IF THIS BE MAGIC

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.