Unabridged: What’s in a Translation with Daniel Hahn

In this bonus episode, I’m joined by writer, editor, and translator Daniel Hahn to discuss his newest book, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation. Today, we chat about Daniel’s approach to this work, how studying Shakespeare in translation helps us understand language, and the various quirks that come up when translating.

TRANSCRIPT

Traci Thomas 0:00

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of unstacked, which is the stacks bonus episodes exclusive to Patreon and sub stack paid subscribers. I'm your host, Traci Thomas, and a lot of times when I do these episodes, it is for the people. I try to give you guys what you want, but today I am giving you what I want. I read a book this year that I absolutely loved, and I thought, You know what? I want to talk to that author. So today we are talking about Shakespeare's plays in translation. That's right, I am talking to Daniel Hahn, the author of, if this be magic, the unlikely art of Shakespeare and translation. And you might be thinking, why do I care about that? And in this episode, Daniel makes the point for why you should care about this super niche topic. The book is fantastic. Daniel is wonderful to speak to, and I hope that you enjoy our conversation. Okay, are you all ready to get a little Shakespearean, a little nerdy and have a really good time for about an hour with me and Daniel, okay, let's do it. All right, everybody. I if you follow me on Instagram, you've heard me talk about this book. I have been nerding out over it. You all know I love Shakespeare. You all know I love books. I didn't know that I cared about Shakespeare in translation, but apparently it's the only thing I care about. Now I am joined today by Daniel Hahn. He is the author of, if this be magic, the unlikely art of Shakespeare in translation. Welcome to the stacks. Daniel,

Daniel Hahn 1:45

thanks so much, Traci. I'm really pleased to be joining you.

Traci Thomas 1:48

I I told you this already, I'm your biggest fan. I don't know how many fans say that to you, but I feel strongly that I could lead the fan club for the rest of my life and would never be tired of it. I loved this book so much. How did you Well, first, I guess first and foremost, we just tell people, like 30 seconds or so what the book is about.

Daniel Hahn 2:09

Sure, thank you, and thank you for those, those lovely words. I'm so pleased you. You enjoyed the book. The book is one of those things that is like the subject is incredibly niche, and I'll say something about it in just a second. But I kind of feel like it's, it's one of those things that people should be getting enthusiastic about, and that's kind of weird when you know there was, like, there's a chapter about commas in Hungarian and it's like, it's really properly, kind of in the weeds. I'm a translator. I love writing about translation. I like writing about translation for people who are not translators. I don't write for, like, the professional the academic world, and so my original idea was to kind of use Shakespeare as, like a case study. So I write about Shakespeare translations as a way of, like, explaining how translation works. So talk to different translators and that sort of thing. But along the way, it sort of became not just a book, you know, using Shakespeare to talk about translation. It's also kind of a book using translation. Using translation to talk about Shakespeare, because in order to explain what the translators were doing, I had to look, you know, do some really close, very nerdy close reading of some Shakespeare lines to kind of go, this is what's happening in this really brilliant line of Shakespeare. This has been what this amazing person did in Swahili or polish or Thai or whatever. So it kind of ends up being a book about Shakespeare, also looked at with a kind of translator's eye. And so it's a book of kind of detailed, close reading, in some ways, that also jumps around, I think, 49 languages in a slightly reckless but genuinely enthusiastic way.

Traci Thomas 3:42

Why do you think that people should care about this? That's what you said. Like, it's a niche thing, but you feel like more people should care about it. What? What is it that it, that you think it's doing that's important?

Daniel Hahn 3:42

Well, I think what is, what is trying to do is to get people to think about how writing works. It's about language, you know, yeah, but it's about writing in a way that we don't usually talk about that. I spend a lot of time interviewing writers, and we talk about themes and we talk about issues and we talk about structure, sometimes, you know, a bit about process, but we rarely talk about syllables and stresses and cadence and, and, you know, commas and, and it's not just that. I think people should. I kind of think people do. I mean, I'm always really pleased when I do like events for this book. And I say I mentioned in passing, you know. And you know that chapter, such and such is about commas in Hungarian. And this, there's this lovely kind of, you know, you can kind of hear the audience kind of go, ooh, lean into it and listen really like, I think a lot of people are sort of interested in, actually, in, like, the mechanics of writing and the mechanics of language, because, like, I say, this one jumps around between languages quite a lot, um, in a way that we don't often get to talk about it. And because Shakespeare, you know, a lot of people know a bit and recognize a few lines and can name a couple of plays, whatever, but often don't think in terms of those. Us in terms of, like, why monosyllables are interesting, or, like, you know, those things that are really building blocks. And so I'm always pleased to discover that it is not just me, it is at least me and you, there are two of us, and this is how we start a movement.

Traci Thomas 5:17

It's true. So you don't know this about me, but my listeners will know this, I studied theater at NYU, and I spent a year doing classical theater, and we spent the whole time basically doing Shakespeare. They call it classical, but it was just Shakespeare. And I love Shakespeare. I love the plays. I love the verse. I love the verse. I was always like, the scene has prose. What a nightmare for me. And so I went into this book kind of like, I love Shakespeare. I'm just kind of curious about this. And last year I actually taught an online class about, like, how to understand Shakespeare. Like, Hey guys, it's not that hard, you know. Like, just look for the antithesis and look for the verse, and kind of you can do it like, it's there. It's there for you. It's tricky, but it's not that tricky. You know, I kept being like, it's not a foreign language. But what was so, what grabbed me about this book, basically from the beginning, was all of a sudden, you know, it dawned on me, right? Other languages, it's not gonna be in the same verse that it is for us, necessarily, and like that one moment was because, to me, the verse is so important and and what I love about the book is like each chapter is sort of a different thing that you're reckoning, reckoning with on verse on, you know, puns on, like longer jokes on actors. And it made me realize that while I do really love the verse, it is so much more than the verse like it is so there's so many little, teeny, tiny choices that a translator makes at every single turn that I really had not considered, mostly because I think about authors, or I think about translators translating, you know, novels or non fiction books. And I think about Shakespeare as being in English. And I just these two ideas. Had never, never, the two shall meet in my mind. And I guess that's what was so thrilling about the book. That's not a question, it's just a sentence.

