Petrov) Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (trans. Richard Flatter) 152 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (trans. Erich Fried) 156 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (trans. Frank Günther) 156 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (trans. Ellie McDonald) 219, 225–6, 228, 238–9 Milan 302

351

miles gloriosus 123–4 Milev, Geo 83 Millais, John Everett 61 Mincoff, Marco 89, 90, 92 Mitton, Madge 303 Mixed with Other Matter (eds José Roberto O’Shea, Daniela Lapoli Guimarães and Stephan Arnolf Baumgärtel) 308 Mnouchkine, Ariane 135 Modenessi, Alfredo Michel 24, 240–54 Modern American School of Mexico 254n Modern Shakespeare Offshoots (Ruby Cohn) 293 Molière [Jean-Baptiste Poquelin] 53, 147, 218, 291 Monaco, Marion 306 Monnot, Marguerite 80n Montaigne, Michel de 4, 149, 293 Montale, Eugenio 315 Montreal 15, 218, 257, 259, 269n Mooneeram, Roshni 306–7 Moratín, Leandro Fernándes de 26n More European Shakespeares (eds Keith Gregor and A. Luis Pujante) 299 More, Julian 80n Morgan, Edwin 218, 219, 229, 232–4, 238–9 Morse, Ruth 307, 314 Mort de César, La (Voltaire) 289 Ms-directing Shakespeare (Elizabeth Schafer) 56 Msomi, Welcome 24, 271–5, 279, 281, 285 Much Ado About Nothing 52, 63, 197n, 212, 306, 311 Much Ado About Nothing (dir. Kenneth Branagh) 311 Müller, Heiner 158–9, 293, 297 Müller-Schwefe, Gerhard 307 Mulryne, J.R. 311 Multicultural Shakespeare 307, 312 Munich Kammerspiele Theatre 156 Murcia 299, 309 Musset, Alfred de 112 Narodna Kultura Publishing House (People’s Culture) 86, 87, 88, 90, 94 Narodna Prosveta Publishing House (People’s Education) 87, 88

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National Enquirer (Canada) 268n Naughton, John 290 Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare, The (Rodney Symington) 313 Neill, Michael 2 New Cambridge Shakespeare, The 101, 102, 184 Newman, Monty 80n New Testament 228, 229, 230 New Sites for Shakespeare (John Russell Brown) 291 Nijhoff, Martinus 26n Nikolov, Spas 95 Nobel Prize 90 Norfolk, Lawrence 161–2 Norma Editorial (publishers) 247 North, Thomas 149 Norway 110 Nouveau théâtre québécois, Le (Michel Bélair) 258 Nyerere, Julius K. 18 Oakley-Brown, Liz 307 O’Casey, Sean 161 Odashima, Yushi 81n OED 168, 187, 189 Ognyanov, Lubomir 85, 86–9, 92 Okrand, Mark 26n Olivier, Laurence 293 On Religion: An Anthology (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) 87 Orkin, Martin 24, 270–86, 305 O’Shea, José Roberto 307–8 Ostrovsky, Alexander N. 162–3 Othello 18, 21, 87, 106, 185–6, 187, 188, 189, 265, 297, 302, 303. See also the adaptation Harlem Duet (Djanet Sears) Othello (trans. Jean-François Ducis) 303 Ovid, 4, 33–4, 51. See also Metamophoses Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (eds Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells) 295 Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, The (ed. Peter France) 135, 297 Oxford Shakespeare, The 184 Oxford Textual Companion 192 Pagnol, Marcel 26n Pancheva, Evgenia 95

Paris 68, 80n, 127–8 Parti Québécois 255–6, 259 Partizdat (Communist Party Press, Bulgaria) 87 Passionate Pilgrim, The 95 Pasternak, Boris 26n, 93 Paul, Fritz 308 Paulin, Roger 207 Pavis, Patrice 26n, 147n Paz, Octavio 243 Pemble, John 308 Pérez, Omar 247 Performing Shakespeare in Japan (eds Minaim Ryuta, Ian Carruthers et al.) 310 Pericles 46 Peterson, Oscar 277 Petrarch [Francesco Petrarca] 89 Petrone Fresco, Gaby 309 Petrov, Valeri 90–3, 94, 96, 97n Peyret, Jean-François 147n Pfister, Manfred 309 Phèdre (trans. Edwin Morgan) 218 Philip I, King of Portugal 122 Philip II, King of Spain 122 Phoenix and Turtle, The 94 Pirandello, Luigi 62 Plaatje, Solomon T. 273, 278 Pléiade edition 135 Plutarch 4, 106 Plymouth Plantation 188 Poland 84, 89, 92, 95, 296, 299, 302 Pope, Alexander 94 Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste. See Molière Portugal 17, 118–29, 292, 294 Post-Colonial Shakespeares (eds Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin) 300 Pratt, Mary Louise 270, 285 ‘Pretender to the Throne, The’ (Anon.) 110–11 Price, Thomas 114 Probleme der Dramenübersetzung (eds Fritz Paul and Brigitte Schultze) 308 Prokofiev, Sergei 313 Prospero’s Books (dir. Peter Greenaway) 303 Proyecto Shakespeare (Mexico) 247 Pujante, A. Luis 299, 309 Pujol, Dídac 310 Purves, David 16, 219, 228–9, 231–41, 236–7

