RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Hahn’s paean to the great translators of Shakespeare, arguably the most challenging writer in English to translate. What better way to heighten appreciation than by showcasing examples of their ingenuity, creativity and commitment? To that end, the author chooses hundreds of examples from Shakespeare translated into almost fifty languages. Himself a distinguished translator of Spanish and Portuguese, Hahn readily admits to being comfortable with only Romance languages. (In Arabic and Chinese, for example, he identifies rhymes by visual patterns.) Though clearly an avid reader and playgoer, he makes no claim to being a Shakespeare scholar. Nor does he use secondary sources. For his authority, he reaches out to translators worldwide, through correspondence and conversation. They provide not only his examples, but glosses on how their translations were reached ... After having guided readers through multiple features of translation, Hahn puts them to the test with a mind-numbing display of the multiple issues that translators must keep in mind simultaneously ... For the most part, though, Hahn’s skilled and compelling chapters offer much to savour. However technical the author’s analyses, he avoids sounding academic. He adapts a comfortable informal style, on a first-name basis with his translators, digressing freely, slipping into colloquialisms, expletives, interjections and deliberate solecisms ... Yet for all the author’s boundless enthusiasm, the book cannot but take on an elegiac cast. Even as he was writing in praise of great translations in the present tense, AI was appropriating those same translations. By now, the work of the more than 100 translators quoted here will almost certainly have been added to the vast store of training datasets – uncredited, of course – expanding and nuancing its capacities for future machine-generated translations.