Daniel Hahn 7:21

I'm really glad you said that, Traci, I also think that it's an interesting thing. It's something that I kind of contended with a bit when I was starting that if you talk to people about people who love Shakespeare, about why they love Shakespeare, it it comes down to language, right? It comes down to the verse, it comes down to the poetry, comes down to the sound of it. It's always, you know, even whether you have, you know, thought about it and studied it as you have, or if you've just, like, encountered, you know, heard someone read us on it and go, Wow, that's really beautiful. The answer is always to do. It's not like he invented good plots because he didn't. He mostly borrowed, you know. But it's always, or almost always, about language. And then you think, Well, what happens if, like, what's going to be left? If we if the language is the one thing we take out, we're going to remove all of these words, 25,000 words. We're going to get rid of all of them, replace them with 25,000 new words, and what's going to be left? And part of, part of that is, kind of feels like a, like a paradox, that we're going to take out the one thing you love, and somehow you're still going to love this thing. But in a way, I think it's not a paradox. It's actually something that reveals, I guess, why I think translation done? Well, of course, you have terrible translation, but why when it's done well, it's amazing. It's because I don't think you should discount, like, the verse and all of the effects and all of the tricks and all that stuff. Because I think those things will be there. They just will have had to be recreated by someone using Danish or using Tamil, or using te reo Maori. And so if the translator is, you know, is really great, and is doing a really great job, is inventive and perceptive, and all the things we want from a reader and a writer, they will create something in which the verse is extraordinary, and in which has a little twitch in the verse that Shakespeare gives his actors becomes a bit of verse in Italian which has a little twitch in just the same place, so that the actor in Rome is given the same little thing to work with, a little turn in the verse, just like the actor in at the Globe in 1599

Traci Thomas 9:32

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about how you knew that you wanted to be a translator, like how this, how you came to this work in general?

Daniel Hahn 9:44

Sure, I Well, I didn't know. I found myself doing it by accident, which is, which certainly was quite common not that long ago. I mean, nowadays it's a little bit different. But when I started, you know, I've been translating for about 20 years now, and when I started. Wasn't unusual for people. You know, I didn't study it. I didn't do a mentorship or a summer school or a program, I didn't do a graduate course or anything like that. I was reading books for a publisher because I happened to read more than one language. My mom was from Brazil. My dad is from Argentina, so even though I only spoke English at home, I had Spanish and Portuguese kind of in the air around me, and I read a book for a publisher friend that was in Portuguese. And I said, This is amazing. You should publish it. She said, Do you want to translate it? And I, because I didn't know what the hell I was doing, said, Sure, okay, like, how hard can that be? But it wasn't something I planned to do. I did that one book, and actually, I then didn't didn't translate another book for, I think, four years between my first and my second. But since that second book, which 2006 or thereabouts, I I've been doing it quite regularly, and I've discovered that that I enjoy it. I've discovered that I'm pretty good at it. And I've also discovered that there is a kind of world of translators who are now some of my dearest friends. There is a world of people who are advocates for internationalism and pluralism in writing and for broadening the horizons, you know, within which we find the things that we read and all the things that I am increasingly excited about. And so I kind of find myself like in hindsight, it's not surprising that this is what I ended up doing with a, you know, multilingual family and so on. But at no point along the way did I think, you know what would be a sensible idea, you know, it'll be a able career choice for me, maybe a literary translation. I'm going to translate Angola novels for a living. Yet, as it turns out, here I am,

Traci Thomas 11:44

okay. This is something that I think about all the time when I read a book in translation, which is like, how do I know if the translation is good or if the book is good? How do I know what I'm responding to if I don't speak the language, the original language?

Daniel Hahn 12:01

I am going to ask you a question back. I'm going to stage a small coup and ask you a question.

Traci Thomas 12:06

Okay. Oh, I love a coup. Okay.

Daniel Hahn 12:07

Why does it matter? I mean, I kind of feel like the jokes are funny. The jokes are not funny the ball that, like, I kind of don't, in one sense, I kind of don't care, like, who did which bits,

Traci Thomas 12:20

sure, I guess

Daniel Hahn 12:20

I have no way of knowing very often, how a piece of work got to you know, this thing that is in front of me on a piece of paper, which to some extent, is also true when I read a book in English, I don't know what was the editor's intervention, who was involved? How? I don't know how many drafts the author did. I can judge whether I think this thing works as a piece of English?

Traci Thomas 12:43

Yeah,

Daniel Hahn 12:44

I and I can make a guess, like the structure and the plot and the thematic. If there's a kind of thematic congruence, that will probably be the author, because that's not usually the translators territory. If the dialog is really sharp, you can't do that if your translation is terrible,

Traci Thomas 13:02

right Right

Daniel Hahn 13:03

Will not be funny if the translation is terrible. But I think it's interesting. I mean, I I'm interested in your question, because I think people are maybe uncomfortable talking about translation or reviewing translation, because they're unable to allocate, you know, praise or blame to the person.

Traci Thomas 13:18

Yeah, I think that's what it is.

Daniel Hahn 13:19

The thing is the thing like, if it was written by two people, you wouldn't have to say, but who, but whose sentence was that?

