← Intelligence Squared
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- [00:00]
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Daniel Hahn
K Pop Demon Hunters Saja Boy's breakfast meal and Hunt Tricks Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that Rumi?
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Maithili Rao
It's not a battle.
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Daniel Hahn
So glad the Saja boys could take
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Commercial Announcer
breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
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It is an honor to share.
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Daniel Hahn
No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No really stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side the and participate in McDonald's while supplies last.
- [01:01]
Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. What does it mean to translate some of the most recognizable and revered works in the English language? And when the wordplay, poetry and syntax of Shakespeare are all changed, is it still truly Shakespeare? On today's episode, Daniel Hahn, award winning translator and author, joins our host Maithili Rao to discuss his new book, if this Be Magic, the Unlikely Art of Shakespeare and Translation and how Shakespeare's works are continually reshaped across languages, cultures and traditions. Let's join our host, Maithili Rao, now with more.
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Maithili Rao
Welcome to Intelligence Square.
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Daniel Hahn
Daniel thank you very much. Good to be here.
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Maithili Rao
Daniel. I want to start by saying just what a lively and unusual book if this be magic your new book is. You speak to translators of Shakespeare's plays working in Bangla, Hungarian, Brazilian, Portuguese, Turkish, German, Swahili, Mahari, French, Japanese, Chinese, Chinese, Danish. I think I've missed probably a few. And play by play, line by line, you really bring to life the many unusual challenges and opportunities of translation in these languages you write. Each language encodes information differently. So this is a book that takes on big questions about the nature of language. What constitutes the heart of a work of literature, a work of Shakespeare? It's also a book that makes space for lots of fun, geeky linguistic tangents Translation is definitely a misunderstood art. And early in the book, you cite a friend who says to you, Shakespeare can't be translated. Isn't that the whole point? So to start with, why was your friend wrong? And why is it important to translate Shakespeare in the first place?
- [02:47]
Daniel Hahn
Thank you. That's a lovely big question to start with. I think of translation as an interpretative act. In some ways, if I translate something and you translate something, we will produce different translations because we are different readers, because we use languages in different ways. We have words we like that are different. And the translations that we do are also limited by the possibilities of the languages we translate into. There are things that English is really good at, and those things Bangla might be really bad at, but there are also things that Bangla is really good at and English finds really difficult. So it's about taking opportunities. And one of the things that I think is interesting about that thing you quoted from that friend of mine who said, well, he can't be translated, isn't that. The point is, I think that it assumes that because translation is always going to be individual and it's always going to be partial, and it's always going to be a matter of making choices, going for this word rather than that word, then it's not worth. And I think you can make that argument. But if you make that argument, you have to make the argument that we don't perform him either, because every performance is also going to be choosing this way of doing it rather than that way of doing it. And one of the things that's amazing about, I think the conversations I had with those translators you mentioned, all those languages I got to talk to amazing translators is the ways in which they, I suppose, try to maximize how much of the Shakespeare they keep, but also how much they are able to take opportunities from the fact that Turkish allows them to do all sorts of things that actually Shakespeare would have struggled to do in English. So it's not just. I think there's this assumption that translation is always going to be kind of damage limitation. Basically, you try not to lose too much. And actually, if you think of it as an actor's kind of personal interpretation and expression with, like I say, the limitations and opportunities of a language and an individual, then I think it becomes something incredibly, incredibly valuable and interesting and surprising.
- [05:08]
Maithili Rao
In a sense. The story of this book really begins with your great grandfather Tristeau, who was responsible for the first translation of a Shakespeare play published in Brazil in 1933. And that was Hamlet. What did you learn about him? And his translation of Hamlet. And what connection does his work have with your own?
- [05:28]
Daniel Hahn
It's interesting because I've sort of always vaguely known that my great grandfather had done this thing. But it only occurred to me when I was some way into writing a book about Shakespeare translations that maybe the fact that my great grandfather translated Shakespeare was A, relevant and B, worth mentioning. So he does, in fact feature in the book. But it's only in retrospect that I can see that, well, it's sort of inevitable that I would end up writing this. I wrote an essay about translating Shakespeare as an undergraduate 30 years ago.
- [06:04]
Maithili Rao
This topic has been following you around.
