This volume, comprising many individual but conceptually interrelated studies, sets out to multiply perspectives on the concept of translation, making it intellectually generative, an invaluable prompter to reinterpretation of texts and fresh theoretical reflections on pertinent critical issues. Mindful that the ideally singular light radiating from translation as conceived by the translators of the King James Bible might actually be refracted through manifold interpretations, our twenty-two collaborators read and reread through what we would call the prism of translation, shedding on the concept and the texts, to bend one of Philip Larkin’s luminous epithets, a ‘many-angled light’.

The identification of...

A Midsummer Night’s Dreamis profoundly and constantly—though also delicately and humorously—concerned with processes of change, of translation from one state to another, and its audience is frequently made aware that for human beings translation—any kind of translation—is likely to be a difficult process requiring that obstacles be overcome, and that it may involve loss as well as gain. The most prominent, and most frequently discussed, aspect of translation in the play is from the unmarried to the married state. In no other play by Shakespeare is the process of courtship leading to marriage so central...

The Elizabethans seem to have had a peculiar interest in hybrids, in the crossing of boundaries and the mixture of opposites. Shakespearean comedy celebrates the quasi-hermaphroditic boy actor playing the part of a girl who then dresses as a boy (Rosalind, Viola). The first published version ofThe Faerie Queeneends with the coupling of Amoret and her beloved Sir Scudamour: fused together in ‘long embracement’, they are ‘growne together quite’, so that

Had ye them seene, ye would have surely thought,

That they had beene that faireHermaphrodite,

Which that richRomaneof white marble wrought,

And in his...

The question that we would like to open up in this essay is how can we talk about ‘character’. Working together on an edition ofRomeo and Juliet, one of us being a theatre director and the other a literary critic, we have found that an area where vocabularies clash most often is that of attributing motivation to the characters’ roles. This emerges most clearly in the translation of these roles from the page to the stage but attribution of motives can be informed by a reversed translation from stage practice to reading strategy. Such attribution immediately calls into play...

A curious and revealing detail in the Globe theatre sequence which opens Laurence Olivier’s film ofHenry Vis the repeated introduction of a stage boy, who holds up placards indicating the title and locations of the play we are about to see. The first placard informs us that this is ‘The Chronicle History of Henry the Fift with his battel fought at Agin Court in France’, and subsequent placards announce locations as an ‘ANTE CHAMBER IN KING HENRY’S PALACE’ and ‘THE BOAR’S HEAD’. Generally speaking, the film’s invention of this boy is in keeping with the archaeological thrust of...

If it is true, as Dennis Kennedy observes inLooking at Shakespeare, that ‘the visual history of performance ... has been mostly excluded from Shakespeare studies’, then it is even more the case that the history of the music which has accompanied successive productions has been virtually totally ignored. However, if ‘there is a clear relationship between what a production looks like and what its spectators accept as its statement and value’,¹ the same must be true of the aural world generated by musical accompaniment. Less completely pervasive than the visual, physical setting of a performance, and much more prominent...

Shakespeare reached Africa perhaps as soon as or sooner than his work reached the most distant parts of his own country. In 1607 there are reports of performances ofHamletandRichard IIby British sailors off the coast of Sierra Leone. This hardly raised the floodgates of performance, but in 1800 the ‘African Theatre’ in Cape Town opened with a performance ofHenry IV(which Part is not clear), and the amateur entertainments of colonial officers, the educational priorities of missionary and colonial government schools, plus the professional companies imported to entertain settler communities, ensured that the plays of...

Joseph Conrad was the first modern writer V. S. Naipaul encountered at the age of ten; and Conrad, seaman turned author, was also someone who ‘had been everywhere before me’ and who ‘sixty to seventy years ago meditated on my world’ (CD, p. 210). Indeed, Conrad’s vision of this world, as some critics have remarked,² is one which Naipaul seems bound to repeat in his own work: ‘half-made societies ... where there was no goal, and where always “something inherent in the necessities of successful action ... carried with it the moral degradation of the idea”’ (CD, p. 208). This...

The eighteenth-century sentimentalist was expected to be a skilled interpreter of nonverbal communication. Sensitive to the nuances of facial expression or physical gesture, the ‘man of feeling’ was an expert reader of physiognomy, a translator of signs who could turn a look into a sentence, the slightest movement into an assertion, a question, or an invitation:

There is not a secret so aiding to the progress of sociality, as to get master of thisshort hand, and be quick in rendering the several turns of looks and limbs, with all their inflections and delineations, into plain words. For my own...

The subtitle of Hazlitt’sLiber Amoris; or, the New Pygmalion, published anonymously in 1823, promises a retelling of Ovid’s Augustan myth of transformation set in Regency England, a translation from classical to modern times. Unlike Ovid’s poetic invention of a distant mythological past, Hazlitt’s prose version takes place in the quotidian world of London’s lodging houses. However, early nineteenth-century London has no pagan Venus who can effect the metamorphosis required by Hazlitt’s narrator. Obviously, like Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus(1818), the subtitle is ironic, and questions the pertinence of classical mythology to the modern world. There is...