Traci Thomas 13:27

okay, so I hear everything you're saying, and I think you're right. And also, when I am reading a book in English, written in English, I mean, I only am reading books in this but originally written English, there are times where I'm reading and I think to myself, Wow, this editor really failed here, and I assign blame to the other even though I don't know it's the editor's fault, but it feels like a problem with the editing. And so I think in the same way, my question is more like, how do I know? Like, if something wins an award for best translation, Is it really because the translation is great, or is it because it's a great book period in the language that the people are reading it? And like, how can you judge this? Like, does a great translation make a book better? Can it make a book better? Is that like, I guess sort of, that's what I'm wondering. Is like, is the translator's job just to repackage the thing as is to the best of their ability, or is there some sort of, like, I'm just gonna punch this up here and like, in the same ways, like a good editor could punch something up by being like, cut these 30 pages like, this is a mess. So I guess that's sort of my question is, like, how does the collaboration part work to enhance, or de enhance, the book.

Daniel Hahn 14:45

I think, I mean, it's such an interesting subject, Traci, and I think what you said about editors in the beginning is also really relevant, because you said, like, I will sometimes read something and go like the editor hasn't the editor could have done a better job here, and I do the same. I very rarely read something that I think is brilliant, and go, Wow, this must have been really well edited.

Traci Thomas 15:03

Well I did with your book. I did. I thought about your book, and I said, who's the editor on this? Because this person, it wasn't that they had done a great job editing, but I could tell that whoever had chosen to publish this book had a vision and understood what you were doing in a way that I was like, this editor is good. And then it was John Freeman, and everything fell into place in my brain,

Daniel Hahn 15:26

absolutely. And that's and, yeah, you can tell. You can tell who, as it were, who buys what, and who supports what and who,

Traci Thomas 15:34

yeah.

Daniel Hahn 15:34

But I feel like there's something about the sort of like the

Traci Thomas 15:38

blame part

Daniel Hahn 15:39

yeah. And in one sense, so if you think about so, I've judged the international Booker Prize, which decides that if something is good enough in English translation, it will be jointly the work of two people. It could, you know, you can't have a really great book written in another language, poorly translated, but the thing that is underneath the translation is so good that it surpasses all of the other books,

Traci Thomas 16:07

right, right, right.

Daniel Hahn 16:08

Similarly, if a book, you know, if, if the bones are wrong, no amount of elegant prose is going to is going to, you know, make this thing work. And the Booker has determined these things are all a bit arbitrary, that this will be a 5050, split of the money the Dublin prize, which includes translations. If a translation wins, they've determined it's 7525 it's a kind of arbitrary thing, but what they have in common is, you're reading work in English only. You're not evaluating the translations in relation to their source text, because you can't, because you can't, because, when I judge the book, you know dozens of different source languages that we couldn't read. But what you are doing is you're reading the English mindful of the fact that for it to have reached this level of like, for it to have have achieved this that at least, at the very least, those two roles have to been fulfilled, to to a kind of exquisite level, and also editors and many other people.

Traci Thomas 17:02

Yeah, that that answers my question. So let me kind of add to this question. For this project of the book, you talk about how you just, like, ordered all these different translations of Shakespeare plays, and you're like, you just ordered them like languages I didn't speak. They'd arrive. You didn't even know what play it was. But you also compare different translations of the same play in the same languages. So I'm wondering what that was like for you as a person, like, especially in the languages that you translate, because you translate in three languages, correct?

Daniel Hahn 17:34

Yeah,

Traci Thomas 17:34

so when you would get, like, three, I mean, there's the, one of my favorite sections in the book is The To be or not to be in 15 different Spanish language translations. And it's like everyone is slightly different. And like some none of them have the word pregunta, which, of course, like I thought was so great, because that's the word that I know to mean question. So I'm wondering, like for you, as a person who does speak multiple languages, as you're getting multiple translations of the same text. How you then, are evaluating it? Are you noticing, like, oh, this translator seemed to be much more preoccupied with the verse, or this translator seemed to be much more preoccupied with word choice, or the way that the words sound out loud, like, how then do you think about translation?

Daniel Hahn 18:18

So, I mean, I should say i There are a few languages that I can read the book mostly is dealing with languages that I can't. So I had these two very different experiences. One of them is, you know, looking at 15 different To be or not to be in Spanish, which is a language I can I have some mastery of, and at the other end of the spectrum, having two different Russian versions of the cleanup speech from Romeo and Juliet. And to do that, I sat down with my friend Sasha, and she pointed things out to me and asked the questions and said, What's the difference between this and this? It looks just at a glance, that line is longer. There seems to be a repetition, and I kind of guessed some stuff, but it was all done with, I mean, the whole book based was based on a lot of very generous friends, but part of the question about evaluating the ones that I can read, it's about evaluating not necessarily in the sense of like which is better or which is worse. Though I have ones I like more than others. It's also having a sense of them being different. So in the same way that you could also see 15 different actors doing Hamlet,

Traci Thomas 19:20

yeah,

Daniel Hahn 19:20

you would love five of them, and you'd quite like five of them, and you wouldn't really love five of them at all. But of the five that you love, it's not because, like, one of them is right and the other is almost right. They're doing different things. So each of them is noticing different things and emphasizing different things and using language in a different way. Spanish works well for that particular example, because, apart from everything else to be or not to be, you would think that that's really simple language, like, how, how much variation can there be? But Spanish also has, you know, it's the language, it's the the principal language spoken in 15 countries, more than 15 countries, to have that kind of added very. Orient. But often what you do, if you're looking at a number of different translations is not just kind of going okay, I pick this one as I would have to if I were publishing it or performing it. It's isn't it interesting that this translator thinks that this is what Hamlet means, and so one translator will use the word dilemma for question, meaning dilemma, one will use the word enigma. One will use the word alternative. So you have these words that are slightly different readings of this dramatic moment, right? And so what we get is you're giving an actor a slightly different way of thinking about a line which is quite ambiguous in English. You know, there are lots of different ways. One of the reasons every hamlet is different is because Shakespeare is brilliant, and there are a million different things in every line. And no performance of Hamlet is going to contain all of them, any more than any translation of Hamlet is going to contain all of them. But often, the interesting thing is, you know, you look at 15 different hamlets in Spanish, and these tell you something about Hamlet, about that line in English, as I say, and in that, in that example, there are some I didn't like as much as others. But often it's not just about sort of evaluating in the sense of choosing or or ranking them or something. It's about look at the possibilities contained within this line of English, and also look what Spanish can do.

