Carvalho Homem, R. and T. Hoenselaars (eds.) (2004): Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-First Century, Amsterdam/New York, Editions Rodopi B.V., viii + 269 p.

This book is a collection of articles on the translation of Shakespeare’s plays. The authors have themselves done such translations, and/or studied the problems associated with this activity on a theoretical level. Roughly the second half of the volume is devoted to the study of the translation of the plays into European (as opposed to Brazilian) Portuguese. These latter essays are of course authored by Lusophone translators involved in this enterprise. The most engaging articles for the non-specialist in this area are those which concentrate on examples of problematic vocabulary and passages in the plays, and on the illustration and justification of the solutions which the authors have adopted in specific translations. A number of them, however, are at pains to explicate the theoretical positions which underlie the decisions involved in the translation of specific passages. They also relate such decisions to more general questions as to the type of translation to be attempted. Is the translator seeking maximum linguistic “fidelity” to the original play (or “accuracy,” p. 132), and, if so, does this mean finding translation equivalents in a variety of the target language from about 1600, or from one that “corresponds” to Shakespearean English in the present-day (or some diachronically intermediate variety of the) target language? If, on the other hand, the goal is socio-cultural “acceptability,” sometimes called “adequacy” (ibid.), meant to attract native speakers of the target language who are non-specialists (and maybe even young) to Shakespeare, how and to what extent should the translator change the original play? Consideration of such objectives means that “adaptation,” and not just translation in the linguistic sense, is one of the main topics in this collection. This eternal conflict between fidelity and current acceptability takes an interesting form in the history of the translation of the plays. What we might call the philological tradition, in this context, has sought to establish the most authentic version of the original, presumably the one closest to the play that Shakespeare wrote (see, e.g., the discussion at pp. 32-37). It then has striven to understand the language of this putative original text as perfectly as possible. Finally, it has marshaled the translator’s presumably native knowledge of a socially and stylistically “corresponding” variety of the target language to furnish an “equivalent” to the source text. (We alluded above to the additional question of the historical period to target for the “appropriate” linguistic variety, which also has to be accessible to the target audience. See pp. 13 and 65-78.) What I will venture here to call the artistic tradition, on the other hand, has sought not linguistic authenticity but cultural correspondence between Shakespeare’s play and a current “rewriting” of it (pp. 97 and 115). The latter must be created anew, not just for each target language, but for every time and place. It is a creation spawned from the original play, whose main goal is to interest the audience and/or the readership in the story dramatized by Shakespeare, or in some analogue to it. It is the logic of this prioritization of current relevance which allows articles in this collection to deal with adaptations and even “spin-offs” (p. 79), as well as translations of the plays. Another tension, which appears from articles here to be almost as acute as this fundamental opposition, is that between translating the play for readers and doing it for audiences. In the latter case, the translator may have, for example, to work with a director, and even actors, not only on problems posed by metrical and suprasegmental structure, but also on harmonizing language with action, on stage directions, and even on …