A uniquely ebullient account of world translators seeking to make Shakespeare their own.
The Bard in many tongues.
Shakespeare is a litmus test for translators. Make him too literal, sacrifice the sound for the sense, and you wind up with basic prose. Overdo it, reproduce the flow of meter and the crack of consonants, and you get an affectation burning like acid. Hahn is a brilliant literary translator, and his book offers a grand and very enjoyable tour of Shakespeare in the worlds of other words. He writes about a Pericles in Brazilian Portuguese, a Hamlet in Danish, a King Lear (famously) in Yiddish, and a Julius Caesar in Latin (which has the author wondering, “How do you translate ‘Et tu, Brute’ into Latin?”). Hahn provides a tour de force analysis of Twelfth Night, looking at the play of pun and prosody through multiple linguistic lenses. He prints a passage, then presents a string of versions. How does Georgian say the pangs of love? How do the flowers bloom in Chinese or Hungarian? How do Shakespeare’s distinctions between “thou” and “you” (informal and formal) render out in Swahili? Every page brims with discoveries, yet Hahn’s tone remains modest—and refreshingly droll. “Translators are hilarious and weird people,” he writes in the book’s acknowledgments. “(If you’ve read this book, you’ll have figured that out for yourself, obviously.)” Readers thinking they know Shakespeare will find something new here. Readers new to the plays and poems will marvel at what they have been missing. You finish the book and realize that it is not just about an author and his readers but about the mysteries of language itself. As Hahn writes, “How do you present a piece of writing that people know so well already, that rings in their memories whether you like it or not? That is the question.”
A uniquely ebullient account of world translators seeking to make Shakespeare their own.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780593801666
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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