Traci Thomas 21:31

Yeah, yeah. Another thing I appreciated about the book that I don't think I had anticipated, that I would appreciate, was, like, learning about the different rules of different languages, like that. Germans have, like, a very strict use of the comma. You can't just, like, in American English, you can just comma wherever you want. You can just, like Toni Morrison, the first line of beloved she just, like, has a period because she wanted to make sure that anybody reading it knew to stop, even though, like, it should have been a comma. Like, I love the idea that in certain places, like you just you can't or, like in French, they're just not doing iambic pentameter. They have to just do Alexandrians, because that's how the language works. And I think that I can't remember. Maybe it was Hungarian, where there was, like, a problem with pronouns. But I wish I remember what section this was, but it was like, but they don't use articles or something, or like vice versa. So it's like, you had to add syllables to get there, but then you got syllables back, because, and I loved, like, learning all those little sort of, like personalities of language. Well,

Daniel Hahn 22:36

I think one of the things that's that's really nice about that, and I'm glad you picked up on that. It's partly that I, like, I didn't know most of this stuff, like these are mostly I don't know. And so I was learning, I was sitting with friends in cafes or on Zoom, and they were explaining, you know, pronouns and other languages to me, or stress counts or whatever. But I do think it also is a way of making you notice things about how English works right the moment you put English next to something else, and you go, Well, why is it different to make this work in Portuguese was difficult because Portuguese has really long words, and then you're going to go a lot of short words in English, those kind of contrasts. You know, you notice that we do certain things with pronoun? Do we have some? Because, actually, we do have, unless you're going to be actively breaking with with the style, as you say, with Tony Morrison beginning Beloved, we do have some rules about where you put commas. Yeah, we have optional, you know, places where you could put them or not. Yeah, there are some places where it would be really eccentric to put a comma in English and will be really confusing. I mean, I don't know about you, I also was not taught a lot of rules about this stuff. Yeah, but I think you do notice I had so many conversations. I mean, I interviewed, I think 1314, just amazing translators who've been translating Shakespeare into various different languages. And a lot of the time, what I was learning was stuff about English that they would all stuff about Shakespeare, like, you know, I've seen Hamlet 10 million times, and they would say, of course, there is that moment when you have to reverse the initial foot to make it work on stage. And I'm thinking, you have to do what listens to this line. But I'd never, I have never sat there and counted stress, you know, stressing the balls, whatever, and to having that sort of outside that thing to compare it to, I guess,

Traci Thomas 24:21

yeah,

Daniel Hahn 24:22

when you see what, you then discover, like, what English is really good at English is really great to jump register between Anglo Saxon and Latin at words or whatever. And that's really difficult to do in Turkish. And then you discover, oh, but Turkish has this whole old Ottoman, words, horde of stuff that we can do. They inform each other and and, like I say, this is a lot of this was new to me along the way too.

Traci Thomas 24:52

What about actors? Because you do have a chapter on actors, and you know, spoiler alert, Shakespeare's plays are playing. Phrase. They're meant to be said out loud. A lot of people read them, but the point is that they're supposed to be on stage. So how much does that factor in to a translation and a translator? How much are they thinking like that's just gonna sound weird in the way that like if you're reading a novel, you don't have to necessarily think about that as much, because, you know, maybe no one would ever read that novel out loud. I like to read novels out loud, but like the plays a good translation, they're going to be on the stage like you're going to have a Gertrude at some point saying these lines.

Daniel Hahn 25:36

So I think every translator I talked to in any depth, talked about the actors they were translating for, even if they were kind of notionally translating for a publisher, but in their minds, they were translating for actors. And I think it's really hard to try and be diligent about preserving what's actually happening in lines of Shakespeare, if you're not doing that, because, like you say, so he was an actor. He was writing for actors part of an acting company. He knew what. Company. He knew what actors needed, and the plays are published in ink on paper, but actually they are instruction manuals for actors to do their job. They're designed to be spoken like you say and they and they're full of little clues that an actor doesn't even need to register, but they will respond to. Because if a line, if everyone's speaking a nice, tidy verse, and one of the lines is suddenly a little bit shorter, that gives a little jolt to the moment, and the actor doesn't have to count syllables, it just kind of happens. And so there's an example I talked about a bit in the book in relation to the Danish translator, amazing man called Niels princess. And one of the examples he gave was this moment in Hamlet, where his Hamlet's on the battlements and everyone's been talking, Hamlet has this big speech, which is mostly iambic pentameter. So it's mostly going de dum, dee dum de dum, dee dum de dum. And it's unusually regular. And then his father's ghost appears suddenly, and Hamlet exclaims as one would if one were in that situation, angels and ministers of grace defend us. And angels is a word that's the first to live well, it's a Traci. So he doesn't say angels, because that would be silly, and he doesn't say angelic ministers of grace. And the reason Shakespeare's making the line begin with an Angels is because it obliges the actor to

Traci Thomas 27:32

be scared, to have a moment.

