The Translator's Art and Shakespeare, with Daniel Hahn

Is Shakespeare still Shakespeare even if every word is changed? While Shakespeare’s work is often hailed for its universality, its meter, metaphor, and wordplay pose special challenges for translators. How do you convey the rhythm and spirit of Shakespeare’s words in a language that follows fundamentally different rules?

Author and translator Daniel Hahn explores these questions in his book, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation. He interviews translators from around the world, providing unique perspectives on Shakespeare’s language and impact.

Some of Shakespeare’s best-known lines can prove the most difficult to capture, like Henry V’s “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Even something seemingly simple like Lady Macbeth’s “Are you a man?” may be tricky to translate when the word “man” carries different connotations in different languages.

In this episode, Hahn dives into the challenges and rewards of translating Shakespeare, exploring not only what is lost in translation, but also what is gained.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published April 20, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by Philip Bodger in Lewes, England and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Megan Fraedrich. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Daniel Hahn is an award-winning translator, writer and editor. His translations include a wide range of fiction and non-fiction from Europe, Africa and the Americas, as well as many children’s books and plays. He is the author of Catching Fire: A Translation Diary, the editor of the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, and co-editor with Padma Viswanathan of the forthcoming Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories. He is currently translating an Angolan novel.

Previous:
The Improvised Shakespeare Company

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[MUSIC fades]

KARIM-COOPER: When we read a novel or watch a play in translation, what are we really getting? A work in translation is like the Ship of Theseus—every word is different from the original. It’s completely changed. But also, still the same.

This work is the underappreciated job of the translator. They have to completely rewrite the original… get inside the author’s head and figure out what they were trying to do with each word. And it’s not just about getting the meaning right. Think about the sound of the words. Their rhythm and rhyme.

For translators working in other languages, Shakespeare might be the Everest of English lit. His compression, wordplay, and metaphor make the translator’s job impossible. Almost.

The author Daniel Hahn translates from Spanish, French, and Portuguese into English. For his latest book, Hahn interviewed translators around the world about the difficulty of rewriting Shakespeare. Hahn’s book is called If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation.

Here’s Danny Hahn in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

——–

BARBARA BOGAEV: Well, Danny Hahn, welcome to the podcast.

DANIEL HAHN: Thanks so much. I’m so glad to be here.

BOGAEV: And I’m so glad to have you here. I’m going to ask the top-of-mind question, which is how do you get over that feeling of “How dare I translate Shakespeare?”

HAHN: I think it’s such an interesting question. I think the one reassuring thing is Shakespeare’s been around for a long time, and he’s been translated a lot, and that means that however bad your translation is, you’re not going to break it, right? Like, Hamlet is still going to be there and you’re not going to break it.

I mostly translate living authors. I mostly translate authors who haven’t been translated before. And so, I feel a kind of responsibility to their English language world reputation because this will be the first time they have been encountered in the English language. I feel like if you’re translating, you know, Hamlet into Danish, today, I feel like you worry about being up to the task, but at least you don’t have that sense of, “What if I kill Shakespeare?” Like, that’s not going to happen now.

BOGAEV: Well, you say the hardest thing to explain to people about your work is that as a translator, you change every word, but the book—or the plays, in this case—must remain intact. So, tell us about that. What do people find hard to grasp about that?

HAHN: It’s principally about meaning, which of course it is. You need to know what something means and then you say it in another language.

But I also think if you’re translating something that is interesting, it’s going to work on many different dimensions, which means that if you’re a translator of Shakespeare, who is more than a little interesting and more than averagely good, you need to be aware of all of the different things, as far as it’s possible, that are happening in a single line.

So, it’s not just figuring out “what does this line mean.” It’s also being aware of the diction, and the rhythm, and the way it might break the meter, and the references, and the assonance, all those different things that are happening. And so, what you’re doing is you’re trying to replace all of these 10 syllables that Shakespeare wrote, with 10 or 12 or 14 of your own, but in a way that ideally is keeping all of those little components. You’re hopefully going to make a line that also has the same momentum, has the same sorts of sound, has the same impact on an actor, and therefore, from the actor to the audience. So, it means thinking in a really, sort of, multi-dimensional way, if you like, about what language is doing, about what the writing is doing.

BOGAEV: Don’t you also have to have a sense of leaving the essence intact? And that, I think, is such an interesting question with Shakespeare because it presupposes you know what the essence of Shakespeare is.

