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The well-known linguist John McWhorter argues that Shakespeare's plays should be translated into modern English since they are written in a language that we eff

• lordleft 2y ago
  I can see his point. That being said, part of what is fun about reading Elizabethan literature in a relatively original style (with helpful annotations) is that I can see configurations of English I’ve never encountered before, configurations that are alien and yet familiar because they are the ancestor of the very words and phrases I use today.
  • comex 2y ago
    Yep. To me it feels like foreign language learning on easy mode. To be clear, I'm not good at foreign languages. I've never become fluent in one. But I studied Latin back in high school, and Japanese more recently, enough to slowly read some works written in those languages. When doing so, there's a real thrill in seeing a familiar idea expressed in a way that's grammatically totally alien. Using sentence structures that aren't allowed in English. Using a vocabulary that marks out a different lattice in the space of possible meanings, connecting some ideas that are disconnected in English, or splitting apart ideas that English connects. Or just using idioms or cultural references that don't exist in English. Meanwhile, in the case of Latin, the vocabulary is full of words that are the ancestors of English words, with meanings that are sometimes the same, sometimes subtly different, and sometimes seemingly totally unrelated, making it feel mind-expanding just to consider the series of semantic shifts that let one meaning evolve into the other. Reading Shakespeare is like that, just… less so. Grammar, vocabulary, and idioms are all familiar enough that you can understand their meaning with just some helpful glosses, yet foreign enough to reproduce some of the same thrill. Sometimes they're more thrilling because they're familiar – because they could be plopped right into modern English and fit into the existing scaffolding, filling in what can now be recognized as a gap. So in a way I agree with John McWhorter. When I read Shakespeare's plays, the foreignness of the language does distract me from the content. But it's in a good way, a fun way. To have an experience that's more about the content, in contrast, I can watch performances of the plays. When performed, the dialogue usually goes by too fast for me to understand the unfamiliar bits, but the way the actors speak it helps get the meaning across. There does still tend to be a risk that I miss out on part of the meaning and get confused about a plot point… but it's not the end of the world. Still, I'm sympathetic to people who find it hard to get into Shakespeare because of this. Not everyone has to share my interest in language. Some may find it difficult; some may just dislike the tradeoff of language distracting from content. If translation helps those people, I'm in favor of that being an option. But reading poems in translation has its own massive cost. A translation of Beowulf isn't Beowulf; it's something related but new and different. Same goes for the Divine Comedy, the Odyssey, the Bible, et cetera. That's just the bitter truth.
    • thaumasiotes 2y ago
      > Reading Shakespeare is like that, just… less so. Grammar, vocabulary, and idioms are all familiar enough that you can understand their meaning with just some helpful glosses I found a version of the Canterbury Tales online that footnoted the lines. No one is going to pretend that Chaucer is comprehensible to modern speakers. But it was very charming to see that it wasn't necessary to indicate which words the footnotes for a line applied to. Enough of the line is obvious that it's clear what difficulty the footnote is helping you with as it explains the meaning of a word. That wouldn't work in a more foreign text.
• jimbob45 2y ago
  Shakespeare's plays should be translated into modern English I've been running through the works of Shakespeare translated into modern English[0]. The original text is next to the new stuff and annotations are present when translations are weird or questionable. I'd highly recommend this for anyone who wants to read his stuff but doesn't have the time to look up every third word. https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translati...
  • garof 2y ago
    I always thought that I should do the translation myself to current colloquial English, for my own better understanding. I didn't know about that link, thanks! Anyone know if there is a printed version that is similar? And, extending that request to other classic works too?
    • jimbob45 2y ago
      https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/?scr=1 https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/?scr=1 SparkNotes has a clearer and more printable version but is behind a paywall.
    • magnetowasright 2y ago
      There are some editions, often made for schools, that have the original text on the right hand page with translations/explanations of the language on the left hand page. The description of the jokes, puns, euphemisms, and general turns of phrase that are no longer intuitive today enrich the experience for sure. Ask your local library.