Daniel Hahn 27:34

And so the fact that there is a little, a little twitch in the meter is not an accident. I think if you assume Jake knows what he's doing, it's also not a thing that is there to draw the eye on the page. Because I'm not sure you would necessarily notice on the page, it is a thing to make the act to do something, whether they're conscious or not, and therefore a thing to make an audience respond to. And so sometimes you'll have a piece of Shakespeare That does sound ugly or difficult or something, but maybe there is a reason for that. And so maybe you want to give the actor something that is quite hard to say. It doesn't always have to be lovely, because sometimes characters are augmented or falling apart or whatever. And then you want to give the actor something which has harsh consonants

Traci Thomas 28:23

Yeah, yeah. There's a part early in your book where you talk about the word havoc, and it's like a the choice, they had to pick a word and needed to fit all the things and like the word. And I was like, right? That's such a good that's such a good pick.

Daniel Hahn 28:36

So that's the same. So, so Julius Caesar, and just briefly, the cry havoc, and let's slip the dogs of war. And I talked to this, a great Brazilian translator who called the Francisco Portillo, who said it took him a while to work out what to do with that word. He saw the old movie with Brando playing Anthony, and he heard Brando kind of shout that word, cry havoc. And he kind of understood that this is a battle cry, and battle cried have certain properties. They need to be shoutable,

Traci Thomas 29:09

yeah.

Daniel Hahn 29:09

And the closest in terms of meaning, the closest Portuguese word he could come come up with, was the vasta song, which is four syllables long and is stressed on the last syllable, and makes a really crappy battle cry, but, yeah, it's too long, and you have to wait a really long time for that. And so he thought the most important thing there is to give the actor a thing that he can shout the meaning. He gives the actor something which is close in meaning. He uses the word mattza, which means killing. So it would be like as if Shakespeare had written cry slaughter, and let's slip the dogs of war. The meaning is close, but not exact, but what has been given to the actor as a bit of material to to deliver, and therefore for the audience to experience, that is the same.

Traci Thomas 29:57

Is this okay when you're translating a novel? All that it's not Shakespeare things. Is it this? Are you this detailed? Is it this rigorous of word choice, or is there something about the Shakespeare of it all that requires a different level of intensity from the translator?

Daniel Hahn 30:20

I mean, everything that the translator of Shakespeare dealt with, that I talked to him about, are things that I have experienced when I'm translating novels. There's something about the density of it. There's something about like, so much happening in such a small space.

Traci Thomas 30:32

Yeah,

Daniel Hahn 30:33

I don't think, at least consciously, in quite the same way, about every word, not least because I get paid by the word, and I have a mortgage, like the amount of time I have, and I have to tell like, five novels a year, right mortgage? And so i There are some words which I will agonize over and ask friends and make notes and write to people and do research, and some of it, I don't have to do that, but I think a number of differences, one of them is that I'm not translating things in verse, which is its own particular problem. Yeah, I'm not, on the whole, translating things that are 400 years old. And often, if you're translating a novel, you're relating something which is largely one voice. And so it does. It is the case that I will often, apart from bits of dialog. And certain, you know, polyvocal novels. On the whole once I get into the voice, I'm in the voice, and it accelerates, because as you do as a reader, you kind of tune in, and eventually I have a sense of what this person sounds like in English, having experienced what they sound like in whichever other language.

Traci Thomas 31:33

Okay, this is a, this is a broader translation question, which is like in the beginning of your book, in the introduction, you talk about close reading and how it takes you a long time to read something that you're translating, that you're reading it over and over, you're spending a lot of time. So can you like, can you kind of walk me and the listeners through what it's like to translate? You know, how many times are you reading through the book before you even get started? Are you taking notes in the book. Are you taking notes on paper? Are you doing sections at what point do you turn to research? Like, are you researching the whole time? Can you kind of just like, set up what the timeline and process is for just translating, not even shake, for just a novel, just everyday, run of the mill translation.

Daniel Hahn 32:18

So I every translator works differently. I where possible. And I'm sure some people think this is a delinquent thing to do where possible. I love to start translating the book before I've read it in its entirety.

Traci Thomas 32:32

Okay,

Daniel Hahn 32:33

so I discover it in the first draft.

Traci Thomas 32:36

Okay

Daniel Hahn 32:36

I do really quick first drafts. I will do if necessary. I'll do 5000 words a day, and they will be rubbish, but just anything to get something down on the page.

Traci Thomas 32:44

So you're reading, and then immediately, chapter by chapter, kind of thing,

Daniel Hahn 32:49

sentence by sentence.

Traci Thomas 32:50

So like, you read a sentence like the dog went to the store, and you're like, el Pero vamos a la

Daniel Hahn 32:55

But also, because I'm translating languages, so I translate mostly from Portuguese and Spanish, and a bit from French into English. And because those are my languages, which are relatively close to English in certain ways, like sentence structure is not wildly different, I can start translating a sentence not having ever seen the end of the sentence.

Traci Thomas 33:14

Got it.

Daniel Hahn 33:15

Because you can, if your sentence in Spanish begins el perro, I can, I can write a dog without the dog, in that case, without having seen what's going to happen. Whether it's a one line sentence or a 10 line sentence, it can be led through it like a reader is. And so my first draft, which is, I mean, unspeakably bad, is nonetheless a thing that happens really quickly, and basically is limited only by the speed at which I can type. And is my is my sort of discovering of the book I did a few years ago. Published a book called catching fire, which is like a diary of the process of a translation. So you could follow a translation. The you know the first entry is basically like, so I'm going to translate this Chilean novel. I hope it's fun. And the last entry was like, Okay, I'm clicking Send Now it's going to the publisher. And in between, it's really kind of, here is a bit of a draft. This is a problem I'm facing. It was originally written as a blog, so people contributed and stuff. But one of the things that was interesting when I published, when I started publishing this online, originally, before it became a book, a lot of it was written for non translators, written for normal people, real people, civilians, but also translators. Obviously read it. Friends of mine read it, and the most common reaction I had to them was a great sense of relief when they wrote things like, oh my god, your first drafts are even worse than my first draft. So nice to see someone who has really like, I thought my first drafts were bad. I do these really terrible first drafts. The second thing I do is fill in some of those gaps. So I'll make some policy decisions. I will do research. If I need to do research, I will look at words. I make decisions about individual words on each page, and then it's reading. I will read it again, and I'll read it again and read it again, and I will hone things that are to do with voice and rhythm and stuff I don't systematically look at the source text after that first draft, I go back and check things, but I don't have a process of going through the whole thing again and then it's just, I mean, in some sense, it's like any other thing process, you know? So I have a reference point which is, which is the source, but I'm mostly, I get to the end of a chapter, and I know the joke isn't funny, funny enough. And it's adding a syllable, taking away a syllable, changing word, replacing the last word with a monosyllable, because they're always funnier. It's just it's moving around bits until it sounds right, until the characters sound like they're actual people. And it has an effect on me as a reader that I would like it to have on other people.