Index Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw) 267n Qin, Shi Huang 101 Qiu, Ke An 99–101 Quebec 15–16, 24, 239n, 255–69, 291, 308, 314 Queirós, Eça de 126–8 Radio Canada 257 Ralli, Augustus 309 Rama VI, King of Siam (Thailand) 18 Rape of Lucrece, The 95 Réception de Shakespeare en Allemagne, La (Christine Roger) 310 Reception of Shakespeare, The (eds Kenneth E. Larsson and Hansjoerg R. Schelle) 304 Reclam (publishers) 197n Redefining Shakespeare (eds J. Lawrence Guntner and Andrew M. McClean) 299 Redundanz und Äquivalenz (Norbert Hofmann) 300 Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre 60, 213 Reichert, Klaus 153 Reiss, Katharina 61 Retamar, Fernández 241, 253n The Revenger’s Tragedy (Thomas Middleton) 5 Ristori, Adelaide 391 Rites of Passage (Edwin Morgan) 229 Riverside Shakespeare, The 101, 187 Rodenburgh, Theodore 5 Rodéo et Juliette (Jean-Claude Germain) 261–3 Roger, Christine 310 Roller, Erika 152 Roman Revenge, The (Aaron Hill) 289 Romania 299, 305 Romantic Cult of Shakespeare, The (Péter Dávidházi) 293–4 Romeo and Juliet 13–14, 74–5, 83, 87, 95, 109, 139, 148, 152, 154, 155, 186, 210–11, 212, 213, 247, 251, 265. See also the following (tr)adaptations: Rodéo et Juliette (Jean-Claude Germain); Romeo et Juliette (Hector Berlioz) Romeo and Juliet (trans. August Wilhelm Schlegel) Roméo et Juliette (Hector Berlioz) 13–14 Ronfard, Jean-Jacques 263–5, 267

353

Roper, Derek 299 Rossi, Ernesto 291 Rotbuch (publishers) 159 Rothe, Hans 163–4, 300 Rotterdam 306 Roundhouse (theatre) 67n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 111–12 Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha) 289–90 Roux, Jean-Louis 259–60, 266, 267n, 268n Royal National Theatre (London) 206, 213 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 56, 57, 213 Russia 26n, 83, 84, 89, 252, 294, 305, 308, 312 Ryuta, Minaim 310 Said, Edward W. 2 Saldanha, Gabriela 289–90 Salic Law 49 Salome 49 Salter, Denis 266–7 Salvini, Tommaso 291 Sanchez, Nicolas 311 Sanderson, John D. 311 Sapir, Edward 54 Sarandev, Ivan 97n Sasayama, Takashi 311 Scandinavia 292 Schabert, Ina 303 Schafer, Elizabeth 56, 57 Schaller, Rudolf 155, 156, 300 Schelle, Hansjoerg R. 304 Schiller, Friedrich 9, 17, 155 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 9, 26n, 112, 152–3, 154, 155, 156, 298, 300, 303, 314 Schlegel, Friedrich 112 Schlegel-Tieck translation 9, 140, 152, 154, 166n, 217 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 117, 314 Schlösser, Anselm 158, 165n Schmidt, Alexander 101–2, 187 Schöne Sidea, Die [The Beautiful Sidea] (Anon.) 6 Schröder, F. L. 9 Schultze, Brigitte 301 Schwab, Werner 157

