- Shakespeare and the Language of Translation
As the late Inga-Stina Ewbank states in the foreword to this volume, the included essays "reflect and confirm a real change in the perception of the translation over the last decade" (ix). The change is further discussed by the editor, Ton Hoenselaars, in an informative and excellently written introduction. Translation studies, a relatively new academic discipline, go far beyond traditional historical research. Not concentrating only on the "correctness" or faithfulness of particular renderings of a literary work into foreign tongues, such studies attempt to reveal that meaning is not permanently rooted in the original text but is, to a large extent, determined by the context. And the latter evolves in time and across political and cultural boundaries; words change meaning over time, but they also have different meanings in different cultures. Thus, a translation's quality rests not in its lexical or idiomatic fidelity but in its ability to transcode the text along with its immediate context (referentiality and topicality); at the same time, in the case of literary texts, it must negotiate meanings created by the interacting elements of the verbal substance, along with external relationships to other literary works. Moreover, the case of drama adds yet another layer of translation, which arises from the text's transformation into a new system—the stage. This alteration is what Roman Jakobson labeled as transmutation or "intersemiotic translation" (discussed here on 168). We must not forget that whenever a translation is used in a theater production, the cultural and verbal contexts created by the translator are further contextualized by the director, who provides the material substance, the new and unique context, in which all the words are given new significance. Thus, it makes little sense to talk about "faithfulness," even if we knew what the original text meant to the early modern reader or spectator.
All of these issues are considered in the fifteen essays collected in this volume. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, "Words and Cultures," contains six essays that concentrate on the transcultural aspect of translation. Dirk Delabastita provides a survey of translation in Shakespeare's own plays, and the instances are discussed in a thorough theoretical context. Susan Bassnett and Tetsuo Kishi write about gendering plays in translation, while Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova demonstrate the role of political context in reading texts in translation. Similarly, Shen Lin gives further evidence of the political aspect of Shakespearean productions (including a shocking incident of a Chinese actor arrested and given a death sentence for playing in Macbeth), and [End Page 100] his discussion of the semantic complexities in the Chinese word "nature" sheds new light on how distant cultural contexts create unexpected meanings. The final essay is Rui Carvalho Homem's discussion of his own translation of Love's Labor's Lost into Portuguese.
A totally different angle of approach to the art of translation is presented in part 2, titled "The Translator at Work," written by professional translators. All the writers appear to share the conviction that a translator has to be a conscientious editor, knowingly selecting a scholarly edition, taking into account emendations and variant readings (including in the text of the translation what learned footnotes usually supply), finding equivalences for idioms and proverbs, and at times translating the untranslatable (as in the famous Hamlet crux, miching mallecho). Hence, the title of Alessandro Serpieri's excellent, although controversial, essay "The Translator as Editor: The Quartos of Hamlet." Other common ground includes consciousness of the need to translate cultural contexts. The essays written by Jean-Michel Déprats, Maik Hamburger, Alessandro Serpieri, Werner Brönnimann, and Peter Llewellyn-Jones give fascinating insights into the art of translation. The objections of a German lady, who criticized the new translation of Shakespeare presented in a theater because she had her "'original German Shakespeare'" on her bookshelf at home (160), are highly amusing. What was totally new to me were the problems connected with translating Shakespeare's plays into a sign language and the...