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- [00:00]
A
As you all know, the Stacks just celebrated its birthday last month and I cannot thank you all enough for supporting this independent podcast for the last eight years. We truly could not do it without you. My plan is to continue to bring you many more years of great reads, author interviews, behind the scenes looks in the book world and pop culture gossip. But I can only do that with your support. So giving us a listen every week goes a long way. And if you want to go that extra mile, consider. Consider supporting the Stacks on Patreon and Substack. I will say May is also the month that kicks off summer around here. I believe in the longest possible summer. That's Memorial Day to September 22nd for those who are wondering and summer ushers in the era of the summer Reading Guide. My non fiction reading guide is coming in May for all of you who are paid subscribers on Patreon or Substack. So that's just a perk to keep in mind in addition to everything else we've got going on like book club meetups, our Discord conversation, bonus episodes, my weekly show and tell over on Substack. Making this podcast takes a village, as they say. And you're part of our village when you support through Patreon and Substack so that me and my amazing team can continue doing what we do best, which is bringing this podcast to you every single week. So if you or your friends are looking to meet other book lovers, support an independent podcast. Come hang out with me@patreon.com the stacks on Patreon and subscribe to my newsletter at Tracy Thomas, substack.com I would love to have you. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Unstacked, which is the Stacks Bonus episodes exclusive to Patreon and Substack paid subscribers. I'm your host, Tracy Thomas and a lot of times when I do these episodes it is for the people. I try to give you guys what you want, but today I am giving you one what I want. I read a book this year that I absolutely loved and I thought, you know what? I want to talk to that author. So today we are talking about Shakespeare's plays in translation. That's right. I am talking to Daniel Hahn, the author of if this Be Magic the Unlikely Art of Shakespeare and Translation. And you might be thinking, why do I care about that? And in this episode, Daniel makes the point for why you should care about this super niche topic. The book is fantastic. Daniel is wonderful to speak to and I hope that you enjoy our conversation. Now, if you're listening and you get 10 or 15 minutes into the episode and it cuts out. That means you are not a paid subscriber on the sub stack or the Patreon. Joining on either of those platforms or both gets you awesome perks. This month is May. That means that our non fiction reading guide is coming out. You would get that. You get access to bonus episodes. If you're on the Patreon, you get access to Book club and our Discord Chat. If you're on the sub stack, you get my hot takes. You get to hear me rank every book I read each month. Also, by joining in either place, you get to make it possible for me to make the Stacks free to everyone every single week. So head to patreon.com the stacks to join the Stacks pack and subscribe to my newsletter at Tracy Thomas substack.com okay, are you all ready to get a little Shakespearean, a little nerdy, and have a really good time for about an hour with me and Daniel? Okay, let's do it. All right, everybody, if you follow me on Instagram, you've heard me talk about this book. I have been nerding out over it. You all know I love Shakespeare. You all know I love books. I didn't know that I cared about Shakespearean translation, but apparently it's the only thing I care about now. I am joined today by Daniel Hahn. He is the author of if this Be Magic, the Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation. Welcome to the stacks, Daniel.
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B
Thanks so much, Trace. I'm really pleased to be joining you.
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A
I. I told you this already. I'm your biggest fan. I don't know how many fans say that to you, but I feel strongly that I could lead the fan club for the rest of my life and would never be tired of it. I loved this book so much. How did you. Well, first, I guess, first and foremost, will you just tell people like 30 seconds or so what the book is about?
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B
Sure. Thank you. And thank you for those lovely words. I'm so pleased you enjoyed the book. The book is one of those things that is like, the subject is incredibly niche and I'll say something about it in just a second, but I kind of feel like it's one of those things that people should be getting enthusiastic about. And that's kind of weird when, you know, there was like, there's a chapter about commas in Hungarian and it's like it's really properly kind of in the weeds. I'm a translator. I love writing about translation. I like writing about translations for people who are not translators. I don't write for, like, the profession or the academic world. And so my original idea was to kind of use Shakespeare as, like, a case study. So I write about Shakespeare translations as a way of, like, explaining how translation works, so talk to different translators and that sort of thing. But along the way, it sort of became not just a book, you know, using Shakespeare to talk about translation. It's also kind of a book using translation to talk about Shakespeare. Because in order to explain what the translators were doing, I had to look, you know, do some really close, very nerdy close reading of some Shakespeare lines to kind of go, this is what's happening in this really brilliant line of Shakespeare. This is then what this amazing person did in Swahili or Polish or Thai or whatever. So it kind of ends up being a book about Shakespeare also looked at with a kind of translator's eye. And so it's a book of kind of detailed, close reading in some ways that also jumps around, I think, 49 languages in a slightly reckless but genuinely enthusiastic way.
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A
Why do you think that people should care about this? That's what you said. Like, it's a niche thing, but you feel like more people should care about it. What is it that it's that you think it's doing that's important?
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B
Well, I think what it's trying to do is to get people to think about how writing works. It's about language, you know, but it's about writing in a way that we don't usually talk about it. I spend a lot of time interviewing writers, and we talk about themes and we talk about issues and we talk about structure sometimes, you know, a bit about process, but we rarely talk about syllables and stressors and cadence and, you know, commas. And it's not just that I think people should. I kind of think people do. I mean, I'm always really pleased when I do, like, events for this book and I say, I mention in passing, you know, and, you know, the chapter such and such is about commas in Hungarian. And this. There's this lovely kind of, you know, you can kind of hear the audience kind of go, ooh. Lean into it and listen. Really? Like, I think a lot of people are sort of interested in actually in, like, the mechanics of writing and the mechanics of language. Because, like I say, this one jumps around between languages quite a lot in a way that we don't often get to talk about it. And because Shakespeare, a lot of people know a bit and recognize a few lines and can name a couple of plays Whatever, but often don't think in terms of why monosyllables are interesting or those things that are really building blocks. And so I'm always pleased to discover that it is not just me. It is at least me and you. I can't tell. But there are two of us, which is. And this is how we start a movement.