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Schwerin-High, Friederike von 312 Schwetzingen 163 Schwob, Marcel 26n ‘Scorned My Nation’ (Dror AbendDavid) 289 Scotland 16, 35, 217–39, 266, 308 Scott, Sir Walter 218 Sears, Djanet 297 Sekgobela, Hope Sprinter 284–5 Selected Works (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) 87 Sello Maaka ka Ncube 277 Semenenko, Aleksei 312 Serpieri, Alessandro 24, 167–83 SeZaR (trans. Yael Farber) 24, 277–80, 281–6, 286n Shaka 271, 274 Shakespeare and Eastern Europe (Zde˘nek St˘ribrny`) 304 Shakespeare and European Politics (eds Dirk Delabastita, Jozef De Vos and Paul Franssen) 294 Shakespeare and the French Poet (Yves Bonnefoy) 290 Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage (eds Takasi Sasayama, J.R. Mulryne, et al.) 311 Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity (ed. Liz Oakley-Brown) 307 Shakespeare-Bild, Das (eds Roger Bauer, Michael de Graat, et al.) 290 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 19, 67 ‘Shakespeare by Writers’ 247 Shakespeare en España (eds Ángel Luis Pujante and Laura Campillo) 309 Shakespeare en España (ed. José Manuel Gonzáles Fernándes de Sevilla) 298 Shakespeare for the Age of Reason (John Golder) 298 Shakespeare français, Le (eds Rostislav Kocourek et al.) 303–4 Shakespeare Goes to Paris (John Pemble) 308 Shakespeare-Handbuch (ed. Ina Schabert) 311–12 Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert (ed. Roger Paulin) 308 Shakespeare in Africa (Lemuel A. Johnson) 302 Shakespeare in Asia (eds Dennis Kennedy and Li Lan Yong) 303

Shakespeare in Bayern (Wolfgang Weiss) 315 Shakespeare in Catalan (Helena Buffery) 291 Shakespeare in Europe (ed. Oswald LeWinter) 304–5 Shakespeare in Europe (ShinE) 198n Shakespeare in Japan (eds Graham Bradshaw and Tetsuo Kishi) 290 Shakespeare in Nederland (Robert H. Leek) 304 Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century Romania (ed. Monica MateiChesnoiu) 305–6 Shakespeare i Norsk Oversettelse (Kristian Smidt) 313 Shakespeare in the New Europe (eds Michael Hattaway et al.) 299 Shakespeare in Romania, 1900–1950 (ed. Monica Matei-Chesnoiu) 305–6 Shakespeare in the Romanian Cultural Memory (Monica Matei-Chesnoiu) 305 Shakespeare Jahrbuch 312 Shakespeare Lexicon (Alexander Schmidt) 101, 187 Shakespeare on the French Stage (Marion Monaco) 306 Shakespeare on the German Stage [1] (Simon Willliams) 315 Shakespeare on the German Stage [2] (Wilhelm Hortmann) 301 Shakespeare on the Spanish Stage (Keith Gregor) 299 Shakespeare, Reception and Translation (Friederike von Schwerin-High) 312 Shakespeare Sechsundsechzig (Ulrich Erckenbrecht) 295–6 Shakespeare’s Globe 213 Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ Translated into Scots (trans. R.L.C. Lorimer) 16, 219, 228–36, 239n Shakespeare Society of the Low Countries 297 Shakespeare’s Reception in EighteenthCentury Italy (Gaby Petrone Fresco) 309 Shakespeare’s Sonnets For the First Time Globally Reprinted (eds Manfred Pfister and Jürgen Gutsch) 309

Index Shakespeares Sonett ’When forty winters’ (Raimund Borgmeier) 290 Shakespeares Sonette in Deutschland (Gesa Horstmann) 300 Shakespeares Sonette in Deutschland (Ludwig Kahn) 302 Shakespeare’s Stagecraft (J.L. Styan) 139 Shakespeare Thesaurus, A (Marvin Spevack) 188 Shakespeare Translation 295 ‘Shakespeare Translation as Cultural Exchange’ (Inga-Stina Ewbank) 293 Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse (Keir Elam) 115 Shakespeare vu d’Allemagne et de France (ed. Christine Roger) 310 Shakespeare without English (eds Sukanta Chaudhuri and Chee Seng Lim) 292–3 Shakespeare: World Views (eds Heather Kerr et al.) 303 ‘Shakespeare Worldwide’ (Dennis Kennedy) 303 Shakespeare Worldwide 312 Shakespeare y sus traductores (Juan J. Zaro) 316 Shao, Ting 99–101 Shaw, Fiona 58 Shaw, George Bernard 63, 165n, 267n, 297 Shen, Lin 23, 98–113 Sher, Antony 275–7, 285 Sheridan, R.B. 306 Shewring, Margaret 311 Shifting the Scene (eds Ladina Bezzola Lambert and Balz Engler) 304 Shurbanov, Alexander 23, 82–97 Siddall, Elizabeth 61 Sievers, Eduard 163 Simon, Barney 277 Simon, Sherry 256 Sládek, Jozef Václav 84 Słomczynski, Maciej 92 Slovakia 83 Smidt, Kristian 304 Smith, Bill 219, 220–1, 234 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Friedrich Engels) 87 Sociocritique of Translation (Annie Brisset) 291 Sofia 85, 90, 299 Sofia University 88, 96