HAHN: Totally. I think one of the things that’s interesting about translation also is it’s very much like performance. Different translators will privilege different things. You give 10 translators the same line from The Tempest and they will produce 10 translations into, you know, Polish or Swahili or Turkish or Tamil. That’s not because some of them will be bad and some will be good, or some will be free and others faithful, or anything like that. It’ll be because they have found different things. They’ve privileged different things. They’ve decided that different things are important in the line, or in the moment, or in where the character is at this point in their development, and that is the thing that they’re going to bring across in their particular translation.

BOGAEV: I really feel for you because I think it might be a revelation to some people to think about a translator being able to inject his own personal interests into the translation, to privilege some things over another like a theater director. That’s exactly what you do, but I don’t think that’s apparent to a lot of people. It’s a hidden art, right?

HAHN: I think it is hidden, and I think you’re right, I think people don’t think about it partly because people are quite uncomfortable with the idea. I think what you want is the feeling that you’re getting something unmediated, right? I’m getting the pure Hamlet.

BOGAEV: Right. That the translator erases his own tracks somehow.

HAHN: Yeah, which in a sense might be the ideal. I mean, I’m not convinced it is the ideal, but you could argue that’s the ideal. But even if you think it’s the ideal, it’s not actually possible. You can’t have, as it were, a neutral translation any more than you can have a neutral performance. However much you as an actor might be wanting to do Lear and might want your Lear to be complete and to be perfect and to be an exact representation of the Lear that Shakespeare wrote, you will notice certain things, and you will have breathing patterns of your own, and you will have rhythms, and your own voice will have its own timbre, and your director will have things that they are interested in, you know, connections they’ll be interested in making.

BOGAEV: Just a history question: what were the first translations of Shakespeare?

HAHN: There was about 30-something, 40 years after he died, the oldest thing that we have, which was a sort of translation of Taming of the Shrew into Dutch. But there are certainly things that were done earlier. There were plays that were toured not only in English before that. But there’s also quite a long time, it was quite a while before he was very widely translated. So, there are, kind of, smatterings for the first couple of hundred years.

BOGAEV: And were those in iambic pentameter? And is it a foregone conclusion that any translation of Shakespeare will be in iambic pentameter or blank verse?

HAHN: It’s not a foregone conclusion at all, for a number of reasons. One of them is that blank verse happens to be the thing that works for English; one of the things that’s really interesting about looking at translations is, you have to see, if you’re a translator into language X which uses meter differently or uses rhyme differently or has a different set of tools, as it were, to work with. Why would you, as a translator, force your language to do the thing that happens to suit English? Shakespeare did these things because English allowed them.

So, there are lots of translations that use different meters. There are also translations that don’t do verse at all. There are some quite interesting translations right through the 20th century where everything is in prose. Sometimes they make the exceptions for just the songs for example, but pretty much everything is in prose.

BOGAEV: Great. Well, I think this is a good time to talk about a specific example and you give the example when you discuss meter of “Cry ‘Havoc!’,” that speech from Julius Caesar. So, maybe you could tell us what the challenge is there and how a Brazilian translator might deal with it.

HAHN: Right. That’s a really interesting one. I’m glad you brought that up. So, we have this great speech, and the line is, “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”

One of the translators I interviewed was a man called José Francisco Botelho, who’s a Brazilian translator who’s been working his way through translating some of the plays into Brazilian Portuguese. He translates into a relatively fixed meter, though sometimes it’s 10 syllables, sometimes it’s 12, and he kind of ground to a halt when he got to this line, because the word “havoc” in English is both quite short and it starts on a stressed syllable.

[CLIP from the 1953 movie adaptation of Julius Caesar. Marlon Brando plays Mark Antony.]

MARK ANTONY: And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.

HAHN: Chico saw the Brando movie and understood from watching this that it’s a kind of war cry. He tried to make it work in Portuguese in which the closest word he could find is the word devastação—which is four syllables long and the stress is on the last syllable—and as he said, “Your soldiers aren’t going to wait around for you if you take that long.”

So, what he needed to do is figure out a way of giving this line something that can be shouted, something that could be a cry of battle, where actually the important thing is that it is relatively short and that it is not stressed all the way at the end of the word, and actually, those things might be more important than, as it were, the semantics or the exact meaning. And so, he ended up not going with the word devastação, but going with the word matança, which means killing. Three syllables rather than four, and it’s stressed in the second one. The meaning, then. is a bit more like if you imagine the English line were, “Cry slaughter and let slip the dogs of war.”