Traci Thomas 35:59

You know, as an author, you have people that you work with that, like your editor, who, and sometimes your agent, who might help you work on the thing, help you get things right. What is that like with when you're a translator? Who do you turn to if you're not sure, if the editor doesn't speak the source language or whatever? Do you turn to your friends? Like, how who collaborates with you, with anyone?

Daniel Hahn 36:22

I mean, I'm really lucky, and I think a lot of translators are that there's a there's a really nice community of translators, some of whom might share my source languages, and some of whom might not. And I'm a part of a number of different groups. You can slice it in lots of different ways. The group of translators who live around my town once a month, exchange problems and translators who have the same language combination as me, and we have like an association and before and where we share ideas, and that kind of thing. So depending on the problem I'll go to, I'll go to different places. I mean, sometimes there's a case where I will look at a bit of bit of Portuguese and go, either I have no idea what's going on here? Or I could read this in two different ways or three different ways, and I need to make a call, and I might put something on the forum of the Portuguese of pelta, the Portuguese English literature Association, and just say, like, how are you guys? Are you guys reading this? Do you just, does this seem figurative or literal to you in this moment? Because I feel like even I have to choose in English

Traci Thomas 37:22

but sometimes is that on purpose, and then you have to find a way to make it be figurative and literal in English.

Daniel Hahn 37:28

I mean, I might have something like this in the book. I think about how like ambiguity is basically the hardest thing to translate. It does happen that, you know, I remember a writer I've worked with a lot a few years ago writing to him and saying, you know, there you have this word doesn't mean in this context. Context, does it mean a, or does it mean B? And he replied, I think trying to be helpful, and said, Oh, it means both. And I was thinking, that's not really helpful, because actually in English, there isn't a word that does both of those things. But it is also true that with an issue like that, if I know that, I need to create an effect where I have a word that means kind of something like this, and a word that means something kind of like that. I don't need Portuguese speakers for that. I need English speakers. So I could ask you this question. I could say, so Traci, have this problem. I have this word, you know, in Spanish, there was this word play, and I need something that sounds, you know, someone says something, someone makes a joke about something, and someone overhears it and thinks that they've made a comment about this other thing, I need to create something that has, that has those properties. I've already told you everything you need to know about the source and forget about that. What we're dealing with now is, how do I make English do the thing that I needed to do. And this is where, you know, my fellow translators, who are local to me, various, you know, for have various, you know, workshops that I've taught in the past, where the students stay in touch, and we all kind of have whatever. And I also, not infrequently, show up on Facebook and say, Can anyone think of a word meaning this and a word meaning that, which conceivably be mistaken for one another in a quite crowded room?

Traci Thomas 39:09

It's very Jeopardy clue. Well, you say in the book, I think another favorite moment of mine in the book is where you say you're talking about, I believe the color blue, and you're like, I've translated the color blue to the color red like that, because the word in whatever language needed to do what the word red does in that, like in English or whatever. And I was like, That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. And it makes sense, and I love it, but like that is crazy when you say it out loud, because, like, my assumption as a reader, when I'm reading a translation is that whatever I'm reading is just like an exact, you know, translate, or like an exact interpretation of whatever was the original text said. And I don't think it really occurred to me how much sort of like finesse and art is in translation, in translation, which, of course, I think I did know it, but I didn't think about it in that way.

Daniel Hahn 40:08

Well, I think what you what you assume, and like a lot of us assume, is that the translation is going to be an exact replica of what the original not what it says, but what it means,

Traci Thomas 40:17

right.

Daniel Hahn 40:17

And actually, what I'm usually translating is what it does

Traci Thomas 40:20

right

Daniel Hahn 40:21

And sometimes the word assul, which means conventionally means blue in English, the reason that word is there is because it has to remind you of something else, and it has to rhyme with something and it has to have this kind of vowel sound in it. And if there is no other reason that, like, the the actual color of this person's front door is immaterial, then all of those other things might take priority right in. Like, meaning is very important, and meaning is one of the main things we translate as traffic in. But it's not the only thing that we traffic in. The color of this person's front door is not the point. The important thing is it has to be a color that rhymes with something that is the same, that has this sort of vowel and ideally ends on a hard consonant, and blue is not going to cut it.

Traci Thomas 41:11

Yeah, yeah. Oh, so good. Same thing. Like, I think another thing that plays into it that you talked about is, like, culturally, depending on where the language is spoken, there's you talk about summer's day and how, like, if you're translating it in, like Aramaic or something like, summer is actually not everyone's favorite holiday or time of year, whereas, like in London, like at the globe, it's like a summer's day is lovely. In some places, summer is oppressive and it's horrible, and to compare someone to a summer's day is really an insult. And like, it's all those little kind of things that you all that the translator, translating world is thinking about that just, of course, had never occurred to me, because when you only speak one language, you're limited by your own language, and like cultural understanding and where your language is spoken. And I think that is so cool.