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Sokolova, Boika 23, 82–97, 299 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 90 Soncini, Sara 295 Sonnets 13, 88, 89, 94, 217, 220–4, 290, 300 sonnet 2 290 sonnet 18 18 sonnet 29 219, 220–1 sonnet 30 222, 223, 224 sonnet 43 222, 224 sonnet 55 223, 224 sonnet 60 10–11, 223 sonnet 66 11, 295–6 sonnet 87 223 sonnet 90 223 sonnet 104 223 South Africa 270–86, 302 Spain 26n, 121–4, 249, 299, 308 Spanish Tragedy, The (Thomas Kyd) 5 Spencer, T.J.B. 183n Spenser, Edmund 40, 192 Spevack, Marvin 187 Sprache Shakespeares, Die (Wilhelm Franz) 187 Stamm, Rudolf 190 Stanislavski, Konstantin 107, 110 Star Trek 18, 27n Stationer’s Company 149 Statute of Anne (1709) 165n Stead, Alistair 270, 293 Steiner, George 121, 153, 270, 280 Stenning-Edgecombe, Rodney 314 Sternberg, Meir 45–6 Stratford-upon-Avon 19, 56, 57, 67, 213 Strehler, Giorgio 111 St˘ríbrny`, Zde˘nek 313 Strindberg, August 53 strolling players 5, 313, 315 Studienausgabe (Tubingen) 184–98 Styan, J.L. 139 Suerbaum, Margarete 196 Suerbaum, Ulrich 196, 197n Suga, Yasuo 81n Supervielle, Jules 135 Svintila, Vladimir 88, 89, 94 Swan theatre 213 Sweden 26n Switzerland 184 Sybant, Abraham 6 Symington, Rodney 313 Syria 305

356

Shakespeare and the Language of Translation

Taming of the Shrew, The 6, 33, 55–6, 58, 87. See also Dolle Bruyloft, De Tanzania 18 Tarantino, Quentin 17 Target 313 Tartuffe (trans. Liz Lochhead) 218 Tate, Nahum 15 Taylor, Elizabeth 56 Taylor, Gary 124, 125, 171, 183n Taylor, Joseph 172 Taymor, Julie 311 Teatro y traducción (Pilar Ezpeleta Piorno) 296 Tempera, Mariangela 302 Tempest, The 6, 40, 87, 111, 139, 196, 241, 247n, 293, 302, 312. See also Prospero’s Books (dir. Peter Greenaway); Schöne Sidea, Die (Anon.) Ten Oorlog (Tom Lanoye) 16–17, 26n Terry, Ellen 61 Thailand 18 Théâtre du Rideau Vert 268n Theobald, Lewis 125 There’s a Double Tongue (Dirk Delabastita) 294 Tieck, Dorothea 153 Tieck, Ludwig 9, 26n Tilley, Morris P. 194, 202 Timon of Athens 47, 105 Titus (dir. Julie Taymor) 311 Titus Andronicus 5, 51, 275–7, 278, 311. See also Aran and Titus (Jan Vos) 300 Tolkien, J. R. R. 314 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich 160 Tompkins, Joanne 261 Tourneur, Pierre le. See Le Tourneur, Pierre Toury, Gideon 314 Trabajos de amor perdidos [Love’s Labour’s Lost] (trans. Luis Astrana Marín) 254n tradaptation 16, 255–69 Traducció dalt de l’enscenari, La (Eva Espasa Borràs) 296 Traducción del humor (Marta Mateo Martínez-Bartolomé) 306 Traducir el teatro de Shakespeare (John D. Sanderson) 311 Traduir Shakespeare (Dídac Pujol) 310 Tragedie o Macbeth, The (David Purves) 16, 219, 228, 231–2, 233, 236–7