No dictionary would ever say “havoc” equals “matança” or vice versa. But he was privileging something that he thought was more important here, which is that it needs to be a line that is exclaimable, that is shoutable on a battlefield to rouse people to go and do things.

BOGAEV: Okay. So, moving on to rhyme, to talk about rhyme and the challenges it poses, you use the scene in which Romeo and Juliet meet as an example of the translator’s art. Why that scene?

HAHN: So, that’s a really lovely moment. We’re talking about Romeo and Juliet’s first conversation. The first time either of them speaks to the other, it forms a perfect sonnet. And one of the reasons this is important for a translator is, it is not accidental that it forms a perfect sonnet. Shakespeare didn’t just write this scene and go, “Oh, what an extraordinary coincidence. They appear to be rhyming with each other.”

[CLIP from the Folger Audio edition of Romeo and Juliet, with Michael Goldsmith as Romeo and Emily Trask as Juliet.]

ROMEO: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

HAHN: The form has an effect, and that isn’t to say that you’re sitting in the audience going, “Good heavens, this is a sonnet,” but you are sitting in the audience knowing these two people are meant to be together. And so, the fact that they meet and they rhyme not only themselves, but also with each other—the fact that it’s a sonnet is not irrelevant. The assumption with Shakespeare, as with, I think, any good writer you’re translating, is that there is a reason for the things that they are doing, and so, a translator has to, first of all, notice these things, but also, is going to work on the assumption that this is a thing that is worth preserving.

BOGAEV: Well, it is true, when you see that in performance or when you’re reading it, you think, “Oh, it’s like they’re dancing with their language. They’re meeting each other. They’re rhyming because they’re so in tune.” It’s like they’re making love when they first meet. They’re just perfect together.

But you also talk about in this chapter that there is one big rule with rhyme: that you don’t force it. So, how do you judge when you’re forcing rhyme?

HAHN: Well, I think that’s a really nice, sort of, if you like, kind of counter example. I’ve ended up writing quite a lot about “Pyramus and Thisbe,” partly because I love “Pyramus and Thisbe,” but also because “Pyramus and Thisbe” is such a good example of all the bad stuff, because it’s supposed to be. It’s not supposed to be a great piece of writing, you know!

BOGAEV: This is the mechanicals in Midsummer when they put on the play.

HAHN: Exactly. The Mechanicals in the Dream. They put on the play and all the things that I say, and everyone says, about the ways in which Shakespeare is a great writer are things that are not happening at this moment. So, it is, you know, very general rather than very specific. The rhyming in some cases is terrible. The alliteration is massively overdone. It’s that sense of someone thinks this is what good writing is like, you know

In fact, one of the examples I use in the book is actually not from Shakespeare. It’s just a moment at the end of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, which ends with this little quatrain:

“Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

“Paradise” is a great word to end something on. But you didn’t, when you heard the word “thrice,” think, “Oh, there’s going to be a ‘paradise’ coming” in the way that you do if you hear, you know, a love song from the ’40s. You have, “Something, something, something, the blue skies above, something, something, something” and you know it is going to end with the word “love,” because that’s the only reason we mentioned the blue skies above, or indeed, “the dove,” or indeed, “hand in glove.” They’re all there because you know what’s going to come. And so, the really satisfying ones often, I think of it as being kind of inevitable, but not predictable, if you see what I mean.

BOGAEV: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up “Pyramus and Thisbe,” because it’s such a great example of how you deal with humor in translation and you discuss it in that chapter. So, why don’t we play some of it? This is from Midsummer and it’s the Rude Mechanicals’ play, “The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe.” In this clip, Peter Quince introduces his cast of characters, including the lion.

[CLIP from the Folger Audio edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Tom Story as Peter Quince.]

QUINCE: This grisly beast (which “Lion” hight by name)
The trusty Thisbe coming first by night
Did scare away or rather did affright;
And, as she fled, her mantle she did fall,
Which Lion vile with bloody mouth did stain.
Anon comes Pyramus, sweet youth and tall,
And finds his trusty Thisbe’s mantle slain.
Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast.

BOGAEV: Danny, help us appreciate what goes into translating the humor of these lines and this play within the play.

HAHN: One of the reasons I’m really interested in the humor in a play like this, or indeed probably any humor in any writing that I like, is that it’s so much about really small details of syllables and tone. You imagine a really funny joke or something, and you look at that and go, “Actually, if this were three or four syllables longer, this wouldn’t be funny.” It requires attention. Not only to this observation, for example, but to the tone of it and to what kind of syllable you’re landing on.