Daniel Hahn 42:03

But again, I think about like, I think you notice those assumptions you have in your own culture, in your own language, the moment you see something that is not the same, like the summers day. So the summers day thing begins. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate Rough winds to shake the darling buds of May and summers Lee south, all too short to date. There are a number of things that are assumed by this. One of them is that, as you say, summer is a thing that people like,

Traci Thomas 42:28

yes,

Daniel Hahn 42:28

rather than it's 50 degrees and revolting,

Traci Thomas 42:31

right?

Daniel Hahn 42:31

Another thing that is assumed by that is that the darling buds of May, like things, are blossoming in May

Traci Thomas 42:37

and that you're in the northern hemisphere.

Daniel Hahn 42:39

And actually, one of the amazing translators I talked to was a woman called Te he's a Maori woman who translated a couple of sonnets and some Shakespeare plays into te reo Maori, Maori language. And in New Zealand, Rough winds would be shaking the darling buds of November or October, which doesn't in any way scan or rhyme with anything obliging. And so she has to make a determination. Am I going to say, well, like for the purposes of the sonnet, we're all in the northern hemisphere, and we all love summer, or am I going to move everything a little bit closer to my readers or my audience? And there are some Arabic translations where it's the first line is, Shall I compare thee to a day of spring, essentially, which actually might be a compliment. And actually, I think what steinhatta did with the darling buds of May, she didn't change it to November, but she said, like the buds of spring, or the first flush of spring, or something. So she made it specific about the season, but didn't pin it to a northern hemisphere reference point that, like, it had never occurred to me that darling, but it may wouldn't only be a con in any way, be a controversial thing, because I have my entire life lived in places where may isn't where Spring is in May. Yeah, it's like, this is not, in fact, the case for everybody. Turns out, who knew

Traci Thomas 43:59

it's I, it's just, it's incredible. It's really, I, just, the book is delightful for this reason. At least I found it delightful because it's almost, like, frustratingly delightful, right? It's like, it's like, you're going through and you're like, oh my god, we have to think about this too. What a nightmare. How amazing. Like every, every section.

Daniel Hahn 44:18

So glad you said I, I kind of found myself. I mean, I ended up I got my first copies of it was published first in the UK a few weeks ago, my first copies, and I mailed them to all the translators I'd interviewed. And the first one I mailed the copy to, I wrote a note that said, this is basically, it's like 400 pages of fan mail. This is a 400 page fan letter, just kind of going, I see how difficult this thing is that you did. Yes, because also, like Shakespeare really good, but also how amazing is your brain to have made this work in this language where, you know, Shakespeare does these things and because English allows them, Shakespeare uses mono symbol because it's a monosyllabic language. He uses Latin of words because we can. He uses these consonants because we have them in rhymes, because we can in a big pentameter, because English does it. And to go from that where you have, like Shakespeare really puts pressure on English and uses all the things that English can do to go, Okay, we now have to do all of the things that English can do, but just to be bloody minded, we're going to do them in a language that actually can't do any of these things, and we're going to do all the things that English can do Shakespeare did, despite the fact that it's actually impossible to do them in Tamil or Turkish or Thai. And so it's full of, I mean, it is. It is full of my amazement

Traci Thomas 45:38

yeah I think that's right. And I think the other thing that I didn't know and only would have known by comparison and from you saying is that in almost all the other languages, Shakespeare is more accessible to the audiences and the readers because they are not hemmed up with preserving Shakespeare's greatness, like our translations are all essentially exactly the same, written in, you know, Shakespearean English vibes, whereas, like, if you have a Japanese translation, like, they're just talking to 2026 2025 Japanese people, like they might, you know, there's parts you say like, they might have a stilted section because it needs to be, because that's what Shakespeare is doing. But for the most part, the plays are more accessible. And I that was like, a real "wait what" moment.

Daniel Hahn 46:24

So I made, I say slightly flippantly in the book that, like, we are we English speakers are the only ones who are, like, stuck with 400 year old Shakespeare. And it is flippant in the sense that I think, like, I think he's amazing, and I wouldn't want it any different, obviously, but it is interesting that there is a kind of distance that most people, including those of us like you and me who studied Shakespeare, there are still things, there's still a gap. There's still a thing that we have to bridge. Sometimes. There are some things that feel close to us, and some things where you kind of go. I think I know what that means. I'm just gonna have to, like, check the footnote to the Arden edition to be absolutely sure.

Traci Thomas 46:58

Yeah,

Daniel Hahn 46:59

there's much less of that in the translation, because the translator is bringing this to a language which is familiar to you. Most translators are using some version of whatever their contemporary language is. Translations go kind of go out of date in a way that originals don't, so they get re translated. And so even if you're not using anachronism, really anachronistic modern, you know, strikingly modern language. You'll be using language that is much closer to your audience than Shakespeare, than Shakespeare to US English speakers today. So if Juliet says in English wherefore out there, Romeo, even if you and I might know that wherefore means why, rather than where you have to stop and think. And there's a bit of a gap in it. In Spanish, she says, porque, porque Are you Romeo? In French, it's pourquoi, are you Romeo? And so that it's a different experience to what we get in English, going to the theater, it is a much closer experience to walking into the globe in 1599 and sing Julius Caesar,

Traci Thomas 48:02

right? Okay, this is my last question for you. It's it's a three it's a three prong, and it is important, and you will be on the record for this for the rest of your life. What is your favorite Shakespeare play? What is your least favorite Shakespeare play, and what is the one that you would most want to translate? And I guess, why that one?

Daniel Hahn 48:21

Oh, my Lord. My favorite is 12th Night.

Traci Thomas 48:24

I love 12th Night so much. It's not my favorite, but I love 12th Night.

Daniel Hahn 48:30

12th Night is my favorite for lots of reasons, partly which are just personal things. Like, I did a production with friends in college. It's the one I know best. Yeah, it's the one I've seen probably the most, the one of which I have seen the best. but also I could if I needed to, like, say. And of course, thematically, it mixes these things and the mix of, you know, melancholy and comedy and whatever. But the real reason is because I love it, because it's important to me. You know,

Traci Thomas 48:57

did you see the Mark Rylance one?

