If This Be Magic - by Daniel Hahn (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

How does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare when every word is changed? What do global audiences of the Bard's plays experience today? And, principally, how did those experiences come into being?

This lively and gloriously written book will change the way we see the Bard. Surveying Shakespeare's work with a translator's eye, and translation with an eye to Shakespeare, Daniel Hahn draws us into the fiery forge out of which the great playwright is reinvented and yet sounds, somehow, like himself--in Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, and over a hundred languages. Shakespeare may have lived and breathed the air of sixteenth-century England, but today, all the world is his stage, his home. Every year, millions of people, from Bogotá to Brussels, read Hamlet for the first time.

The story is remarkable because Shakespeare is one of the toughest anglophone writers to tackle. Translation is a process of constant choice, and translators must question what every line is meant to be or not to be. A universe of intention lurks behind every line: word order, word play, breath, punctuation, rhythm, metaphor, voice, rhyme, song--all this and more. How should Romeo and Juliet's first meeting unfold if they can't mention pilgrims? What does The Taming of the Shrew sound like in a language where every noun has a gender? How do you reconstruct a 400-year-old topical joke in a new culture and without any of the same words? Why might Hamlet be even longer in Japanese? And why are Lady Macbeth's pronouns such a problem?

Daniel Hahn is a generous and winning guide. Traveling the world, he speaks to writers engaging with Shakespeare's work and shares stories of his own. If This Be Magic does not require knowledge of any other language or more than a passing acquaintance with the Bard's canon, but draws out surprising and fascinating insights on both. As nerdy as they come (there is an unapologetic chapter on commas), supremely readable, and often funny, this is a book for everyone and a fitting tribute to the Globe's Bard. "My language! Heavens!" Shakespeare once wrote, "Were I but where 'tis spoken." The afterlife of translation means 'tis now spoken everywhere.

About the Author

DANIEL HAHN is a translator, writer, and editor with almost ninety books to his name. His work has won the International Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Blue Peter Book Award, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among others. He writes about translation for various outlets, and speaks about it regularly at festivals and conferences, often doing up to one hundred events a year. He is a past chair of the Society of Authors, and is on the council or advisory board of organizations including the Cheltenham Literature Festival, the Booker Prize Foundation, Public Lending Right, and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.