http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/mcwhorter/archive/2009/05/19/will-shakespeare-s-come-and-gone-does-the-bard-s-poetry-reach-us-like-august-wilson-s-come-on-really.aspx

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/mcwhorter/archive/2009/05/24/should-we-have-to-read-the-bard-before-hearing-him-more-on-shakespeare.aspx

McWhorter wrote an article back in the late 90s that influenced me to translate Shakespeare’s plays.

Kent Richmond

True, one can study the individual plays, reading them, re-reading them, reading the notes, learning about Shakespeare’s culture and his theater, and then attend an actual performance. But that’s not the way the plays were meant to be experienced. They were written to be experienced in live performance. Though some of us do, we can’t all devote this much time to Shakespeare studies–there are other things to learn about and experience in the world of the arts, and in the world of everything else.

On the other hand, as you say, the language is Shakespeare’s tool. Without the words, we’d have nothing, and much is lost–or, at least, altered–in translation.

But just as there are great writers, there are great translators. To say that one should never read or perform Shakespeare in translation is just the same as suggesting one should never see a movie with subtitles (ironically, both looked on as culturally “elite” activities). If one doesn’t read French, should one just ignore Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac”–or be required to learn French in order to enjoy it? What about Anthony Burgess’ excellent translation? A translation is a different work of art than the original, but it can still succeed in capturing much of the spirit, wit, characters, ideas, and emotions of the original, without needing an extra volume in order to understand it–in this way, a translation of a Shakespeare play is far truer to the immediacy of Shakespeare, which was as much a part of his work as the language.

That said, there is also very much a place for the study and performance of the texts as we find them in the Folio(s). The non-scholars among us still follow the story of a good performance and pick up on a good deal of the humor, drama, and intricacies of character that Shakespeare gives us. A good actor aided by a good director can make the language much more accessible and understandable, even if most of us are apt to lose a lot (unlike reading Shakespeare, performance is instantaneous and fleeting–there’s no time to go back and re-read a line for comprehension). The “music” of the language–and it is very poetic and very musical–remains entirely intact, and so does the meaning, to the extent that it is not lost on those watching and listening; after all, you just couldn’t ever, ever in a million years improve on some of Shakespeare’s perfect phrasing–Benedick’s “There’s a double meaning in that” or Hamlet’s “Methinks it is like a weasel” wouldn’t be half so funny or so brilliant if you changed any one of those words in any way imaginable, as vaguely archaic as the grammar or choice of words may be.

So let’s keep up the First Folio study and performances, and let’s lose this elitist attitude that only the folios will suffice and get some genuinely brilliant Shakespeare translators out there–we deserve some modern Shakespeare translations the equivalent of Burgess’ “Cyrano,” Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translations of Dostoevsky, or Gregory Rabassa’s Garcia Marquez. Only when we have all these different ways of accessing and understanding Shakespeare’s genius will we approach truly “original practices.”

I find it both interesting and refreshing that a Poet is less interested in the rules of Poesy,the ostensible justification for ‘emending’(a less offensive cryptic-ism for ‘correcting’)Shakespeare for hundreds of years, than in how Shakespeare brilliantly hammered against the bulwark of acceptability.

For me, there is no replacement for the Folio when it comes to interpreting and ‘translating’ his work, either in the literary or dramatic realm. Understanding Shakespeare as the gifted Musician he most certainly was can happen only when his ‘phrasing’ is accepted at face value in what we have as the closest approximations to the original ‘voicings’. It’s only then that it truly opens itself to interpretation, much the same as when Mahler, for instance, ‘interpreted’ Beethoven when conducting Ludwig’s symphonies. Color, imagery, phrasing, tempo, rhythm, mood, tone–all there to be discovered–and chosen, interpretively, and then appropriately measured and shaded by the ‘Player’. HERE is where the translating begins–and belongs.

Sure it takes a little longer to read Shakespeare–but “…copious amounts of time” ?

Spending copious amounts of time comes later–when you realize how much the little extra effort you spent, darting your eyes to find out what the hell ‘quietus’ means, has opened up an entire world of wit, philosophy, psychology, and insight into human nature quite like no other.

The Language and the way HE used it was The Way he created that World.
He IS the language and the Language Is HIM. Pull at the patchwork, the quilt unravels.
Any other type of ‘translating’ takes the tool of genius out of his hands and renders impotent the beauty and majesty of His Way of Communicating. It is his exact observance and his uncanny ability to record it that led him to the heights of his interpretive, dramatic, and Communication skills, enabling him to tell the story His Way. He needs no one to ‘explain’ him in Their Way.

Remove the language and you’ve buffed the facets off the diamond. Understanding His Wit with the language is necessary in order to really “get it’. We must go to the mountain. But the climb will be worth it. It’s the climb that transforms–the conversation (Communication) is much more interesting–and knowing– when we descend.

“Words, words, words.” They take a little Work, work, work.

The language has changed but not so much that it is entirely unintelligible. The stories, the words, and writing style are dramatically potent that I think that we are not limited to the choice of translating or abandoning the texts.

Word meanings, in addition to many words themselves have changed a great deal since the time these volumes were written. This fact alone means that the meaning is already being obscured by our own knowledge of modern english; we are not the intended audience of these plays. 500 years have passed and with them, nuances of meaning, double meanings, and words themselves have fallen out of use or changed, and this is not the fault of the modern reader. As the language has changed, so have the meanings of the works written with archaic linguistics. Shakespeare was a brilliant writer, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that, but his work is no longer digestible by the modern masses, leaving us with the choice to either abandon them (not likely), translate them, or spend copius amounts of time learning the language before reading them.