BOGAEV: Yeah, word placement is very important.

HAHN: Word placement, right.

I think people assume that, of course, translating wordplay is going to be difficult, for example, and translating cultural humor is going to be difficult. But I think every kind of humor is difficult for that reason. Because you’re looking at what is the sequence in which you’re getting the information, you know, where is the pause and is there a monosyllable at the end? And so, what you’re often doing as a translator is figuring out what are the building blocks and then rebuilding something with the same moving parts.

So, as an example, the beginning of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” we have Quince give this prologue in which he’s describing what we’re about to listen to and he’s reading something which obviously is punctuated in such a way to encourage him to pause in all the wrong places—

BOGAEV: Which actors really play up.

HAHN: Which actors really play up. It’s written in order to be giving the actor playing Quince—you know, it’s just one joke after another, but, as it were, it’s writing that is supposed to be got wrong, right? You read this, if you read it as written, and if you pause in the wrong places, there is a whole other meaning, which is contrary to what you intend.

If you are translating this into Hungarian, you need to give the actor playing Quince the same sort of material. It will probably mean slightly different things, but you need to give the actor something that they will be able to, as it were, misread in the same way an English language actor could do, and so, that’s a really nice example.

Well, there are a couple of things there. One of them is, “Lion hight by name.” That’s, you know, trying to sound grand by using old language, right? But also “Did scare away, or rather did affright.” Those are not two usefully distinct things. They’re there in order to get to the end of a line because we have to fill a line and also because you need a rhyme there.

BOGAEV: It also gives the impression that if it’s acted well, I think, that they don’t even know what they’re saying there. Quince doesn’t even really know what he’s saying and doesn’t even recognize that it’s redundant.

HAHN: No, totally, and there’s a lot of this—and a lot of Bottom’s speeches are like that as well, and not just, in fact, not just in this scene, but in lots of other places—and you have this real sense they don’t really know. “Moon, I thank thee for thy sunny beams.” No one’s stopping to go, “Really? Moon, sunny beams? Is that sensible?”

[Both laugh]

We’re supposed to notice it, and the on-stage audience, the people of the court, notice it. But we’re not watching actors who are interrogating the sensibleness of the things that they are saying. And again, if you’re then a translator, you’re trying to create that sort of effect. The German translator whom I wrote about has a line which is, you know, something like, “Oh, night as black as night,” which you can imagine someone declaiming in a grand and poetic way, but actually is really silly.

BOGAEV: And this is a related question to rhyme, kind of the same question, is there such a thing as trying too hard when translating puns or gags? Is that a problem when you’re translating?

HAHN: Yes, absolutely. I think that one of the things that we come across often as translators is that, you know, Shakespeare is doing things because his language happens to allow them.

There are lots of plays on “sun” and “son,” S-U-N and S-O-N. That’s really easy in English. You don’t need to explain anything in English. It’s one syllable and you can say that word and your audience doesn’t know which of those you mean.

You could do something that makes that sort of equivalent, as it were, in another language, but it might be very cumbersome and might be quite forced, and so, you have to decide whether or not it is worth it, whether you’re doing something that actually is too conspicuous and too distracting.

But it also means that you can think, “Well, maybe I’m going to not let Richard III say, ‘son of York,’ in a way that is going to take me eight lines to explain the joke. But I could give him something else, you know, a couple of pages later where Shakespeare hasn’t got a pun, but where my language happens to allow something, and it would be ungrateful for me not to use that.” Cumulatively, you have this sense of him being the kind of character who is doing whatever. And it may be that you’re compensating. You can’t put this thing in here, but you put something else in there.

BOGAEV: It seems that it is very easy to introduce, inadvertently, new complications. You were just mentioning, you know, something that calls attention to itself where it shouldn’t because you’re trying to force the pun. You write that it happens a lot when you’re dealing with the hardest thing to translate, which is ambiguity. here’s just so much ambiguity in Shakespeare. So, tell us more about that. What’s so hard about ambiguity in Shakespeare and the pitfalls of translating it?

HAHN: Ambiguity, I think, is generally the hardest thing to translate for any writer who uses it deliberately because the idea of having a word that means X in French, as well as finding a word that means X in English, you can kind of do that, you will start with the dictionary meaning and whatever. But if you have a word in French that means X and Y, the likelihood of finding an English word that does both of these things is very slim. A lot of interesting writers play with this or writers will play on the fact that you can disguise gender in their language and it’s harder to disguise gender in other languages, whatever it might be. Ambiguity can be a really deliberate thing that writers will do, and in the case of Shakespeare, it’s often something that is happening mindful of the experience of the audience. So, part of the problem is figuring out how you can create something that has that openness when it is consumed in your new language.