- [06:06]
Daniel Hahn
It really has, or I it, one way or another. So I've known about his translation. It's an interesting one in a couple of respects. One of them is that he. It wasn't strictly speaking, the first translation of a play in Brazil. It was the first translation of a play directly from the English into Portuguese in Brazil, because Shakespeare had been translated, but via French. And I think that already tells you something about translation, but also about the role of different languages in Brazil at
- [06:33]
Maithili Rao
the time, these bridge translations, as they're called.
- [06:37]
Daniel Hahn
Right, exactly. Bridge translations. And so French was used as it was in many places, as Russian was used in other places as the source, if you like, for the translation into a third language. So that's one thing that I think is quite interesting and quite revealing about just the fact that he was translating from English and that no one had done that before. There have been plenty of translations into Brazilian Portuguese, but the fact that he was going directly from English is the thing that was the novelty in the early 1930s and 33. The other thing that I think is interesting about his translation and that I am sort of ambivalent about, is he decided, this is at the point when modernism was beginning to be a thing in Brazil, that the best way to produce Shakespeare in Brazilian Portuguese was to try and affect a Portuguese that is kind of. Kind of 17th century Portuguese to recreate something. It's not exactly, but it's got markers of 17th century Portuguese. And so he's putting on this sort of slightly phony literary oldie voice for reasons I understand. And I have translated 100-year-old books and wanted them to sound like 100-year-old English writing. I don't completely think it works. And it's an interesting decision. Now, I don't know any translators who will do that now. Partly because I feel like one of the things you get from translation is you get something that is produced For a reader or for an audience today, you know, it is sort of fresher than the original in some respects, but it's a curious one to look at this attempt to make Shakespeare sound like as it was then, 300-year-old text.
- [08:30]
Maithili Rao
You describe it as the temptation to make him sound grander than he is, right? Well, I think that's part of it, yeah.
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Daniel Hahn
I think it's trying to make him sound old, sort of venerable, and try to make him sound grand and trying to make him sound like poetry. Capital P, poetry. And one of the things that loses is the fact that when Shakespeare was writing, he was principally not writing in language that would have been 400 years old to his audience. Translations tend to bring. People who consume Shakespeare in translation are usually consuming something that has been brought closer to them. We English speakers are the ones who are sort of stuck with 400-year-old Shakespeare. No one else is in that position. Most people have Shakespeare that has been produced for them in the same way that our Chekhov in English is not normally 100 year old Chekhov. And so Teuchstel, my great grandfather's decision to do this sort of archaicizing thing feels to me like an interesting experiment, but I can't quite get over that. I can't quite get over the fact that it feels like an experiment, and it doesn't quite feel like it's people talking to each other, which is what you want, rather than that sense of, oh, here's a very old poem. I feel like we're being reminded of that in a way that is not helpful. But I also feel slightly guilty saying this because, you know, he was my grandmother's father and she adored him. And I don't want to be mean.
- [10:09]
Maithili Rao
Well, and I imagine, you know, for some people encountering his translation, that might have been their first encounter with this play or their only access to it. And, you know, he was trying to, I imagine, convey what felt important about its meaning and its grandiosity or so on. But like you said, there's so many live decisions translators have to make about language, about syllables, about rhyme, about words with multiple meanings, about jokes, about puns. You write about all of this in the book, and I wondered if you could share a few of your favorite translation puzzles and how some of the translators you spoke with used their own literary ingenuity to solve them.
