Category: History and Linguistics

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Daniel Hahn’s “If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation” and My Profit On’t

My personal favorite jacket for the book; would you say these people are about to “kiss by th’book”?

Surprising as it may sound for someone who is in the ongoing process of learning 4 different languages (yes, I’m counting my native English) and “plays o’ th’ viol-de-gamboys” (that’s Twelfth Night for you), I’ve always been daunted by the prospect of learning individual characteristics of a language that I’m not currently studying. I’ve had to memorize the trees before I can even start looking at the forest. So when I saw the latest addition to my local library’s catalogue, Daniel Hahn’s If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation, I was intrigued and yet daunted. We’re old buds, the Bard and I, and I wanted to hear him speak in other tongues; but how was I supposed to appreciate the travails of translating Shakespeare into Turkish? One curious look later, and I was standing next to the bookstand reading about how to treat Mark Antony’s prophecy that the spirit of Caesar will “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war” (Julius Caesar 3.1. 280), when the nearest equivalent to the exclamation “havoc” in Portuguese is devastaçao, a word with an inconveniently large syllable count for a twelve-syllable sentence.

As a native Portuguese speaker and professional translator, Hahn may appreciate Antony’s use of matança in that particular translation, but he doesn’t know most of the featured languages, so he has to rely mostly on his colleagues from around the world and linguistic detective work such as noticing visual and vocal patterns in the translated text to understand and enjoy the translations. Since Hahn isn’t telling one story, each chapter is relatively stand-alone, only connected by how they bring up some of the literary, linguistic, and social components that make Shakespeare, well, Shakespeare. Each section has a certain topic, such as verse, alliteration, metaphor, rhyme, or humor, and each topic is allocated several examples from distinct languages. Hahn shares corresponding anecdotes, translation histories, and personal opinions on relevant topics in his field such as ‘fidelity’, ‘“literal” translation’, and of course, what kind of process translation really is.

In particular, I feel like his analogy of translation (itself a borrowed analogy), as a body that renews millions of cells over so and so many years’ time while remaining the same creature, is one that cuts to the quick of debates over the goal of translating creative literature. An instruction manual may be appropriately reduced to simply informing about a subject, but a play may involve poetry or prose, comedy or tragedy, songs and music, and a bevy of spoken and embodied devices that may shun even giving information at all for the sake of an effect. Honoring the writer/playwright involves recognizing what choices were made to achieve that effect and recreating them in the target language. And sometimes, in the case of works in Early Modern English, the target language is Modern English!

But I can’t cover all of the points Hahn makes, so I highly recommend you read his book and learn a little more about translation, especially if you enjoy Shakespeare’s plays or sonnets. Even if you find the Bard hard to understand or enjoy, I would still say check it out. Hahn’s writing is really approachable, and he doesn’t usually expect the reader to know the entire scene, play, or stanza that he covers, just as he doesn’t expect you to recognize all of the languages at play. Whether you go through the whole book front to cover or flip to a random chapter like I did, I’m sure you can delight in multicultural, multilingual Shakespeare.

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Spilling Linguistic TEA

I can actually tell how your country accessed tea leaves just by the way you say it. It’s not a magic trick or an elaborate mental gymnastics. The history of tea is broad, deep and a topic of heated debates. Ranging in various flavors from white herbal to decaffeinated earl gray, tea became a stable aspect in cultures across the world. And for such a widespread word and cultural phenomena one would expect that each language would develop a unique term to describe this healing liquid, right?

Not quite. Etymology of tea extends to just 2 derivatives: “tea-derived” and “cha-derived”. This etymology doesn’t depend on what linguistically family you speak — both Russian and Kazakh use the “chai” variation despite belonging to a Slavic and Turkic groups respectively. Similarly, both Armenian and Sudanese share a common “tea-“ derivation even though Armenian belongs to a unique branch of Indo-European family while Sundanese is an Austronesian language — thousands of miles apart.

The secret lies in the means of transportation, and more specifically, the space by which tea has conquered the world.

The term cha (茶) is “Sinitic,” meaning it is common to many varieties of Chinese. But most importantly, its roots are in the non-coastal Eastern part of China and spread the world through the ocean: first reaching Central Asia until it reached Persia and Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, the “te” form used in coastal-Chinese (still East!) languages spread to Europe via the Dutch, who became the primary traders of tea between Europe and Asia in the 17th century. The Dutch ports mainly resided in Fujian and Taiwan where the local population used the “te” variations allowing this specific form to be spread via ocean.

To put it simply, if you say “chai” then you got your drink through land trade, and if you say “chai” you can thank the ports and ocean.

Of course, there is always room for a few exceptions. For instance, Polish uses the word “herbata” whose phonetics closely resemble that of English “herbs”. Thai language also stands out — instead of the internationally acclaimed “tea” or “chai”, Thai speakers use the term “miang” translated as “fermented tea leaves”.

Makes you think twice about ordering “chai tea” next time!