But the other problem, as you alluded to, Barbara, is that you want that openness to be controlled, and you don’t want to add in ambiguity where there isn’t ambiguity already. And some of this comes with anachronism. There was an example I think I might have mentioned where a friend and I were co-translating a book written in the 1920s, a Colombian novel called La Vorágine (The Vortex). The first page, the main character is talking about what a great seducer he is of women, and he talks about lighting a spark somehow. I can’t remember the exact phrasing, but he uses the word “tinder,” the Spanish word for tinder in the sense of tinder that you used for sparking up a fire. We didn’t use this word in English, because as soon as you use the word tinder where you’re talking about attempting to seduce people, there is a whole other bit of distraction that is not supposed to be there, that was not intended in 1924 and is not, I think, a problem in any other translation. But in English, it would create this whole extra bit of interference, if you like.

BOGAEV: You mean the app?

HAHN: Yes. You need to be mindful of “What are the things that words will bring in this new language?” Some of which will be very beneficial and there’s great opportunities to create wordplay that isn’t in the original, for example. But you also have to be careful that you are not inadvertently bringing in a joke or something that is inappropriate, or something that’s ambiguous in a misleading way.

BOGAEV: Some things just seem impossible. Some of Shakespeare’s wordplay, like, for instance, in Richard II, where Bolingbroke, the challenger to the throne, asks the king, “Are you contented to resign the crown?” And Richard’s reply begins—

HAHN: “Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be.”

BOGAEV: “Therefore no ’no,’ for I resign to thee.” I mean, you’re in hot water from the start.

HAHN: You’re in a lot of trouble because there are lots of ay’s and no’s, and there are different kinds of I’s and knows. There’s “A-Y,” and there’s the letter “I,” and different kinds of no. So, you’re certainly in trouble.

And I assumed, I have to say, when I wrote my proposal for this book, I gave this as an example of something for which there probably isn’t a solution. Like, sometimes you just have to go, “This is not going to happen. We’ll put a joke in somewhere else.”

But I then went to see a production of Richard II in Copenhagen. And when I was at this production of Richard II—because I know the play reasonably well—I could kind of see the moment coming, right? I know which scene we’re in. There are these two actors who are kind of facing off on the stage and one of them is holding a crown. And then one character says, “Something, something, something, something, Kron.” And the other person then said something to which the audience laughed.

Now, I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that somehow the translator and the actor through him had given some impression to the audience that what was being said was witty and clever. And it’s important because even though what Richard is saying is not substantial, it is him showing off, and it’s him thinking he’s clever and it’s him not wanting to say yes, but not really in a position to say no. There’s a reason why there is this tricksy little bit of writing.

The Danish translator, Niels Brunse, I saw him the next day. One of my first questions was, “What did you do? Like, what was the thing you did for, ‘Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be. Therefore no “no,” for I resign to thee.” And he sent me his little pair of lines. The meaning isn’t precisely the same, but the effect is. This is, Richard prevaricating, showing off because he thinks he’s the cleverest person in the room, but also not quite happy to land on an answer to this question. And the audience reacted in the same way as the audience reacted when I saw Mark Rylance do it in English or anyone else do it in any other language.

BOGAEV: Well, some of these things, you make it sound as if, “Oh, I’ll think about it for a couple of hours and I’ll come up with something.” But you cite some examples of these poor translators who have been bedeviled by a single line. You talk about a Brazilian translator who has been just stymied by a single line for two years. It’s why he hasn’t translated Henry V yet. And it’s just, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

HAHN: So, that’s the thing. English is incredibly compact apart from everything else. Shakespeare particularly does a huge amount with monosyllables. That line is incredibly simple. “We few.” But “We few” is saying quite a detailed thing in only two syllables. You know, the people who are us, but limited to us, and there are not a lot of us. “We few.” Two syllables.

You can do that in Danish. The translator, Niels Brunse, who I mentioned, is brilliant and also is working with a language that closer to English in some respects. But Chico Botelho, as you said, was very keen to do the Henry IV plays and Henry V as he’s working his way through the plays but he’s kind of aware of this looming, “We few” waiting for him when he gets to that scene. And he doesn’t want—I think we’re all quite stubborn, probably—he doesn’t want to go, “You know what, to hell with it, it’ll just have to be two lines” because there’s a merit in the simplicity of it.