• AlbertCory 2y ago
  Well, he's wrong, and that's why there are so few "modern English" productions put on. And also why Shakespeare plays in the original language continue to live. When you see it performed live, you still get the gist. The language is still beautiful. That's the point. More to the point, the audiences would not increase at all if they were translated into modern terms. On the other hand, no one in the theater minds if you adapt the plot into something else entirely. Ran (King Lear) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089881/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_3_nm_5_in_0_q_ran https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089881/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_3... 10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0147800/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0147800/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
  • shortrounddev2 2y ago
    > and that's why there are so few "modern English" productions put on Modern productions of shakespeare or even victorian era stories constantly make their way into Hollywood. "Clueless" is just a modernized version of "Emma"
    • dbspin 2y ago
      This is reductive. Clueless is certainly not "just" a modernised version of Emma. It takes broad strokes inspiration from the plot of Emma, but the charm of the film isn't something that can be reduced to the original novel. The application of a comedy of manners onto the contemporary setting, combining broad farce with naturalistic performances, skewering (while also benefiting from) consumer fetishism etc. The point here being that one could write a million bowdlerised versions of Emma and never land on a Clueless. Modern English Shakespeare translations are readily available. It takes genius to make one that rivals the original in popularity.
      • AlbertCory 2y ago
        > This is reductive And this is a meaningless insult. One might say it needs translation into Normal People English. > The point here being that one could write a million bowdlerised versions of Emma Who cares? The point is, the plots and characters are readily adaptable into modern settings, and that IS a valid modernization of Shakespeare, as McWhorter wants. There are a million ways to do that, and godspeed to all of them. Having dukes and queens and earls speaking modern English is just stupid.
• graemep 2y ago
  Shakespeare is modern English and perfectly comprehensible. Beowulf is not. Yes, there are some words that have changed (like his example of "character") but those are few. There are always difficulties. There are lots of words that have different meanings in British, American and other forms of English ("bum", "fag", etc.), or that are offensive in some places but not others, different usages..... The way to make Shakespeare is and fun is to watch it (on stage, or film). I have been to several Shakespeare plays in the last year and there were none where I felt I was just "catching the basic gist". The jokes worked for a start.
  • recursive 2y ago
    > Shakespeare is modern English and perfectly comprehensible My personal experience is inconsistent with this. I'm not an English expert, but I'm a native speaker. I generally am able to communicate with people using the language. Despite these qualifications, I was hard-pressed to find any lines that I could make sense of in Shakespeare. This is not a criticism of the material. Also it's not really a self-criticism either. I believe that there is a large group of alleged "English speakers" that would have the same experience as me. You can't claim that it's "perfectly comprehensible" without acknowledging that many (most?) are not able to comprehend the material.
    • magarnicle 2y ago
      It is modern English, it is generally comprehensible, but it isn't easy for the modern speaker. The main reason is that Shakespeare is full of familiar words that have secondary meanings that are uncommon or unusual for us now. So we find it hard to parse because a word we tend to use as a verb might be a noun, for instance. An example off the time of my head would be the word "fast", which we usually use to mean "quick", but Shakespeare uses to mean "held tight". Speaking of "quick", he would use that to mean "alive". If you really think about each line you might be able to work it out without notes, but that doesn't make it very easy to read.
      • kwhitefoot 2y ago
        That meaning of fast is still current in phrases such as 'hold fast to'. Similarly for quick. There is a relatively recent film called The Quick and the Dead based on a 1973 novel of the same name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quick_and_the_Dead_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quick_and_the_Dead_(1987_f... If you are moderately well read most such words should not pose more than momentary difficulties.
• qntty 2y ago
  Shakespeare’s plays are already in modern English
  • rtkwe 2y ago
    In terms of the words they use sure but the grammar/sentence construction is quite different and hard to parse for modern readers. That's their point the translations make decisions to make the language more understandable for their target audience so it's more accessible to them in some ways than it is to English speaking audiences who are usually expected to read it in the original without modification.
• jfengel 2y ago
  Shakespeare is modern English. Linguists describe it as "Early Modern English". It's contemporaneous with the King James Bible, which is still widely read, without translation. The difficulty with Shakespeare isn't that it's in Elizabethan English, but that it's in poetry. The Russians and French have strong poetic cultures. They enjoy reading poetry, and the challenge of writing it, including translation. That just doesn't exist in Anglophone cultures. But Shakespeare wasn't meant to be read. It was meant to be performed, and a native speaker watching a good performance has no need of translation. The emotions and flow of the story are clear. They may not understand each and every word, but that's often true of even the latest movies. (The dialogue is often mixed in a way that makes it hard to understand -- by the director's choice.) I regularly perform Shakespeare for audiences who have never seen it before, and I never translate a word of it. I generally edit it to make it move more briskly than Elizabethan audiences wanted, but the only time I'll change a word is to make the pronouns match the actors I cast (and not even always then). Shakespeare's stories are rarely worth preserving for their own sake. The stories themselves are dated -- not the words, but the culture. There's no "translation" that will make Claudio not an asshole for the way he treats Hero, or make Hero not look pitiful for taking him back. Shakespeare's plays in modern words are always flat, dull, and penitential. If you're going to modernize the language, modernize the whole thing -- go see the delightful "Ten Things I Hate About You" or the magical "West Side Story".