- [10:59]
Daniel Hahn
Sure. I mean, I feel like there are some things that are obvious, as it were. I think people would guess that puns are going to be difficult, wordplay is going to be difficult. Because they are built around a word having two meanings, for example. But what interested me a lot of the time was that the things that really challenged translators were not so much the puns, though. They're difficult, and you take them apart, you look at the moving parts, and you build a new one in your new language out of similar moving parts. It was often the things that seemed much more straightforward in English that challenged the translators, and they required using certain ingenuity. I talked to an amazing Mori translator who was just working on Macbeth. When I talked to her, she's called Tehomihita Mason. And the line that she was struggling with was the line, are you a man? Lady Macbeth says to Macbeth, and you wouldn't think reading through Shakespeare plays that are you a man? Is going to be the difficult line. But often it was things that seemed quite simple, and often it was things that were very kind of granular. I'll give you one little concrete example. The first person I interviewed was a translator called Niels Bruntze, a Danish translator who's now completed the canon of plays. And he mentioned a line in Hamlet where Hamlet sees his father's ghost for the first time. And he, like most people, have been speaking in iambic pentameter. And it's been fairly regular, which means it's been going, dee dum da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum. And the lines start on a stressed syllable, like to be or not to be. And then Hamlet sees his father's ghost, and his line is, angels and ministers of grace defend us. This is Hamlet calling for aid, but also exclaiming in a moment of shock. He doesn't say angelic ministers of grace. He says angel. There's a really hard first syllable there, which is a way of Shakespeare giving an actor a kind of, you know, almost unavoidable, you know, bang at the beginning of the line. One of the things that I love about the really great translators I talk to is that they notice things on that level, and then they have to figure out how to do them. So if you're Niels Bruntzer, you have to notice that there is a little metric flip at the beginning of that line. And then you have to think, well, what can I do in Danish, which is not English, to create the same effect? In that instance, Niels basically produced a nine syllable line. He lopped the first syllable off, and you kind of come in with a second syllable. But in a way, the whole book is looking at the ways in which these amazing people I talked to found these really small things, but also then thought about the ways in which they could create those effects. English is a very monosyllabic language in lots of ways. How do you figure out, if you're a translator into Hungarian or into Turkish, into other agglutinative languages like Turkish, for example? How do you create the effect of really, really sharp little monosyllables that Shakespeare uses all the time, using whatever Turkish has available to you or Hungarian has available to you? So, yes, a lot of the time it's those very small and absolutely nerdy things, but which I feel revealed something about what Shakespeare is doing, because there is a reason you have a stressed syllable at the beginning of that line. And there is a reason King Lear uses monosyllables in really specific moments. But not only does it reveal something about Shakespeare, looking at it as a translator has to, and noticing these tiny. These little granular things, but also, I think these examples tell you something about translation, because you then have to figure out, well, what are you going to do if you're Emine Ayan, trying to make Turkish do something that does not come naturally to Turkish?
- [15:31]
Maithili Rao
And then there's also the ongoing problem of making out what Shakespeare meant in the first place, to the extent that we can. There is a specific example. You also talk about where chimney sweepers in some editions becomes dandelion, and that's not just in translation, but in English translations, English productions as well. Something that caused a bit of a stir for Shakespeare audiences a few years ago. Why can chimney sweepers become dandelions? What is that about?
- [16:07]
Daniel Hahn
So there was a theory some decades ago that has now, I think, not given much credence. But there was a theory some years ago that chimney sweepers was, I think, like a Warwickshire local dialect way of talking about dandelions. And there is a bit of a song in Cymbeline which ends, golden lads and girls all must like chimney sweepers come to dust. And the theory was that the golden lads, I think that's the line, I hope I have not misquoted it. Or golden boys is dandelions before they are in their full chimney sweep mode, as it were. And then they're chimney sweepers because they look like those brushes which you then, you know, they are blown out and they come to dust. There are lots of reasons, I think, not to believe this theory. Not least, I don't think those are the brushes that we use anyway. But it's a very nice idea. I think that actually what it's talking about is this flower that begins and it's golden. And then it turns into this thing that looks like a brush. And then it comes to dust. And it was suggested Emma Rice, when she was artistic director of the Globe, a brilliant director. And she said in an interview on. I think it was today. It was on a BBC radio interview. If we think that chimney sweepers means dandelions, maybe we could just swap the word chimney sweepers for the word dandelions. If we were doing a production of Cymbeline, it has the same number of syllables. It fits in the line really nicely. Golden lads and girls are must like dandelions come to dust. You end up bringing the meaning a little bit closer to an audience in the same way that a translation would, but it's not disrupting the song, not disrupting the meter, and so on. This was the end of the world, obviously, because people weirdly have no problem translating Shakespeare into 25,000 words of Polish. But the idea of changing any of the words in English, like even one of them, was obviously sacrilege. And so there was a big furor about this. One of the reasons it's interesting to me is that around the time when this theory was being given some kind of credence, the translations that were produced around that time took account of this. So translators often are doing research. They're looking at annotated editions, et cetera. And so there are some translations that were done 20 years ago where it is the word for dandelions rather than the word for chimney sweepers. And there is this kind of window between someone proposing the theory and the theory being basically disproved or debunked. When translations being produced around that time either use the word dandelions or use the word chimney sweeps, but had a little footnote saying, commonly believed to be. And like I say, translators are often having to do the kind of research that certainly would have been very difficult if My great grandfather, 100 years ago, translators are using annotated editions and the Internet and so forth. But it means you can almost trace the theories looking at when the translations were produced. Translations produced today of Cymbeline would not have dandelions in them. The Gabrielle Baldini translation of Cymbeline in the middle of the last century also would not have had dandelions in it because it precedes that theory. I really like that theory, and I'm sorry, it's probably not true because it's such a vivid.
