Mind your language | 29 September 2007

I have stumbled across a translation of Shakespeare into English on a website called No Fear Shakespeare. Hamlet’s well-known soliloquy goes: ‘The question is: is it better to be alive or dead? Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles by simply putting an end to them once and for all?’

The double is is certainly a modern touch. Nobler is a surprising survival, considering how much else was jettisoned. I’m not sure about nasty. If it does not have a babyish tone, then it connotes dirtiness, as in that resolution for ‘When I come to be old’ by Jonathan Swift: ‘Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.’

One difficulty in translating is that each crux must be decided one way or another. There is that vexed line in Henry V about the death of Falstaff: ‘His nose was as sharp as a pen and a Table of green fields’. Lewis Theobald (1688-1744) amended this to ‘a [ie, he] babbled of green fields’. The interpreters of No Fear Shakespeare give the text as ‘he told of green fields’ but mysteriously manages to render that as: ‘His face was gaunt and he was babbling about green fields.’ And I can’t see that ‘his face was gaunt’ is clearer than ‘his nose was as sharp as a pen’.

But the abolition of all metaphors can wash away difficulties too. ‘I am but mad north-north-west,’ says Hamlet. ‘When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.’ This the No Fear ironing service smooths into: ‘I’m only crazy sometimes. At other times, I know what’s what.’ Crazy, no doubt, to prevent American students thinking that by mad Hamlet means ‘angry’.