Tragelehn, B.K. 153 Translating Life (eds Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead) 291 Translating Shakespeare (ed. Irene Weber Henking) 315 Translating Shakespeare for the Twentyfirst Century (eds Rui Carvalho Homem and Ton Hoenselaars) 292 translation endolinguistic translation 2, 18, 46, 168 iconoclastic translation 267n identity forming translation 267n interlingual translation 2, 18, 45, 51, 168, 295, 303, 307 intralingual translation 2 intersemiotic translation 2, 43, 168, 175, 295, 312 perlocutionary translation 267n Translation, Poetics and the Stage (Romy Heylen) 300 Translation Studies Abstracts 314 Translation Studies Bibliography 314–5 Translation Studies Reader, The (ed. Lawrence Venuti) 315 Translator, The 304 Translators through History (eds Jean Delisle and Judith Woodsworth) 295 Trebitsch, Siegfried 165n Tremblay, Michel 218, 259 Trevis, Di 56 Trivedi, Poonam 315 Troilus and Cressida 45, 190, 191, 195. See also the adaptation Troiluswahn und Cressidatheater (Michael Wachsmann) Troiluswahn und Cressidatheater (adapted by Michael Wachsmann) 157 Troy 262 Tsubouchi, Shoyo 81n Tudor, Mary, Queen of England 122 Twelfth Night 19, 23, 58, 63, 69–72, 76–7, 81n, 156, 205, 259–60, 268n Twelfth Night (trans. Thomas Brasch) 156 Twelfth Night (trans. Frank Günther) 156 Twelfth Night (trans. Jean-Louis Roux) 259–60, 268n Twelfth Night (trans. Yasuo Suga) 81n Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 87

Index Übersetzung (eds Armin Paul Frank et al. 297 uMabatha (Welcome Msomi) 24, 271–5, 282, 285 UNESCO 295, 301 Ungaretti, G. 26n Universal Copyright Convention (1952) 165n Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México 247 University of Auckland (New Zealand) 304 University of Basel 198n University of Porto 129n University of Toronto 198n Ur-Hamlet 174–5, 177 Urkowitz, Steven 177 USSR (former) 93, 299 Utrecht 294 Valverde, José Maria 26n Vancouver 312 Vano afán del amor, El [Love’s Labour’s Lost] (trans. Alessandro Modenessi) 248–53 Venus and Adonis 4, 95 Venuti, Lawrence 26n, 117–18, 315 Vermeer, Hans 61 Verne, Jules 301 Verri, Alessandro 309 Vestris, Eliza 63 Vickers, Brian 309 Victoria, Queen of England 17 Vida, Hélène 162–3 View of the Present State of Ireland, A (Edmund Spenser) 40 Vígny, Alfred de 17, 112 Vilar, Jean 137, 147n Vincent, Jean-Pierre 147n Virahsawmy, Dev 307 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 231 Vitez, Antoine 143, 147 Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] 8, 289, 304, 308, 309 Voltaire’s ‘La Mort de César’ (Helena Agarez Medeiros) 289 Vos, Jan 300 Vos, Jozef de 294 Voss, Johann Heinrich 155, 314 Wachsmann, Michael 153, 156–7

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Wales 35 War and Peace (Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy) 160 Warren, Rosanna 128–9 Waterhouse, J.W. 61 Weber Henking, Irene 315 Weimar 155 Weiss, Wolfgang 315 Welles, Orson 292 Wells, Stanley 19, 124, 125, 171, 183n, 202, 295 Wertheimer, Jürgen 290 West Yorkshire Playhouse 56 When the Roses Dance (Valeri Petrov) 90 Wieland, Christoph Martin 9, 26n, 185 Wielands Shakespeare-Übersetzung (Sabine Kob) 303 Wilde, Oscar 306 Wilder, Billy 80n William Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage (ed. Brian Vickers) 309 Williams, Raymond 112n Williams, Simon 315–16 Winter’s Tale, The 52, 85, 87, 193–5, 196 Woman’s Prize, The (John Fletcher) 297 Woodsworth, Judith 295 WordCruncher 187 World Shakespeare Bibliography 316 World Shakespeare Congress (Vancouver) 312 World War I 315–6 World War II 84, 86, 93, 164 Wörterbuch (Leon Kellner) 187 Woudhuysen, H.R. 124, 125 Writers’ Union (Bulgaria) 91 Wu, Xing Hua 99–101 Wycherley, William 306 Yearbook of English Studies, The 314 Yong, Li Lan 303 Young, Douglas 218 Yuan, Shi Kai 110 Yugoslavia 95 Zaro, Juan J. 316 Zhang, Xiao Yang 316 Zhu, Sheng Hao 99–101, 102, 295 Zivojinovi, Branimir 95 Zola, Émile 107