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Maithili Rao
Yeah, it's a very vivid little metaphor. And the idea that this is a local vernacular is also fun to think about. But like you said, it's a series of choices. It's trial and error. It's trying to infer and make sense of a text and make it recognizable to a new audience. You mentioned Gabriel Baldini, and you write in the book about how he was married to the Italian writer Natalia Ginsburg, and how it's possible to find traces of her interests in his translations, which is another fun, unexpected thing about translation, where it's not only influenced by specific languages and what languages can do and can't do and how they work, but also the translator as a artist or just a human in themselves. What do you notice about Baldini's work? I mean, you write about it in a lot of contexts. The Ginsburg thing jumped out to me.
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Daniel Hahn
I think it's a really interesting one. So Baldini was doing these translations of Shakespeare plays middle of the last century. They were all in prose. They're very, very long. They're all kind of expansive because he's not limited by scriptures of verse. He explains everything. So I think they're basically unperformable, these translations. They're kind of useful as explanatory things, but you can perform them because they take weeks, but they're interesting, I think. But then there are these moments where just when there is a song, almost nowhere else, I think, in the play, when there is a song in the play, suddenly the translation becomes incredibly tight, beautiful, really sharply focused. And in fact, that Cymbeline thing with the Dandelions, which is Phenom or the Heat of the sun, is the song is one of the examples that I look at. And it suddenly feels like Baldini has all kind of skills that we didn't know he had. You know, he was producing something interesting, but he wasn't producing something. You know, the songs. The Italian translation of the song is really beautiful and it's rhyming and it's really structured. And I was talking about this to Thea Leonarduzzi, who was just writing, now finished, I think, writing a biography of Natalia Ginsburg, who basically said, you know, that Natalia was married to Baldini. And you also know that those translations of the songs might not completely be his translations of the songs. And there are particular markers that we found. So we sat down together, Thea and I, and kind of looked at them. We found really specific things, like she had a couple of really idiosyncratic non standard spellings she likes, and one of them appears in the translation of the song, but nowhere else in the play. But it's like Natalia's own spelling of this word. And there are a couple of things like that. And it's interesting partly because, as you say, it reveals something about a translator. So we can see her fingerprints. So we can see this has Natalia's fingerprints, which is not the same as Gabriele, her husband's fingerprints. But the other thing that is revealing about it is her name is not on this translation. Translators are often under noticed, let's say. And there have been lots of translations published by great translators who didn't have their names on their work for various reasons. This is a particular case because one person does have his name on the work and he's an interesting man. His wife, Mrs. Baldini, who is one of the great, great 20th century Italian writers, kind of helps out in ways that we don't completely know, or at least I don't understand exactly how this worked. I don't know. Was this his idea? Was this her idea? Did she want to be anonymous? I have no idea about any of these things, but I do feel like it not only says something about the way in which the translations are personal and have a little bit of her blood running through those bits, but also whose labor is visible, I think is not at all irrelevant and part of a trend that we see in many cases
- [24:28]
Maithili Rao
from the point of view of a lay reader or audience member seeing a Shakespeare production in Japanese or reading it in Danish. How much should they be thinking about or noticing or aware of some of these choices and intricacies that go into the translation? Or is the marker of a good translation that they don't notice and they're just encountering the text and absorbed by it and don't have a moment to think about all these other little choices and behind the scenes scurrying the production that goes into it. What's your theory on that?
