Shakespeare translated?

Has anyone here ever seen a website, or a book, that has any of the work of William Shakespeare translated into other languages?

I know it’s been done in German at least, because I read an article once about the actor Leon Askin(General Burkhalter) doing King Lear in German.

The reason I’m asking is because I’ve been going through a big box of memorabilia and throwing a lot of it away. One item I came across is some work I did as a senior in high school Spanish. Our teacher wanted to show how hard it can be to translate from one language to another, especially poetry. So I translated Antony’s oration over the body of Caesar into Spanish. I’m curious to see how close I came to someone else’s work(presumably a better linguist.)

Well, I understand his work is much better in Klingon…

My German teacher insited he was better in German. The Klingons will have to fight her for it.

Here’s a list (probably incomplete) of European translations of Shakespeare’s work. The first three (German Romeo and Juliet, Portuguese Hamlet, and German Merchant of Venice (the title seems to have been translated into The Jew of Venice, from the English, but my German is crap)) are all from during his lifetime.

I can’t find anything about non-European translations in general, but searching for that, I see at least The Merchant of Venice has been translated into Maori, and I know the Complete Works have been translated into Japanese. (At least 3 times, apparently.)

La Tragedia de Julio Cesar

Actually, Caesar might work well in Klingon. All the primary characters act in accordance with what they believe their duty to be and what their honor requires of them. The only exception might be Caesar himself, although whether Caesar is a thug trying to take over the Republic or a Cincinnatus for a new generation is both the major disagreement between Antony and the assassins and something that Shakespeare doesn’t really weigh in on.

And, of course, I don’t think a Klingon would commit suicide rather than die in battle, but the whole second half of that show isn’t so great anyway.

Here’s a translation of Shakespeare into modern English.

Apropos of nothing but the book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? has a chapter on translating things like poetry that’s pretty interesting. His opinion is that anything that can’t be expressed through translation can’t be expressed through language, which I think sort of stands a lot of conventional wisdom regarding poetry on its head.

You can express it, maybe, but the result won’t be poetry.

I checked that one out, and it’s for Spanish speakers reading the play in the original English. Shucks. The introduction, the footnotes, the glossary of terms, all are in Spanish, but the play itself is in English.

Oh, my god. Why did you do that?

I wondered why anyone would see the need to ‘translate’ Macbeth

I think this makes Chronos’s point. Or I am missing a joke?

Why not?

Is this the part:

ANTONIO. — ¡Amigos, romanos, compatriotas, prestadme atención!

I’m no linguist, but that looks like “Friends, Romans, countrymen, give me your attention”

http://es.wikisource.org/wiki/Julio_César_(Shakespeare):_Acto_III

Here’s another one - Entran Antonio y otros con el cadáver de CÉSAR about halfway down the web page.

And they do appear to be different translations:

Amigos y Romanos, Compatriotas, atención prestadme:
A enterrar, no á ensalzar á César vengo.

¡Amigos, romanos, compatriotas, prestadme atención! ¡Vengo a inhumar a César, no a ensalzarle!

I own many translations of Shakespeare to Portuguese, sometimes of the same plays. All translations diverge greatly from one another and, by necessity, from the original. Contemporary Portuguese is just too different from early modern English, or any English, so translation becomes a question of choices: which aspects of the text will the translator keep and which will he be forced to loose?

Some translations make the verse into prose while some that keep the verse sometimes rhyme when Shakespeare doesn’t, as un-rhymed poetry is very rare in Portuguese, or at least was until the 20th century. Also, Portuguese verse is syllabic, so there’s no clear equivalent to iambic pentameter (or any other other meter Shakespeare used, for that matter) which means there’s great metrical variety amongst the translations. Translations meant for staging are also very different from translations meant to be read.

This will sound terribly ignorant, but isn’t that true of all translations? Why would anyone translate something very similarly to someone else?

I don’t read many translated works - there are plenty of good books and cheap novels in my language that I can enjoy without wondering what may have been lost - so I really don’t know.

I guess it depends on the kind of translation and on the kind of work being translated. A very practical reason for having something translated multiple times when the translations are both very similar to one another and perfectly good is copyrights: at least in Brazil, a translation has a copyright independent of that of the work being translated. So, when I buy a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, say, in Portuguese, I may be prohibited from reproducing and distributing the text even though the novel’s copyright has expired long ago because the text of the translation is still copyrighted. So it may be in the interest of the publisher to keep pumping out new translations every few decades instead of simply republishing the old ones. Another reason is that language changes over time and what may seem colloquial and ordinary in a translation done in the sixties may sound stiff and mannered to a younger audience. The above is pure speculation on my part, as I work with the law and not publishing.

But I only really mentioned how different the translations were from each other because I thought it might interest both the OP and Inner Stickler, both of whom have mentioned the difficulties of translating poetry and didn’t seem too familiar with translated works. It is obvious, but I miss obvious stuff all the time, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to point it out.

I don’t know about Shakespeare, but a local theater performed a Klingon version of “A Christmas Carol” over the holidays. If any author lends himself to Klingon, it has to be Dickens more than Old Willy…

Shakespeare’s works have been translated into French and are even sometimes studied in school (don’t ask me about it, I went through the anglophone school system…!)

Here is a link to Project Gutenberg’s search results for "Shakespeare French"

Again I want to thank folks for the links listed here. I’ve looked at the two versions of Antony’s oration in Spanish, and I do see differences in them, probably because the two translators had different ideas of what was meant, or which word was closest in meaning to the original English.

They are both better, I am sure, than the translation I did in high school. I understood that sometimes you have to translate meaning, not an awkward word for word translation, but mine still comes off sounding more literal.

For example, both translations online have the opening line being either “atencion prestadme” or “prestadme atencion” which would be something like “give me your attention” or, more freely interpreted “Listen to me!”

I did it literally. "Amigos, Romanos, companeros, prestame sus orejas!’ Silly of me, but I was just a high school student and not what one would call fluent. I imagine a fluent Spanish speaker would laugh at my translation, but I do remember, after all these years, that I worked really hard at it.