Hahn salutes the ingenuity of these mostly undervalued intermediaries, who 'engage in a peculiar alchemy of turning gold into gold.' Rather than offering a comprehensive survey of Shakespeare in translation, Mr. Hahn provides a series of illuminating glimpses into the problem-solving that is integral to the craft, while exulting in Shakespeare’s capacity to resonate with audiences encountering him in Bengali, Chinese, German or Kurdish ... Hahn is a wry guide, but heartily appreciative of his fellow practitioners. If This Be Magic is both a subtle, probing study of their handiwork and a deliciously fresh reading of Shakespeare, a writer adept at 'making English do things that English doesn’t do.' It is a stirring celebration of the plurality of languages, replete with snippets of Hungarian, Russian, Yiddish and even Klingon. Within a single page Mr. Hahn can hop from Esperanto to Turkish to Hindi. Spare a thought for whoever records the audiobook.
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.
As useful and significant a work on Shakespeare's work as it is on translation ... The range of topics addressed is quite amazing ... Fascinating reading ... Both simply good fun as well as thought-provoking in the best way, and especially highly recommended for anyone interested in language, literature, translation, or Shakespeare.
Learned but cheerful and chatty ... Is Hahn right that Shakespeare flourishes in translation? ... It is also disappointing to see Hahn brush swiftly over the early history of Shakespeare’s dissemination ... Hahn argues that great translation is not an act of transformation, but should work 'to reveal what is already there'. Yet the dazzling examples he uses travel a long way from the Shakespeare of England in the 1590s. This is a sea-change, into something rich and strange.