- [25:10]
Daniel Hahn
It's really interesting one. We talk about this, as you can imagine, a lot as translators, when we are complaining that no one notices us and no one appreciates us, which is a thing that we do occasionally. And I've already mentioned that once, and you could argue that if somebody reads a translation I do of a novel, say, and they are not aware of me being there, that is a compliment in some respects, which I think is true. But I would kind of put a nuance there. I. I want people to get to the end of the book and understand what has happened, so they understand that I have done quite a lot of words. All of the words I've read are my words. And if they are, for example, going to review it and talk about how great the jokes are. I would like them to notice that I made the jokes. That's not to say that while they are reading it, I want them constantly to be marveling at my choices or sneering at my choices. But that's partly because I think it's partly because of the kind of reading I like to do. I don't tend to read when I'm really engrossed in something. I'm not thinking about the writing of it. I will be transported by it and engrossed by it, and I will laugh at the jokes. But I don't think I want to be aware usually. Obviously, there are exceptions. Usually I don't want to be aware when I'm reading of the craft that is kind of happening, that is creating its effect on me. I think thinking about acting as one of those metaphors we use for translation quite a lot, and I think it's quite a useful one here. I think you watch someone doing Hamlet and you don't want to spend three and a half hours going, oh, look at all that acting. Oh, there's some more acting. Look, look, he's raised an eyebrow. Look, he's acting again. You want to be seduced by this thing when you're in it, you know, real time. But you also get to the end and you know that what you've been watching is a deception. It's been someone putting on the costume and pretending to be this thing. And so I like the idea of someone reading a translation of mine and getting to the end and going, oh, yeah, but I don't read Portuguese, actually. That was a whole other thing happening. But that doesn't mean that kind of, when you're in the moment, you need to be going, oh, look at how well constructed this joke is. I wonder why this line has an impact on me. Oh, it ends on a monosyllable. Well, of course, what do you expect? No wonder it's having an impact on me. I don't feel like you need to be aware of those things in the moment. Just as when Hamlet says, angels and ministers of grace defend us, I don't think in the audience you go, oh, that's a trochaic opening to a line rather than an ambic opening to a line. What you notice is this big kind of explosive wow moment and Hamlet seeing his dead father. But that doesn't mean that we don't find a way of valuing or celebrating acknowledging the fact that the actor or the director or the pianist or the translator or whoever it is. His work we're also seeing in addition to Shakespeare's has contributed something that has created the effect for us.
- [28:39]
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Daniel Hahn
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- [32:05]
Maithili Rao
Well, to run a little bit with this metaphor of translation being a bit like acting in some ways where you don't necessarily want to say, ooh, what acting? While you're watching the acting. We're speaking a couple weeks after the Oscars and it was fun. This year I thought that one of the big contenders was a film based on a novel, based on a piece of literary criticism about one of Shakespeare's plays. I'm talking about Hamnet, based on Maggie o' Farrell's novel, which takes some inspiration from a Stephen Greenblatt piece published more than 20 years ago in the New York Review of Books. So not a normal, you know, line of origin for a Oscar nominated film. And I bring all this up because Paul Mescal, who plays Shakespeare, apparently said if Shakespeare's performed right, you don't have to understand what they're saying. You can feel it in the body, which is maybe a bit of a controversial thing to say. Words have meaning. Shakespeare's plays have meaning. What is, what do you make of that sentiment he's trying to express? And this idea that sometimes the meaning of the words is secondary to other things happening in a play or on the stage or the kind of net effect.
- [33:18]
Daniel Hahn
I think there's a lot of merit in what he said. I mean, I think there are two things. One of them is you trust. This is a less controversial thing to say, trust that Shakespeare knows what he's doing. And what that means is you as an actor don't have to notice the changes in you don't have to notice consciously when there is a change to the meter of a line, to the rhythm of a line. But Shakespeare is making you do it anyway. Shakespeare makes you stress this first syllable of angels and ministers of grace, not because you notice as an actor, but because he makes you do it. When Juliet says, gallop, a pacey, fiery footed steed that also begins with a stressed syllable, and the actress doesn't need to go, let me just sit down and count the syllables. She just has to say the word gallop. And Shakespeare is making these things happen so that, you know, as an actor, if you are attuned to what words sound like, you're given a score to perform. And so you don't need to be conscious of everything. And I think that is quite an embodied thing as he's describing. You know, you breathe where the lines tell you to breathe. You stress the syllables, the lines tend to stress. So I do think that's part of it. And I also think that you're right in saying that meaning is, as you say, words have meaning, the plays have meaning. But meaning is not the only important thing. And sometimes it's not the most important thing. And as a translator, you're looking at a couplet, say, and you're going, okay, well, this means, you know, there's a fairly straightforward meaning to this, but it also has a certain number of syllables, and it also has a rhythm that moves around in a surprising way. And these two lines