  • ipnon 2y ago
    Yes I find most people who find Shakespeare incomprehensible suddenly find it clear and simple once they read it aloud
    • jfengel 2y ago
      I think it takes some experience in getting a Shakespeare text from the page into a form that really clicks with people. It's not because the words are unfamiliar, but because Shakespeare has a fondness for long, elliptical sentences and convoluted grammar. It can be hard to figure out where the emphasis goes. It helps that the poetry gives you a lot of cues. Iambic pentameter gives you a framework. Deviations from it are cues that something is important. It's not a formula for performance, but it reveals just how much more Shakespeare was directing you than just the words to say. John Barton's "Playing Shakespeare" course has been how they teach that to RSC actors, and that has given us some of the greatest Shakespeare lights of the last 50 years. The videos of it with his students are magnificent views of a comically young Patrick Stewart, a ridiculously baby-faced Judi Dench, a positively embryonic Ian McKellen, and many others. Inexperienced readers may not be able to get that just from reading it aloud by themselves. But if they listen to somebody who has practiced it, they'll have a huge leg up on comprehension.
• dr_dshiv 2y ago
  I don’t think many have read your link. It’s great. Some lines from King Lear: The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash; then must we look to receive from his age, not alone the imperfections of long-engraffed condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them. Regan replies: Such unconstant starts are we like to have from him as this of Kent’s banishment. Goneril continues: There is further compliment of leave-taking between France and him. Pray you, let’s hit together. The commentary on these lines is delightful!
• jccooper 2y ago
  I'm very much on board with cuts and/or emendations to remove or update archaisms and obsolete cultural references, and align better to modern expectations with regards to length and intermissions and such. Unless your mission is explicitly historical accuracy, you're probably doing a disservice to your audience if you don't. But Shakespeare doesn't need translating after you've done that, as I think all the attempts at doing so have shown. They're dreadful.
• karaterobot 2y ago
  McWhorter's a fun, cantankerous guy, always ready with a hot take. This one is wrong. We do have access to Shakespeare! Even ignoring productions, which are immediately understandable, a regular person, with no special education, and only a tiny bit of patience, can just sit down and read all of Shakespeare, and understand it. Right now! They may have to look up some of the words, but that's exactly what people have been doing for hundreds of years—without access to the internet, even. I don't know what's changed now to make this task onerous. I mean, I could speculate about our attention spans, but I can't say that with certainty. A contemporary English translation is unnecessary, wouldn't make the plays even a tiny bit more relevant or meaningful, and I predict most people would prefer the original anyway.
  • recursive 2y ago
    > a regular person, with no special education, and only a tiny bit of patience, can just sit down and read all of Shakespeare, and understand it. Right now! This just is not my experience. Today, I spent about 20 minutes trying to understand the first sentence of "Romeo and Juliet". When I get to "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny," I cannot reconcile any dictionary definition of "mutiny" with anything this fragment might reasonably mean. There are a few definitions of "mutiny", but generally, it's "rebellion against any authority". Who is the authority? Is it the heads of the dignified households? Like the staff of the house is trying to seize power? Or younger members of the family? What's civil blood? If I spent eight hours pondering this prologue, I strongly doubt that I would make any more headway than this.
    • karaterobot 2y ago
      Are you trying to parse every word in sequence, or just understand the meaning in context? The latter is much easier.
      • recursive 2y ago
        I'd settle for either one. In order to have have a context at all, one must have some critical mass of understanding. The density of parts I can understand is never enough to achieve that. My experience is that any portion of Shakespeare that I attempt to read goes the same way. If I dig farther into "mutiny", there's no way to know if I'm eventually going to produce a "context" or whether I'm on a fool's errand. In order to develop a context, one must somehow achieve a sufficient foothold of comprehension from which to build it. There are precious few sentences in Shakespeare for which I would be able to do that. The farther you get into the play, the more references there are to earlier, so you kind of have to start at the beginning. But I can't understand that part either. You keep saying it's easy. I believe you when you say that's your experience. What I'm trying to tell you is that it's not easy for everyone. There is no amount of patience that I could apply to this pursuit that would yield success. This is my good-faith best effort to comprehend it and it's not happening.