It took rather longer than I care to admit before I was prepared to concede that Ruskin’s ‘intrinsic value’ is itself a term without intrinsic value.¹ The phrase is at best a promissory note, at worst a semantic relic to ward off the evil eye of commodity. One would suspect that I was taken with, and by, the idea of a talismanic key; an idea which I then read into Ruskin’s words in order to find there the confirmation that I desired. Eisegesis instead of exegesis. Put somewhat differently, questions of value are inseparable from matters of translation; and translation...

Browning’s admirers have often, and rightly, celebrated the achievement of his dramatic monologues, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’, published inMen and Womenin 1855. My interest in them here, however, is not primarily literary-critical, and I do not propose to offer sustained critical commentary on the poetry itself, although my discussion does move towards a closer attention to some detailed features of the poetry. I am mainly interested in some larger questions raised by Browning’s interest in those particular painters, at that particular time in the middle of the nineteenth century. The questions are, briefly, to do...

Among the great Victorian novelists, Thackeray could probably best be described as a natural connoisseur of the fine arts. George Eliot and Hardy acquired considerable expertise in matters of art, but both set out with a deliberate intention to learn the subject which was very different from Thackeray’s comfortable familiarity. This may help to explain why Hardy’s novels make more direct reference to painters and their works than do those of Thackeray, although an equally plausible explanation could be found in the later date at which Hardy was writing. After the onset of the Aesthetic movement, reference to the work...

On 7 September 1871, a middle-aged Englishman stood on the railway station in Edinburgh. He was short, fat, red-faced, bull-necked, bush-bearded and ‘quite bewildered’.¹ He had been away from Britain for the whole summer; everything now looked very strange and he hardly knew where to buy a ticket for. He had been to Iceland and enjoyed it. The last words of his journal account of that visit leave us in no doubt about this: ‘Iceland is a marvellous, beautiful and solemn place ... where I had been in fact very happy.’ He was still happy enough when he arrived home...

Schiller’s celebrated defence of the redemptive social value of art as autonomous aesthetic illusion (Täuschung, translated as ‘fiction’ by Carlyle)¹ offers a suggestive proleptic commentary on the close relationship between late nineteenth-century aestheticism and a certain logic of translatability. Whilst this defence alludes to a familiar mimetic conception of the relationship between art and life—between the ‘copy’ and its ‘original’—it also enacts a striking defamiliarization of this paradigm by claiming for aesthetic illusion a truth which is lacking from its ostensibly reflected source. Art, Schiller would seem to say, offers a truth which is lacking from truth; only...

Any artistic production inevitably involves an act of translation, a transference of a form, commodity, or idea across a boundary, be that boundary one of time, space, language, or cultural medium. Shakespeare and his works are among the most durable and flexible of translated media, and seem unlikely to be easily exhausted. Particularly interesting are the ways in which ‘Shakespeare’ operates both as an enabling medium and as an object who is himself translated. Within the economy of translation, the facilitating medium is a common point of reference, a shared experience which first makes conceivable the possibility and desirability of...

In April 1879, Anton Chekhov, then aged 19, wrote to his youngest brother, Mikhail Pavlovich Chekhov, recommending some reading:

Take a look at the following books:Don Quixote(complete, in all seven or eight parts). It’s a fine work by Cervantes, who is placed on just about the level of Shakespeare. I recommend Turgenev’s ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’ to our brothers if they haven’t read it already. As for you, you wouldn’t understand it.¹

Turgenev’s essay had originally been given as a lecture in 1860, the year of Chekhov’s birth. My own essay is designed to be an extended gloss...

There are several concepts of Shakespearean translation that might offer us a way into the reading of James Joyce’sUlyssesand, not least, into the chaotically elliptical but brilliant discussions of Shakespeare that take place in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of that book.¹ A reading ofUlyssesconfronts us with Joycean multilingualism but also with the need to examine issues of cultural translation and of the reading and rereading of Shakespeare in the European cultural contexts of the period during whichUlyssesis set and of Joyce’s own life.² It is well known that Joyce can offer the reader...

Some texts—one thinks, almost at random, ofUlysses,Shame,Rites of Passage—insist on a reading through translation more than others. They may be thematically oriented toward issues of translation; they may be more cryptographic in texture. It is my contention in this essay that Allan Hollinghurst’s second and, so far, best novel,The Folding Star(1992),³ is a tragicomic gay romance which is concerned in many ways with translation itself as well as with various kinds of ‘shadowy transposition’.⁴ Translating intriguingly across sexual orientations (straight, gay), cultures (English, Belgian) and periods (principally, twofins de siècle, the 1890s...

Mark Batty You’re known specifically as a writers’ director, and you have yourself commented that ideally the author should be present when you’re dealing with his work and that it is a privilege to be in the head of genius when working on a classic play. Given these views, what relationship do you like to have with a translator of the work of a non-living author?

Peter Hall I think the problem always with translation is that you inevitably feel as if you’re looking through frosted glass at the original, that you can’t quite get at the absolute. I’ve always...

Mark Batty You’ve done a great deal of work in the theatre that has involved intricate reworking of texts. You have worked in collaboration with Inga-Stina Ewbank on a number of Ibsen’s plays, for example. How do you see the work you have done on adapting and translating texts in relation to your primary role as a director? Are these activities extensions of that role or separate interests?

John Barton What is adaptation and what is translation? The categories seem to me very blurred, and I wonder if this may not be Inga-Stina’s view also when looking at particularly knotty...