Some thoughts on another essay by Charles Krauthammer, this time a characteristically crabby essay about modern Shakespeare performances that dilute, distort, or corrupt the original texts. He starts derisively with with a quotation from the playbill of a Yiddish-language New York City performance of Hamlet that is “translated and improved.” It reminded me of college buddies I had during my year abroad in London who mildly mocked a woman they knew who said Shakespeare is really better in French.
Krauthammer as usual makes some sharp and insightful points, even though I think he is a bit too dour. He refers to “the prevailing academic notion of the critic being superior to the author,” which, I think, sums up a lot of the literary theory tension between strict textualists or close readers and the reader-response or new historicist approaches.
While I agree with Krauthammer and my college friends that it is odd to say Shakespeare is better in a foreign language, the issue of Shakespeare and translation is interesting. I mentioned in a past blog that one of my teachers used the year 1500 as a turning point when world cultures (with different languages) began to inter-mingle. Shakespeare, writing in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, must have been an important influence on the emergence of the English language as what one of my multilingual buddies referred to bitterly as “the global language of business” in the modern world.