• aragonite 2y ago
  > "Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak." This reminds me of a popular anecdote in philosophy, that German students grapping with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason often prefer Norman Kemp Smith's English translation over trying to deciper Kant's 18th-century German :) That said, I'd argue that literary work (especially literary work with such linguistic significance) should be handled differently than theoretical/expository work. What modern students really need are not so much translations [1] as meticulously annotated editions where the annotations are (so to speak) written by linguists rather than literature professors (i.e. the focus should be on bridging the language gap & providing linguistic context, not on literary interpretation or tediously over-analyzing literary symbolism) [1] which would be as exciting to read compared to the original as a remake of Gone with the Wind in the 21st century - the plot is there, but the magic is lost.
• vonnik 2y ago
  This exists: https://playonshakespeare.org/ https://playonshakespeare.org/
• _ZeD_ 2y ago
  Dude... every Italian kid read the divina commedia. Dante wrote it in 1321. In poetry. Oh, and he basically "invented" the Italian language. that is difficult to read now.
• vundercind 2y ago
  I found hip-hop, in general, much harder to approach than Shakespeare. I still miss a lot of the allusions and references in it without notes. I don’t think hip-hop needs to be translated, though. I think I needed to try harder and acquire some education before I could begin to appreciate it beyond a very-surface level, if even that. I certainly wouldn’t care to use a “translation”. What’s the point? The invitation to grow is important and shouldn’t be dismissed. This isn’t completing your sprint goals, it’s art appreciation. However long it takes is fine.
• waldrews 2y ago
  Yes please. When we torture students with seemingly archaic math, like geometry largely in the form it was in the time of Euclid, we do it for a reason, setting up subsequent ideas, and we have modern textbooks that clean up the presentation and connect it to modern applications. Making students learn an outdated form of English, useful for Shakespeare and nothing else, does not seem that useful as an investment of effort, compared with learning another modern language, or even something like Latin that in turn helps in learning other languages and understanding English vocabulary in several useful fields. Growing up reading Shakespeare in the original Klingon, being able to actually understand what was going on, gave me more of an appreciation of the literature/stories/history than later struggling through it in archaic English with a reference in hand.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• sbelskie 2y ago
  “ Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak." I think the more radical argument and the one closer to the truth (but not the whole truth) is that these countries possess nothing of Shakespeare, for the simple reason that they, unlike us, have never read him.
• mauvehaus 2y ago
  I think a better question isn't "is it hard to read/consume as originally written?", but "Is it worth getting over the hump of reading/consuming as originally written?". I'd argue the answer to that second question is "yes". It's relatively understandable as Early Modern English, and it's eye opening just how loose the grammar and phrasing can be while remaining understandable. It's delightful to see how Shakespeare plays with the language and a treat to find unfamiliar words and phrases. Is some of it a little cumbersome? Sure. Are there jokes that have lost something over the last 400 years? Absolutely. Are some of the stories a little ridiculous? Certainly. Is it also a fascinating glimpse into English as a language? Absolutely! Does everyone delight in language as much as I do? Of course not. I remember reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in 7th grade and the book we used having the play on the left page, and notes for the modern reader on the right page. I found that to be a great way of making the text accessible. Especially as a seventh grader. For the record, I found Pride and Prejudice (without the zombies) to be a harder read than any of the Shakespeare I've read.
  • jermaustin1 2y ago
    This is my view as well. I'm no literature buff, but some of my fondest lessons in school were dissecting the meanings of Shakespearean prose. Finding the fun pronunciations that turned something boring into something humorously vulgar. His play on words is what makes so much of his comedies work even today. It is always a treat to get to watch a play that stays true to the cadence that Shakespeare wrote for. Can I understand an entire play while watching it: no. Can I find the fart joke: YES!
• mbg721 2y ago
  They don't get it in the language they speak at all! Puns are shitty in translation, and Shakespeare is loaded with them. Modern English isn't good enough, you need the allusions, the little nods, the things that make it human.
• Suppafly 2y ago
  Shakespeare's plays are pretty easy to understand though. You could certainly translate them into easier to understand English, but a lot of the tougher language is due to the word play and such, not because the words themselves aren't understandable.
• morgango 2y ago
  | You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.
• linearrust 2y ago
  > The well-known linguist John McWhorter argues that Shakespeare's plays should be translated into modern English since they are written in a language that we effectively no longer speak. Shakespeare is modern enough to be understandable by any english speaker. What shakespeare requires isn't a translation but annotation for the cultural/historical/etc references and archaic words. > "Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak." I don't think you can truly enjoy shakespeare in a language other than english. After all, the value in shakespeare isn't the plot, but the language. > However, we would never complain a translation of Beowulf 'isn’t Beowulf' I would. But it isn't worth learning old english just to read a book. It is worth reading a bit of annotation for shakespeare. Certainly this 'well-known linguist' isn't equating the difficulty of reading beowulf with hamlet?