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ABSTRACT
Building on the growing interest among Translation Studies scholars in ‘intralingual translation’ and hoping to contribute to it by some data-driven descriptive work, this paper sets out to investigate the specific case of rewritings of Shakespeare in modern English. Examples will be taken from Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595), a play for which more than a dozen such versions have been found. These are born from a perceived need to bridge the comprehension gap between Shakespeare’s play and later audiences. The paper will look into the nature of this comprehension gap and the various (other) ways of dealing with it, before comparing the corpus of modernized versions of Romeo and Juliet. A great variety of translational approaches emerges from the study, and there is no less variety as to how these rewritings appear to be labelled or classified, suggesting that they belong in a generic no-man’s land. The idea of translating Shakespeare into modern English generally invites negative reactions; the main arguments used in these controversies and their underlying political and cultural assumptions are also briefly examined.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributors
Dirk Delabastita is professor of English literature and literary theory at the University of Namur and Research Fellow at KU Leuven (where he is a member of the CETRA staff). His books include three volumes on the translation of wordplay and verbal humour: There’s a double tongue (1993), Wordplay and translation (special issue of The Translator, 1996), and Traductio. Essays on punning and translation (1997). Dirk Delabastita has co-authored three dictionaries of literary terms: Lexicon van Literaire Termen (seventh edition, 2007), Dictionnaire des termes littéraires (2001, paperback 2005), and Algemeen Letterkundig Lexicon (open access at http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/). His other book-length publications include European Shakespeares (co-edited with Lieven D’hulst, 1993), Vertalen Historisch bezien. Tekst, metatekst, theorie (co-edited with Theo Hermans, 1995), Fictionalizing translation and multilingualism (special issue of Linguistica Antverpiensia NS, co-edited with Rainier Grutman, 2005), Shakespeare and European politics (co-edited with Jozef de Vos and Paul Franssen, 2008), and Multilingualism in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries (co-edited with Ton Hoenselaars, 2013 and 2015). He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Target (with Sandra Halverson) and of a new book series on Shakespeare in European culture (with Keith Gregor). In 2013–2014 he was holder of the Francqui Chair at the University of Liège. His main research interests are English literature; literary studies and its interface with linguistics and translation studies; literary terminology; wordplay and ambiguity; and the translation and international reception of Shakespeare.
Notes
3. Denton (Citation2007), Zethsen (Citation2009), and Berk Albachten (Citation2014) list several other types of intralingual translation: localization, précis-writing, expert-to-layman communication, American editions of British literary texts, translation from oral into written forms of language, etc.
4. References are to the Oxford edition of the play (Levenson, Citation2000).
5. The KJB is an interesting case inasmuch as it was itself largely an intralingual revision of the Tyndale Bible (1520s–1530s) and has itself been ‘translated’ (revised, updated, modernized) several times in more recent times. In a manner which calls up similarities with the widespread opposition of the ‘faithful’ to the idea of ‘translating’ Shakespeare into English (Shakespeare’s works being something like a secular Bible to English culture), these revisions have often been contested (‘the KJB does not need translation and its superiority does not bear tampering with’), leading even to something like the King James Only Movement.
6. English is an extremely diversified language. I am broadly referring to its standard British variant.
7. It is worth noting that there is a more broadly based tendency to un-translate and un-modernize Shakespeare; witness the growing popularity of OP Shakespeare (Original Pronunciation), the revival of Elizabethan production styles (as in the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London), or the renewed interest in the unedited original Quarto and Folio texts of Shakespeare’s works.
8. Many of Shakespeare’s texts (Hamlet being a foremost example) have a complex genetic history and come in different variants which unsettle their stability and pose the questions of what the ‘originals’ are in any translational endeavour. This is an issue I shall have to make abstraction of in this article.
9. Note, however, that especially non-scholarly editions do have a history of expurgating or ‘bowdlerizing’ Shakespeare’s dialogues. This could happen by silently removing morally offensive passages (inasmuch as they would have been understandable for modern audiences) and/or by not removing them but failing to offer metalingual explanation (inasmuch as the taboo content has become incomprehensible).
10. There are several more such reference works by twentieth-century (Eugene Shewmaker) and nineteenth-century scholars (Alexander Schmidt, Robert Nares). Interestingly, they are all careful to call themselves a ‘glossary’ (or ‘lexicon’, in one case) rather than ‘dictionary’. Whatever the terminology used, the question remains if they can or should be regarded as monolingual (explanatory) or bilingual (translational) dictionaries.
11. Even if digital technology may soon open up new possibilities, it takes a lot of imagination to see how one can ‘footnote’ unintelligible phrases or lines within the usually fast-paced temporal flow of the show. Other than cutting the passage, well-tested theatrical solutions include the following: offering some form of visual (intersemiotic, in Jakobson’s terms) translation of what is said in the obscure line; speeding up the delivery of the obscure lines (‘get it done and over with’); and/or introducing some textually irrelevant but ‘funny’ stage business to direct the spectator’s attention away from the obscure lines.
13. The links between translation and comprehension form the central theme of Maksymski, Gutermuth and Hansen-Schirra (Citation2015); some of the papers in this collective volume actually deal with intralingual translation, albeit not the cross-temporal variety envisaged in the present article.
14. https://www.shakespearecomics.com/product-category/comic-books/. See Greaves (Citation2000) for RJ.
15. http://www.classicalcomics.com/. See McDonald (Citation2009) for RJ.
17. Similar apps are SwipeSpeare and its by-product TapSpeare (available through iBooks on the iPad and iPad Mini). They present the original play with the option to see the modern text by swiping or tapping the screen in the relevant place.
18. All sorts of ‘adaptations’ of RJ (e.g. film versions, narrative retellings for children, radio plays, and so on) often modernize or ‘translate’ any phrases lifted directly from the original play. For this reason alone they would deserve to be studied here; another reason being that the distinction between ‘translations’ and ‘adaptations’ is of course notoriously unstable anyway. See borderline cases such as Hort & Hort (Citation1986, revised 2008), which presents ‘a shortened version in Modern English’, or Powell (Citation2012), a graphic novel with much reduced and simplified dialogues. Unfortunately, the inclusion of all those versions would have expanded the size of my corpus beyond manageable proportions for the purpose of this paper.
19. Susan Bassnett and Randolph Quirk (see http://www.shakespeare2000.com/comments.html) and John McWhorter (Richmond, Citation2004, blurb).
20. See, for instance, blogs such as https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/04/14/essay-flaws-peer-review
21. The case of Yates-Glandorf (Citation2004) is somewhat peculiar in this respect. Its lay-out suggests verse, but this merely results from a policy to give a line-by-line version of the original, as no effort whatsoever is made to reproduce the prosodic features of Shakespeare’s verse.
22. Here, the underlined passages represent the textual departures from Shakespeare’s original.
23. For a discussion of the notion of family resemblances in a Translation Studies context, see Tymoczko (Citation2007, p. 90ff).