also rhyme with each other, and they also end on a monosyllable, which is quite surprising given the shape of the speech or whatever. And they also include a sustained image from something that we've just seen before. The precise meaning might not be the most important of those things. So I'll give an example of just a little translation I did a while ago where I was translating a children's picture book. And in the original, the character was living at Nieme Houde, I think, number two of a house on the street. And in my translation, Nieme Horde became number seven. And there is no dictionary in the world which will say de means seven. But actually, what the house number was was not in any way significant in this book. What was significant was that it had a certain sound. It had to rhyme with something. It had to be funny. It had to have certain properties, this word that were more important than, is it a 2 or is it a 7? And so often as a translator, you're figuring out ways of optimizing whatever you think is the important part. There will be a hundred things happening in a line. You will probably be able to do half of them. If you are an amazing translator, bring some new things which you and your language can do. But you're having to make choices. And I think one of the things that I think people misunderstand about translation in some ways is that it's about meaning exclusively, entirely. Not just principally, but entirely. If you understand the meaning of something, you can translate it. But if you take to be or not to be, that is the question. And being or not being. Well, that's the issue, isn't it? They mean the same thing, but they. I mean, one of them is a little more poetic. A little more poetic, yeah, but the meaning is the same. It'll be hard to draw a really clear distinction between what they mean. They sound different, they have different numbers of syllables, they have a different register and all sorts of things. But I think if you are a great translator, you would translate those two lines really differently, despite the fact that the meaning, just the meaning is the same. And so I do think there's merit in the idea that, yes, of course, we are concerned with meaning, because that is one of the things that is happening in a piece of writing. But what makes translation interesting, what makes at least literary translation interesting, is that literary translation is not concerned only with meaning. And there are some times when meaning is almost incidental to an effect. It might be that you're translating angels and ministers of grace, and you can only do it by saying ministers of grace and angels, because in your language, ministers happens to have a hard stress or whatever at the top, and you're changing it. But really what you're doing is you're deciding what is important and you're prioritizing. Giving Paul Maskell, who doesn't need to think about exactly what's happening in that line, but giving him exactly the thing to work with as an actor. And that's another thing that a lot of the translators I spoke to talked about, probably all of them was being aware of these things they're producing as a score for an actor and thinking about if I'm going to give. If Shakespeare is giving the actor playing bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream this particular joke, I, Frank Gunter, have to give an actor in Germany exactly the same material to work with. And so it's being aware of. You don't, as an actor, have to be a scholar of Jacobean theatre. But if you're sensitive to the sounds of things, the way we use words, then that's. That's. I feel like that's sort of the job, if you know what I mean,
- [39:36]
Maithili Rao
along the lines of meaning and what you understand directly in the words or not. You write about going to See Shakespeare productions In something like 15 or 20 different languages, many of which you don't speak. But you do understand what's happening on stage because you know these plays quite intimately. You work with them line by line. You spent a lot of time thinking about the meaning of particular scenes. I was trying to imagine. When you're sitting in the audience watching a Shakespeare production in a language you don't speak, what are you noticing? What's coming alive for you in particular?
- [40:11]
Daniel Hahn
There's a huge range. I've had a huge range of experiences. I saw a Twelfth Night in Hungarian and a Richard II in Danish. I saw a Twelfth Night in Portuguese, which is a language I do understand. And the experiences were quite different. Partly, as you say, because in some cases I knew the plays very well, though not always, and partly because I sometimes had access to the language. But I was often pleased when I sort of forgot when I watched the Hungarian Twelfth Night in Budapest, translated by an amazing man called Adam Nadisti. Twelfth Night is the play I know best in the world. And I was almost going line for. Like, I knew exactly where we were. Line for line, beat for beat. And I could tell, you know, even half an hour in, I could tell Mariah's about to walk in, she's going to say something, and then the audience is going to laugh. And I don't know what they will be laughing at because it's in Hungarian. But I know that if they've done this right, this is the next beat. And that is a very interesting experience, but not a very satisfying theatrical experience. And with that particular production, I noticed at some point, you know, a bit later in the play, that I'd stopped doing that. I'd stop and just followed the telling of the story, which is a thing you can do if you don't have access to the language at all. In some plays more than others. I think there are some plays in which there are quite big speeches that are not advancing the action. And then there is. You don't get very much. You know, you get to hear someone with a nice voice saying verse in Danish for five minutes. But you can't see how that is moving the action forward, necessarily. And one of the plays I write about most is Midsummer Night's Dream, which is not only many people's favorite, but also many people's introduction to