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A
It's true. So you don't know this about me, but my listeners will know this. I studied theater at nyu and I spent a year doing classical theater. And we spent the whole time basically doing Shakespeare. They call it classical, but it was just Shakespeare. And I love Shakespeare. I love the plays, I love the verse. I love the verse. I was always like, the scene has prose. What a nightmare for me. And so I went into this book kind of like, I love Shakespeare. I'm just kind of curious about this. And last year I actually taught an online class about like how to understand Shakespeare. Like, hey guys, it's not that hard. You know, like just look for the antithesis and look for the verse and kind of you can do it. Like, it, it, it's there, it's there for you. It's tricky, but it's not that tricky. You know, I kept being like, it's not a foreign language. But what was so what grabbed me about this book basically from the beginning was all of a sudden, you know, it dawned on me, right? Other languages, it's not going to be in the same verse that it is for us necessarily. And like that one moment. Well, because to me the verse is so important and, and what I love about the book is like, each chapter is sort of a different thing that you're reckoning, reckoning with on verse, on, you know, puns, on like longer jokes, on actors. And it made me realize that while I do really love the verse, it is so much more than the verse. Like it is. So there's so many little teeny tiny choices that a translator makes at every single turn that I really had not considered. Mostly because I think about authors or I think about translators translating, you know, novels or non fiction books. And I think about Shakespeare as being in English. And I just. These two ideas had ne never the two shall meet in my mind. And I guess that's what was so thrilling about the book. That's not a question, it's just a sentence, a long one.
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B
I'm really glad you said that, Tracy. I also think that it's an interesting thing. It's a thing that I kind of contended with a bit when I was starting that if you talk to people about people who love Shakespeare, about why they love Shakespeare. It comes down to language. It comes down to the verse, it comes down to the poetry, it comes down to the sound of it. It's always whether you have thought about it and studied it as you have, or if you've just heard someone read a sonnet and go, wow, that's really beautiful. The answer is always to do it. It's not like he invented good plots, because he mostly didn't, he mostly borrowed. But it's always, or almost always about language. And then you think, well, what happens if, like, what's going to be left if the language is the one thing we take out? We're going to remove all of these words, 25,000 words, we're going to get rid of all of them, replace them with 25,000 new words, and what's going to be left? And part of that kind of feels like a paradox, like we're going to take out the one thing you love and somehow you're still going to love this thing. But in a way, I think it's not a paradox. It's actually something that reveals, I guess, why, I think, translation done well, of course, you can have terrible translations, but why, when it's done well, it's amazing. It's because I don't think you should discount the verse and all of the effects and all of the tricks and all that stuff, because I think those things will be there. They just will have had to be recreated by someone using Danish or using Tamil or using te reo mari. And so if the translator is really great and is doing a really great job, is inventive and perceptive, and all the things we want from a reader and a writer, they will create something in which the verse is extraordinary. And in whichever little twitch in the verse that Shakespeare gives his actors becomes a bit of verse in Italian, which has a little twitch in just the same place, so that the actor in Rome is given the same little thing to work with, a little turn in the verse, just like the actor at the globe in 1599.
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A
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about how you knew that you wanted to be a translator? Like how you came to this work in general?
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B
Sure. Well, I didn't know. I found myself doing it by accident, which certainly was quite common not that long ago. I mean, nowadays it's a little bit different. But when I started, you know, I've been translating for about 20 years now. When I started, it wasn't unusual for people, you know, I didn't study it. I didn't do a mentorship or a summer school or a program. I didn't do a graduate course or anything like that. I was reading books for a publisher because I happened to read more than one language. My mum was from Brazil. My dad is from Argentina. So even though I only spoke English at home, I had Spanish and Portuguese kind of in the air around me. And I read a book for a publisher friend that was in Portuguese, and I said, this is amazing. You should publish it. She said, do you want to translate it? And I, because I didn't know what the hell I was doing, said, sure.
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A
Okay.
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B
Like, how hard can that be? I said, myself, like an idiot. But it wasn't something I planned to do. I did that one book, and actually I didn't translate another book for, I think, four years between my first and my second. But since that second book, which is 2006 or thereabouts, I've been doing it quite regularly. And I've discovered that I enjoy it. I've discovered that I'm pretty good at it. And I've also discovered that there is a kind of world of translators who are now some of my dearest friends. There is a world of people who are advocates for internationalism and pluralism in writing and for broadening the horizons within which we find the things that we read and all the things that I am increasingly excited about. And so I kind of find myself, like, in hindsight, it's not surprising that this is what I ended up doing with a multilingual family and so on. But at no point along the way did I think, you know, what would be a sensible idea? You know, what would be a stable career choice for me? Maybe a literary translator. I'm going to translate Angolan novels for a living. As it turns out, here I am.
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A
Okay, this is something that I think about all the time when I read a book in translation, which is like, how do I know if the translation is good or if the book is good? How do I know what I'm responding to if I don't speak the language? The original language? All right, that's it. You want more of this episode of the Stacks on a bridge? You must join the Stacks Pack on Patreon by going to patreon.com thestacks or subscribe to my newsletter unstacked@tracy thomas.substack.com com and remember, by joining either of those places, you make it possible for me to make the Stacks every single week, free to all. Thank you so much. For your support, and we will see you in the stacks.