YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Hahn

lines on the record: 52
first: 2026-04-11
most recent: 2026-04-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“meaning not being the important thing. I think it takes, I'm not sure it takes a human to notice things because I can be taught to do whatever you want the teacher to do. It takes a human to make the kinds of choices that are being made. Having looked at the speech and decided that actually I'm going to not make it rhyme, even though Shakespeare makes it rhyme because whatever. So there are ways in which the human brain makes choices that are more surprising and more interesting to me because this is a creative act. It's not just an act of processing. But also I feel like it's the point. I don't know if an AI talk could have written Hamlet instead of Maggie of Arrell. I would instantly be less interested in it. Than thinking about this person who has struggled to express. Loss and grief and poetry and whatever.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Slightly idiosyncratic spelling that she likes for reasons that we could speculate. The fact that her translation is different from his and will be different from everybody else's is because she is her, is because it has filtered through an individual consciousness and sensibility and experience. And the ways in which that makes her translation different is. Is not a bug. That is translation. It's the feature, not the bug. And I feel like. Even with the, I think it's slowed, but what was a kind of rapidly increasing competence of AI tools in translation? Even if it could get from, as it were, 80% of what we do to 100% of what we do. That would still be Would still be Yeah, I feel like there's something about I feel like humanity is the point. That's part of it. But also, you know, we were talking earlier about”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the reason I'm interested in what these people are doing is partly because they are people and because everyone is different. In that thing you quoted, I say what I can do or still less what all of us can do. And the variety is also part of the point. The fact that Natalia Ginsberg's fingerprints are on Baldini's translation. Is also why we lose from the homogenizing and the diminishing that comes with sort of endlessly recycled AI. That I'm interested in what happens when it is... Not just someone who knows loads of vocabulary, but someone who is Natalia Ginsburg. A particular sensibility and a particular feeling about loss.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ways in which it can be amazing and brilliant and inspired, and also the ways in which it has flawed. I think the mistakes are much more interesting than algorithmic mistakes, if you know what I mean. I feel like that immediately says something about What we might well be losing Which isn't only to do with quality is not quite the right word, but the ways in which AI tool producing a Danish translation will be aware of fewer of the things, fewer of the components than Niels Brunster is aware of. But also, I feel like. Even if an AI tool could do exactly the same thing as this one person. I would immediately be less interested in it.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a chapter about AI in the book, and I talk to my editor quite a lot about whether I should write this chapter because it was always going to be... If it was in any way a concrete thing was going to be outdated. So I ended up writing something short and sort of a bit abstract, I guess. But one of the things that my editor said when she was arguing that maybe the chapter shouldn't be there was in a way the entire book is an argument for the human, right? It's an argument for why it is that this person's translation is different from that person's translation and what that tells us about. Creativity and how we use language and so on. And so, in one sense, I feel like Understand what is entailed in human translation.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so actually what happened was that different members of the audience had a completely different sense of the ways in which these things were relational. Tim referred to someone who said, you know, I really like the bits in Indian because there's this sort of non-English thing that is happening. And how am I supposed to know what they are? But of course, depending on who you are in... In the room, if there is an actor who ask Canada, you would be able to lock into that in a different way to someone who might be speaking. Urdu or someone, whatever it is, you know.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But everyone laughs when Tatinia wakes up and sees bottom of the ass's head. Like that works as a bit of dramatized, the comedy isn't the dramatized thing. But the other thing which I thought was sort of interesting about that production was the way in which when it came to when it was performed in the UK, in the US, various other places, most audiences didn't have a sort of subtle distinction between these languages and had a sense of it being essentially a bilingual production, English and another language. As it were English and the languages of South Asia, in a kind of combined way, because I can't necessarily tell the difference between Bangla and Tamil or Tamil and Hindi or whatever.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That each character need to be translated into the language of whoever was understudying that part. So Abhijit Gupta, who translates into Bangla, needed to translate, I think Lysander was one of his actually. But he needed to translate Puck. So Puck got translated into Bangla as well because the Puck understudy happened to be a Bungla speaking actor and so they needed that kind of just-in-case. Incredibly complicated. But one of the things that I think was interesting, first of all, he talked about that exact scene doing Mitsumer's dream for an audience who've never seen Shakespeare before and who probably can only understand one sixth of it because they happen to be Tamil speakers or Bandler speakers or Hindi speakers, whatever it might be.