Shakespeare, because it's one of those plays which I think is easiest to appreciate and enjoy and laugh at with the least amount of expertise in the language. There's a moment that I talked to the Director Tim Supple, who did this amazing South Asian bitter extreme in six or seven languages a few years more than a decade ago. And he talked about this moment where Titania's asleep. She's had the love potion in her eyes. We know that she is going to fall in love with whoever or whatever she sees when she wakes up. And then the character of Bottom, who has an ass's head on, comes on stage and he is singing, we assume, quite badly. And then you notice that she's about to wake up. You don't need any language at this point. The joke is situational and relational and it's about, you know, you laugh at their reaction, you laugh at his reaction. You know, she has a line which in any other context wouldn't be funny, but in this context it's very funny. She says, what angel wakes me from my flowery bed? But you don't need to know that line to be able to see, because Midsummer Night's Dream is. It's a very storytelling play. There are things that happen. It's quite intricate. You could kind of follow the advances and the unraveling of the plot in a way that I think is more difficult to do with, you know, Lovesaber's Lost or whatever. And so I do think that there are some plays which work incredibly well, even without access to the language, conventional access to the language, let's say, you know, you will understand sound and rhymes and stuff. The Richard II I saw in Danish I found very difficult, partly because there are some big speeches and it's quite hard to know where they are taking you narratively. And also it was a very kind of stylized production. So everyone was, you know, it was, if I remember rightly, like 14 or 15 white men in suits. Everyone was wearing a suit. The sets were basically lots of kind of bed type things around the stage. And so it was very. I very quickly lost any sense of who anybody was. There was a moment, a really specific moment I was waiting for. And when that came, I was able to kind of anchor myself again. But it's quite difficult in that moment, particular play and in a language I don't know and in that production to get any purchase on what's going on. Because it is just people talking and I can tell when they're rhyming and when they aren't. But that doesn't help me very much. Yeah, a strange mix of experiences that
- [45:16]
Maithili Rao
Tim Supple multilingual productions that are particularly unusual. You describe that he cast actors from different regions of India who speak different languages as their mother tongue. And then what wound up happening is they needed multiple translations that could help the actors understand their lines in their native language. And then as they were going to speak them. And yeah, I like the phrase that you used to describe it, which is the most translationally extreme case taken on behind the Director. Yeah, it's a really.
- [45:54]
Daniel Hahn
I mean, it's one. I so wish I'd seen that production. But the principle behind it, which I completely. Which I really like. So Tim Supple is an amazing director, I think, and he does a lot of work in translation. But translation is not sort of the point of anything he does. It's a part of it, but it's not the point. He thinks, like, who are the people I want to work with? And if the people he wants to work with are in China and Chinese speaking, then that involves a Chinese translation of Shakespeare. And in this case, we had, you know, he had these actors, he cast the actors first, people he thought would be great in these roles and then thought, okay, now we're going to need to produce a script for them. But as you say, he also. This then required in some cases, multiple translations, because if you imagine a conversation between Hermia and Lysander, Hermia needs her lines in her language, but also she does really need to know what Lysander is saying, because it's very easy to switch off if you have no idea what this other person is saying. But also, each character needed to be translated into the language of whoever was understudying that part. So Abhijit Gupta, who translates into Bangla, needed to translate. I think Lysander was one of his, actually, but he needed to translate Puck. So Puck got translated into Bangla as well, because the Puck understudy happened to be a Bangla speaking actor. And so they needed that kind of just in case. Incredibly complicated. But one of the things that I think was interesting, first of all, he talked about that exact scene doing Midsummer's Dream for an audience who've never seen Shakespeare before and who probably can only understand one sixth of it because they happen to be Tamil speakers or Bangladesh speakers or Hindi speakers, whatever it might be. But everyone laughs when Titania wakes up and sees bottom of the ass's head like that works as a bit of dramatized. The comedy isn't the dramatized thing. But the other thing which I thought was really interesting about that production was the way in which, when it came to. When it was performed, it was in the uk, in the US and various other places, most audiences didn't have a sort of subtle distinction between these languages and had a sense of it being essentially a bilingual production. English and another language, as it were. English and the languages of South Asia in a kind of combined way, because I can't necessarily tell the difference between Bangla and Tamil or Tamil and Hindi or whatever. And so actually what happened was that different members of the audience had a completely different sense of the ways in which these things were relational. Tim referred to someone who said, I really like the bits in Indian because there's this sort of. There's this kind of non English thing that is happening and how am I supposed to know what they are, you know? But of course, depending on who you are in the room, if there is an actor who has Kannada, you would be able to, you know, lock into that in a different way to someone who might be speaking Urdu or someone or whatever it is, you know.
