Translating Shakespeare
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‘If This Be Magic’ Review: A Great Feast of Languages
Shakespeare has resonated with audiences in Swedish, Swahili and beyond. But translating the Bard requires some difficult choices.
By Henry Hitchings, WSJ (April 22, 2026)
Transferring Shakespeare's works into another language is hard work:
Samuel Johnson complained, more than 250 years ago, that William Shakespeare’s style was “ungrammatical, perplexed, and obscure.” Many students and theatergoers since have shared that view. Yet even if we agree with Johnson, it has become customary to celebrate instead the playwright’s linguistic resourcefulness and dazzle: his flair for coining words and twisting old ones into new shapes, his taste for double meanings and calculated ambiguity.
The obscurity condemned by Johnson derives in part from Shakespeare’s readiness to draw on vocabulary that would have struck even his contemporaries as bewilderingly nonstandard. Today many of us are as likely to be disorientated by his fondness for folklore and myth, his assumptions about religion and social order, and his immersion in the conventions of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater.
…
Mr. Hahn is a translator himself—chiefly of fiction, from Spanish, Portuguese and French—and a former chair of Britain’s Translators Association. He knows what it means to “spend many months living deep” in a “book’s guts” and is well placed to get other translators to discuss their work. This means quizzing Jean-Michel Déprats about how to distinguish Othello’s grand rhetoric from Iago’s base insinuations, or listening to Shoichiro Kawai reflect on the difficulty caused by the Japanese words for “messenger” and “dead body” sounding identical.
…
One tenacious fallacy about Shakespeare is that his speeches are always clotted with gargantuan words; Macbeth’s “multitudinous seas incarnadine” is a classic example. Yet often it is the compactness of Shakespeare’s writing that troubles translators. Romeo’s line, “Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die,” or Lear’s verdict on Cordelia, “I know when one is dead and when one lives; / She’s dead as earth,” compress a huge amount into a string of monosyllables. Such succinctness doesn’t travel easily.
To demonstrate this, Mr. Hahn acquires copies of “My First Hundred Words” in eight languages. In English, 75 of the 100 are a single syllable. In Italian and Greek, by contrast, 99 contain at least two syllables. For translators of Shakespeare working in those languages, the challenge is immediately apparent.
Hahn's insights abound. Here's one I particularly relished:
Other passages create headaches of a different kind. How should a French translator handle the scene in “Henry V” where Princess Katherine receives an English lesson—much of it conducted in French? Or the meeting in that play between Welsh, Scottish and Irish captains, each endowed by Shakespeare with a distinctive accent?
Selected readings
- "Four centuries of peeving" (1030/09)
- "This week's display of ignorant peeving" (12/31/20)
- "If It's 'All Greek To You,' Blame Monks And Shakespeare", Ben Zimmer, Visual Thesaurus (7/8/15) — According to this article and its appended chart, it would appear that Latin is relatively easy, Greek is hard, Chinese is harder, and Heavenly Script is hardest of all.
- "A Book from the Sky" — WP
[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]
AntC said,
April 24, 2026 @ 12:11 am
The internet is awash with claims of Shakespeare coining ~20,000 words. A more conservative estimate is ~1,700. At the risk of sounding like Holofernes the pedant …
More recent research suggests both figures are bunkum: at best, the supposed neologisms are the first time those words have appeared in print. Bearing in mind that in his time printing was expensive, most of the population was illiterate anyway, so what appeared (and has been preserved) was official/legal documents circulated amongst an elite.
Apply a sense check: how would audiences follow the play, or 'get' the "calculated ambiguity" if it used words they'd never heard before? Did the players hand out a glossary (that most couldn't read anyway) in advance of the performance, such that the foyer was more like a schoolroom than a social venue?
Pshaw and Pish! I say. The vocabulary was "nonstandard" only in the sense that dictionaries didn't contain rude words/courtiers didn't use them in polite society. Everybody knew the words and their meaning and ambiguities. (Even the prudish Malvolio.)
I put it to Hitchings that going to the theatre with the intent of getting bewildered wasn't a thing until C20th.
Michael Carasik said,
April 24, 2026 @ 4:41 am
Hear him interviewed on the Folger's "Shakespeare Unlimited" podcast: https://www.folger.edu/podcasts/shakespeare-unlimited/the-translators-art-and-shakespeare/
Scott P. said,
April 24, 2026 @ 7:49 am
The theme of the article reminds one of the old paper, "Shakespeare in the Bush":
https://www.naturalhistorymag.com/picks-from-the-past/12476/shakespeare-in-the-bush
Chris Button said,
April 24, 2026 @ 7:49 am
使者 vs. 死者 ? Can't they just spell it out as "the one who …" rather than "the -er". Or does it need to be terse?
Olaf Zimmermann said,
April 24, 2026 @ 12:19 pm
Lost in translation, perhaps?
I can assure you that Shakespeare in French is an unmitigable disaster, Molière in German is so flat-footed no amount of insoles would help, and Goethe in English is plain impossible.
PS Lakoff&Johnson(1980) is not one of my favorite texts – except for the opening line: "Ideas don't come out of thin air".