BOGAEV: Another simple example you give is a colleague of yours that this time is translating Shakespeare into Māori and she got all tangled up in one line from Macbeth, right?

HAHN: Oh, this was amazing. So, I was very lucky to be in Aotearoa, New Zealand, a couple of years ago and I met this really extraordinary woman called Te Haumihiata Mason, who had just done a Romeo and Juliet and was working on Macbeth when I met her. She mentioned she was working with Macbeth and I said, “Well, that must be really difficult. What’s it like?” or something along those lines.

BOGAEV: Right. All those witches’ spells.

HAHN: Yeah, exactly. I thought that would be something that’s difficult because they’re really compact and because they are so much about sound. The effectiveness of them, they are about the sound, right? The effect of the magic is in the words. I always think that I can guess what is going to be the difficult part to translate, and I’m almost always wrong. She was struggling with the line where Lady Macbeth says to Macbeth, “Are you a man?” And I thought, “Well, how hard can that be?”

And then I talked to a Bulgarian translator, Alexander Shurbanov, who’d done a Macbeth, and I said, “‘Well, ‘Are you a man?’ in Macbeth?” And he went, “Oh my god, that was one of the hardest lines of the play.” And it’s partly to do with the economy, as again, it’s doing so much that’s so precise with just four syllables.

BOGAEV: The layers.

HAHN: Incredibly simple, but the layers of it and every language also delineates meaning in a slightly different way so that the Bulgarian translator I talked to said, “Basically, I have two choices. I either can say, ‘Are a human male? Are you a human person?’” which is not what Lady Macbeth means. It’s not a species question. Or he could have Lady Macbeth say, “Are you male, as opposed to female?” which is also not what she is asking.

So, Te Haumihiata, who’s doing the Māori translation, the first draft—I think she changed it in the end—but the draft she was working on when I met her, has Lady Macbeth say to Macbeth, “Have you got balls?” which actually is what she is asking.

BOGAEV: Exactly what’s she’s asking.

HAHN: She’s not asking a question about gender. She’s not asking a question about species. She’s asking a question of “What kind of a man are you?” It’s “are you the sort of man who would—” whatever.

But “man,” just a monosyllable in English. It’s very simple. It’s one of the first words you learn when you learn English. But actually, it isn’t just one thing, first of all. But it also doesn’t map exactly on to words in, as it were, equivalent words in other languages.

BOGAEV: Now I have to ask you about AI. How does translation fare in this age of AI?

HAHN: I mean, translation, the kind of translation I do, is under threat, unsurprisingly, by AI. Not because it can quite do the things that literary translators can do, but because it might be close enough that not enough people mind about the difference. I like to think it’s not what I can do, but it’s kind of okay. The question is, for how long will the difference between what it can do and what I can do be worth $6,000 that publishers would have to pay me to translate this book?

But one of the things that we lose from that, I mean, apart from all of the other things that we lose from it—

BOGAEV: And your career!

HAHN: And the small matter of my career, thank you for noticing that!

I think this kind of multiplicity, this idea that different translators will produce different translations, and the reason I would translate something in such and such a way is because I noticed something, because I have certain language that I like, because I have my own idiolect, you know, the language that I use.

BOGAEV: Because you’re a human being.

HAHN: Because I’m a human being who will read this thing and have my own understanding of grief, or love, or loss, or my own interest in what these characters are going through.

And so, this idea, you know, give translation to two different translators to do, and they’ll produce two very different things, I don’t think it’s a bug. I think that’s a feature of translation. I think that’s the whole point of it. I think the humanity is the point of it. The fact that it’s being filtered through a human consciousness, and human experience, and human taste, and human observations, and human expression is the reason we do it. It is not an accident on the way to something more efficient.

BOGAEV: Well, Danny, thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking with you.

HAHN: Thank you. Such a pleasure talking to you.

—————–

KARIM-COOPER: That was Daniel Hahn, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Thinking Through Shakespeare If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation is out now from Knopf.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Philip Bodger in Lewes, England and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Megan Fraedrich. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare Unlimited, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It really helps others find the show.

Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts.

If you’re in Washington, DC, come visit the Folger on Capitol Hill. Come face to face with a Shakespeare First Folio in our exhibition halls or take in a play in our theater or enjoy our Quill & Crumb café. We’d love to see you. For more information, visit our website, folger.edu.

Until next time, thanks for listening!