- [49:22]
Maithili Rao
Before we go, let's talk a little bit about AI and its role in translation. You write, where it comes to literature, AI can be a handy tool for humans, not a bargain substitute for them. I don't think even the most sophisticated machine can yet do what I do, still less what we can all do. But what worries me today is that people believe it can, or soon will. Once people buy in, the battle might be lost. I tend to agree with you on this, and I worry about the buy in problem too. And I've honestly been surprised by how much ground people are already, already willing to cede to AI when it comes to literature and writing and translation as well. What can AI do for Shakespeare and what can it not do? What does this mean for translators and for readers?
- [50:10]
Daniel Hahn
So there's a chapter about AI in the book, and I talk to my editor quite a lot about whether I should write this chapter because it was always going to be. If it was in any way a concrete thing, it was going to be outdated. I ended up writing something short and a bit abstract, I guess. But one of the things that my editor said when she was arguing that maybe the chapter shouldn't be there was, in a way, the entire book is an argument for the human right. It's an argument for why it is that this person's translation is different from that person's translation and what that tells us about creativity and how we use language and so on. And so in one sense, I feel like if you understand what is entailed in human translation, the ways in which. I mean, the ways in which it can be amazing and brilliant and inspired, and also the ways in which it is flawed. I think the mistakes are much more interesting than algorithmic mistakes, if you know what I mean. I feel like that immediately says something about the. What we might well be losing, which isn't only to do with. Quality is not quite the right word. But the ways in which an AI tool producing a Danish translation will be aware of fewer of the things, fewer of the components than Niels Brunta is aware of. But also, I feel like even if an AI tool could do exactly the same thing as this one person, I would immediately be less interested in it. I mean, the reason I'm interested in what these people are doing is partly because they are people and because everyone is different. In that thing you quoted, I say what I can do, or still less what all of us can do. And the variety is also part of the point. The fact that Natalia Ginsburg's fingerprints are on Baldini's translation is also what we lose from the homogenizing and the diminishing that comes with sort of endlessly recycled AI that I'm interested in what happens when it is not just someone who knows loads of vocabulary, but someone who is Natalia Ginsberg with a particular sensibility and a particular feeling about loss and slightly idiosyncratic spelling that she likes. For reasons that we could speculate, the fact that her translation is different from his and will be different from everybody else's is because she is her. Is because it has filtered through an individual consciousness and sensibility and experience. And the ways in which that makes her translation different is not a bug. That is translation. That is the feature, not the bug. And I feel like even with the. I think it's slowed, but was a kind of rapidly increasing competence of AI tools in translation, even if it could get from, as it were, 80% of what we do to 100% of what we do, that would still be. That would still be insufficient. Yeah, I feel like there's something about. I feel that humanity is the point. That's part of it. But also, we were talking earlier about meaning not being the important thing. I think it takes. I'm not sure it takes a human to notice things, because AI can be taught to do whatever you want to teach it to do, but it takes a human to make the kinds of choices that are being made. Having looked at the speech and decided that actually I'm going to not make it rhyme, even though Shakespeare makes it rhyme, because whatever. So there are ways in which the. The human brain makes choices that are more surprising and more interesting to me because this is a creative act. It's not just an act of processing. But also, I feel like it's the point. I feel like I don't know if an AI tool could have written Hamlet instead of Maggie o', Farrell, I would instantly be less interested in it than thinking about this person who has struggled to express loss and grief and poetry and whatever.
- [54:54]
Maithili Rao
Well, on that note, thank you so much, Daniel. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.
- [54:58]
Daniel Hahn
Lovely talking to you too, Natalie.
- [55:00]
Maithili Rao
I've been speaking with Daniel Hahn about his new book, if this Be Magic, the Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation. I'm Michael Lee Rao. You're listening to Intelligence Squared.
- [55:13]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts for ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership if you'd like to join us at any future live events, you can join us in person by heading to intelligencesquared.com attend where you can see our full events program and buy your tickets. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [55:55]
Daniel Hahn
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