CuConnacht said,
April 24, 2026 @ 12:45 pm
AntC: Shakespeare does at least sometimes explain new words. Take "multitudinous" and "incarnadine", noted above, both first recorded uses if I'm not mistaken. Macbeth says:
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
DJL said,
April 24, 2026 @ 1:20 pm
Bah, consider translating Finnegans Wake instead…
AnthonyB said,
April 24, 2026 @ 1:48 pm
Amazingly, Pound's Cantos has been translated.
(I once shared an office with a fellow linguistics graduate student who, in his downtime, was reading Finnegans Wake while I was reading the Cantos.)
Olf Zimmermann said,
April 24, 2026 @ 4:29 pm
@AnthonyB
If you truly endured those two œuvres, Jaspers' Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913) might come in handy.
NB Pound had been appreciated as an excellent critic, and then turned loopy.
ktschwarz said,
April 24, 2026 @ 5:49 pm
CuConnacht, "both first recorded uses if I'm not mistaken": You're mistaken, but in a way that illuminates what exactly those lists of "new words in Shakespeare" really mean. According to the OED, Shakespeare's was not the first recorded use of "multitudinous", it was the first use specifically describing the ocean and meaning "vast" (rather than "numerous"). And Shakespeare was not the first to use "incarnadine": others had used it as an adjective, he was the first (that we know of) to use it as a verb. This kind of thing is probably what Hitchings means by "twisting old ones into new shapes". Another famous one: Shakespeare has the first known use for "elbow" as a verb.
katarina said,
April 25, 2026 @ 1:30 am
Liang Shiqiu 梁實秋 (1903-1987), an essayist and literary theorist who taught at several Chinese universities, translated the complete works of Shakespeare into Chinese.
Tom Dawkes said,
April 25, 2026 @ 5:24 am
@AntC. I listened this week to Robert Icke on BC Radio 4's "This cultural life". He related the experience of directing "A midsummer night's dream". A lady asked him if he was the director and said "Why did you update the language?" Robert said he hadn't, and it was only later that he realised she was angry because "she had understood it … she wanted it to be distant"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002vc9t
David Morris said,
April 25, 2026 @ 7:25 am
In conjunction with Shakespeare's 'birthday', Thursday was 'Talk Like Shakespeare Day'. I informed my colleagues of this, and one replied with a sentence which included a verb ending with -eth where I'm sure (not being a scholar of Early Modern English) it shouldn't have been. She also sent a link to website which renders Modern English into Shakespearean English, which seemed to assume that *every* verb should end with -eth. It also made several other basic errors.
But that raises the issue of how -eth and -s forms are/can be/should be translated, along with 2nd person pronouns, to name just two aspects which were in a state of flux at the time.
ajay said,
April 28, 2026 @ 6:17 am
According to the OED, Shakespeare's was not the first recorded use of "multitudinous", it was the first use specifically describing the ocean and meaning "vast" (rather than "numerous")
I think this is wrong. "Multitudinous" in that usage modifies not "ocean" but "seas". The ocean is made up of many seas – the North Sea, the Irish Sea and so on. There is so much blood on Macbeth's hand that even the ocean wouldn't wash it off; instead, the blood would redden all the many, many seas of which the ocean is composed.
Apply a sense check: how would audiences follow the play, or 'get' the "calculated ambiguity" if it used words they'd never heard before? Did the players hand out a glossary (that most couldn't read anyway) in advance of the performance, such that the foyer was more like a schoolroom than a social venue?
I don't know – how do people normally handle the first time they encounter a new word? They have a guess at the meaning from sound and context. The meaning of "incarnadine" is pretty obvious in this sense; "even the ocean wouldn't wash my hand clean. My hand would XXX the ocean instead and turn it red." It's not very difficult to fill in what XXX stands for even
ajay said,
April 28, 2026 @ 6:19 am
…even if you don't have the added hint of the Latin derivation from carnis, flesh or meat.
ktschwarz said,
April 28, 2026 @ 8:47 pm
ajay: Take it up with the OED, it's their definition (in 1908, and again in the 2003 revision). I interpreted the Shakespeare line the same way you did, but on the other hand, the OED has later citations for "multitudinous torrent" and "multitudinous sea", so they probably wanted to include Shakespeare as a precursor. They also point out that when applied to the sea, it can mean "having a multitude of waves".
A lot of words on those first-used-by-Shakespeare lists wouldn't have even required context, let alone a glossary: some are only "first" by a fine distinction of definition, like "multitudinous", or "cold-blooded" used figuratively of a human; many others are derived from familiar words in an obvious way, like "noiseless".
David Arthur said,
May 2, 2026 @ 8:10 am
>Or the meeting in that play between Welsh, Scottish and Irish captains, each endowed by Shakespeare with a distinctive accent?
I encountered this same question with a Swedish translation of 'Waverley', wondering how they would handle the characters who speak broad Scots. It turned out they really did seem to understand even the broadest of it, but in translation they reduced it to standard Swedish – I almost thought they should have rendered it as Norwegian!