Daniel Hahn 48:59

I saw it. So I worked on and off of the globe. So I saw that production so many times. I saw that production originally. I will make you as jealous as I can. before it was on stage at the globe that production was on in the in the, I think, February of that year, on the 400th anniversary of the first performance in middle temple Hall. So there were two weeks of performance of that production middle temple Hall, in which Mark was Olivia and Viola was a young actor who was a student at the time called Eddie Redmayne.

Traci Thomas 49:31

Wow. Incredible. Was he so good,

Daniel Hahn 49:36

highly beautiful. And then it went into the globe space, and it was amazing. And then it came back, and then it went to the West End, then it went on tour, and it has been filmed his performance as Olivia remains. I have a slight problem with it, only in that I have never liked an Olivia since

Traci Thomas 49:53

it's impossible. What was your least favorite?

Daniel Hahn 49:56

I don't have an answer for that. I mean, there's none. I don't like it all. And actually, one of the things so weirdly this is, this is gonna be my way of attempting not to answer your question. I'm sorry, I was asked at an event a few days ago whether there was, like, a bit of Shakespeare that I wish he'd done differently, right, something that I think could have been done better, or whatever. Obviously, the answer is no. I wouldn't presume, although there are things that are brilliant and things that are almost brilliant and things that are not quite brilliant, but like I still couldn't have written King Henry VI part two or Titus Andronicus, even though they are maybe not Hamlet. But one of the things that it didn't make me think of was I got to see a few years ago the RSC, the Royal Shakespeare Company, did a season, actually, 15 years ago now, where they did the eight sequential history, plays Richard second, going through to Richard the Third. And they did this really nerdy thing where you could see them all over a weekend. So you see Richard the second on like Thursday night, and then three on Friday, three on Saturday, and then you finish with Richard the Third on Sunday. But they also did the thing that was even nerdier than that, where you could see the eight of them over a weekend in more or less the order in which they were written. I went with my friend Abby, who director, and it was just sort of heavenly, partly because you start with these plays which are like the Henry the sixth, while they're very good in lots of ways, they are not King Lear, and we're not going to pretend that they are King Lear, but having something that allows you to watch him grow from, writing these plays that are good. And sometimes there are bits that are better than others, and bits that are collaborative, some of the early stuff, and and then you watch him turning into the person who's writing Richard the Third, and then Richard the second, or at least in the sequence it was that it was the tetralogies reversed. So we went from, we went to Richard the Third, which is amazing, amazing.

Traci Thomas 51:49

That's my favorite.

Daniel Hahn 51:51

So I don't so I like, there is, there isn't one I would, I would willingly live without. Because I do feel like even the ones that are, I mean, I saw two Gentlemen of Verona recently, and two gentlemen of two Gentlemen of Verona is, again, not Hamlet, but it is a) full of brilliant things, And B) the stuff where it's not quite there yet. So interesting, because you watch this and go like, really soon you're going to be able to write as you like it.

Traci Thomas 52:19

Yeah, you're going to get there.

Daniel Hahn 52:20

It's not that long. This is the guy who, just after the turn of the century, is going to be writing 12th Night

Traci Thomas 52:28

in your book, you talk about how you say something like, Well, if you've seen two gentlemen of verona, because I guess maybe you guys don't do it there that much, but they do it here all the time. I was in it. I was Sylvia. It's, I feel like it's a really popular one here. Americans really like the comedies. So I feel like the comedies get done a lot, a lot, a lot. I don't like love Labor's lost at all, or Cymbiline, those are two I really dislike.

Daniel Hahn 52:53

So loves labors lost and symboling are both plays for which I have relatively recently seen really good production. That's probably the difference.

Traci Thomas 53:01

I've never seen a good one. I don't, I don't care for it on the page.

Daniel Hahn 53:05

I think loves labors lost is when you read it on the page, it's hard to imagine it working really well on stage, yeah? And Cymbiline is, like, the entire plot is insane. And there are so many moving parts that don't, you can't imagine them working, So if you actually see it done well on stage, and you kind of go, oh, this, like, the mechanics kind of work in a way.

Traci Thomas 53:23

Yeah. Okay, and what's the one you'd want to translate?

Daniel Hahn 53:27

I mean, fortunately, I don't really have to choose one, because I will never be able to translate Shakespeare, though. I also feel slightly aggrieved about that. The easy answer is twelfth night, because I would just, I would happily just spend quite a lot of time living in this play. I feel like something, I mean, midsummers night dream is one of my favorite plays, or indeed, things that has been made by humankind. And I think that allows, that would allow you get to do so many different things. really beautiful stuff. There's really silly stuff. There's very good jokes. there are lots of different kinds of voices. I feel like, if you were feeling brave, you could, you could just fireworks, you could just like proper [?] a little bit of everything, incredibly fun. I think

Traci Thomas 54:15

I love that. Well, Daniel, this was amazing. Thank you for writing this book and letting me nerd out with you. I just, I'm so happy about it. I finished it a few days ago, and I just keep thinking about it. I might start it over again. I just loved spending time with it. It also made me want to go back and reread some of the plays.

Daniel Hahn 54:33

I mean, he is properly good,

Traci Thomas 54:34

yeah. This was amazing. Everyone at home also, I just want to shout out the audio book. You have people you read it, but then you also have people speaking different languages, and you're kind of annotating it verbally, and it's it's really great. So thank you so much. Thank you for writing this and doing this nerdy thing for us niche people. We appreciate you.

Daniel Hahn 54:54

Thanks so much, Traci. Really good talking to you.

Traci Thomas 54:56

And everyone else. We will see you in the stacks.