Along similar lines, Goethe’s 1812 adaptation of the play (based on Schlegel’s verse translation) presents a sanitized version, turning Romeo from a volatile youth to a more responsible man. Sampson: Me they shall feele while I am able to stand,Īnd tis knowne I am a pretie peece of flesh.Ĭhristoph Martin Wieland’s 1766 German version excised this scene in its entirety and begins with the encounter between Gregory, Sampson, Abraham, and Benvolio and the ensuing fight. Gregorie: They must take it in sense that feele it. Sampson: I the heads of the maides, or their maiden heads, I haue fought with the men, I will be ciuil with the Sampson: Tis all one, I will shew my selfe a tyrant, when The exchange between Sampson and Gregory in Romeo and Juliet presents an opportunity for innovation and self-censorship: Differences in grammatical structure aside, bawdy language and puns also pose a challenge.
Before a translation can be undertaken, decisions will have to be made on the register and gendered expressions to convey Orsino’s comments about love from a male perspective and Viola’s apology for a woman’s love when in disguise as Cesario in Twelfth Night, or the exchange between Rosalind in disguise as Ganymede and Oliver on her “lacking a man’s heart” when she swoons, nearly giving herself away.īut limitations create new opportunities and bring translation closer to an act of performative interpretation. In addition to making the right choice of employing the familiar or polite style based on the relation between the speaker and the addressee, the male and female speakers of Japanese are each confined to gender-specific personal pronouns at their disposal. Working with Japanese, a language more complex than English from a sociolinguistic point of view, a translator would have to wrestle with more than 20 first- and second-person pronouns to maintain the ambiguity and subtlety of gender identities in a play such as Twelfth Night. Sometimes it is translated as “to have” (but to have or not to have what!?), to do, to die, and so on. In a collage of recitations of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech in different languages, drawn from actual performances, the vague, versatile, and “Swiss-knife” verb “to be” is as ambiguous in English as it is in many other languages. For the English sentence to make sense, the aphorism will have to be elaborated to specify what message the translator conveys and what values he betrays, but the punning value of the epigram will be lost. Translating Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech into Japanese, for example, will require substantial rewriting, because Japanese does not have the verb “to be” without semantic contexts. While European translators can draw on the shared Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions, the farther a language is situated from early modern English culture the more creative strategies of displacement a translator will have to deploy. Translating Shakespeare involves new semantic, semiotic, and cultural contexts. Given that Shakespeare used translated materials extensively, it is not a surprise that his plays are among the most frequently translated works today. One is unsure whether Catherine is speaking the truth that she does not understand English well enough (“I cannot tell”) or just being coy-playing Harry’s game, though Catherine eventually yields to Henry V’s request: “Dat is as it shall please de roi mon père”. The “broken English” in the light-hearted scene symbolises Henry V’s dominance over Catherine and France after the English victory at the Battle of Agincourt. The peace negotiations dictate that the English monarch marries the daughter of Charles VI of France, uniting the two kingdoms. Henry V contains several instances of literal translation. Gertrude not only relays what Hamlet has just done but also provides her interpretations, as a translator would, of her son’s actions. Claudius speaks of Hamlet’s “transformation” and asks Gertrude to “translate” Hamlet’s behaviour in the previous scene so that Claudius can “understand … the profound heaves”.
Translation also served as a metaphor for physical transformation or transportation. And within Shakespeare’s plays, moments of translation create comic relief and heighten the awareness that communication is not a given. Translation of Shakespeare’s works is almost as old as Shakespeare himself the first German adaptations date from the early 17th century.