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But as you say, he also, this then required in some cases multiple translations, because if you imagine a conversation between Hermia and Lysander, Hermia needs her lines in her language. But also she does really need to know what Lysander is saying because it's very easy to switch off. You have no idea what this other person is saying. But also...”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a really, I mean, I so wish I'd seen that production. But the principle behind it, which I completely, which I really like, so Tim Suppel is an amazing director, I think, and he does a lot of work in translation, but translation is not sort of the point of anything he does. It's a part of it, but it's not the point. He thinks, like, who are the people I want to work with? And if the people he wants to work with are in China and Chinese speaking, then that involves a Chinese translation of Shakespeare. And in this case, he had these actors, he cast the actors first, people he thought would be great in these roles, and then thought, okay, now we're not going to need to produce a script for them.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I remember rightly, like 14 or 15 white men in suits, everyone was wearing a suit. The sets were basically lots of kind of bed type things around the stage. And so it was very, I very quickly lost any sense of who anybody was. There was a moment, a very specific moment I was waiting for. And when that came, I was able to kind of anchor myself again. But it's quite difficult in that particular play and in a language I don't know and in that production to get any purchase on what's going on because it is just people talking and I can tell when they're rhyming and when they aren't, but like that doesn't help me very much. And a strange mix of experiences.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“because midsummit stream is a very storytelling play. There are things that happen and it's quite intricate. You can kind of follow the advances and the unraveling of a plot. In a way that I think is more difficult to do with Love sleep is lost or whatever. And so I do think that there are some plays which work incredibly well even without access to the language, conventional access to the language, let's say. You will understand sound and rhymes and stuff. The richer the second I saw in Danish, I found very difficult, partly because... There are some big speeches, and it's quite hard to know where they are taking you narratively. And also, it was a very kind of stylized production. So everyone was, you know, it was...”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Titania's asleep. She's had the love potion in her eyes. We know that she is going to fall in love with whoever or whatever she sees when she wakes up. And then the character of Bottom, who has an ass' head on, comes on stage and he is singing, we assume quite badly. And then you notice that she's about to wake up. You don't need any language at this point. The joke is situational and relational. And it's about, you know, you laugh at their reaction, you laugh at his reaction. She has a line which in any other context wouldn't be funny, but in this context is very funny. She says, what angel wakes me from my flowery bed. But you don't need to know that line to be able to see...”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is a thing you can do if you don't have access to the language at all in some plays more than others. I think there are some plays in which there are quite big speeches that are not advancing the action. And then you don't get very much, you know, you get to hear someone with a nice voice saying verse in Danish for five minutes. But you can't see how that is moving the action forward necessarily. And one of the plays I write about most is midsum night stream, which is. With the least amount of expertise in the language. There's a moment that I talked to, the director Tim Supple, who did this amazing South Asian Midsummit stream in six or seven languages, more than a decade ago. And he talked about this moment where”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even half an hour, Ren, I could tell Mariah's about to walk in. She's going to say something, and then the audience is going to laugh. I don't know what they will be laughing at because it's in Hungarian, but I know that if they've done this right, this is the next beat And that is a very interesting experience, but not a very satisfying theatrical experience. And with that particular production, I noticed at some point, a bit later in the play, that I'd stopped doing that. And just followed the telling of the story.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a huge range, I've had a huge range of experiences. I saw a 12th night in Hungarian and a Richard II Danish, I saw a 12th night in Portuguese, which is a language I do understand. And the experiences were quite different, partly, as you say, because in some cases I knew the plays very well, though not always, and partly because I sometimes had access to the language. But I was often pleased when I sort of forgot. When I watched the Hungarian 12th Night in Budapest, translated by an amazing man called Alan Nadasti. 12th night to the player know best in the world, and I was almost going line foot like I knew exactly where we were, line for line, beat for beat. I could tell”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I, Frank Gunther, have to give an actor in Germany. Exactly the same material to work with. And so it's being aware of You don't as an actor have to be a scholar of Jacobizan theatre. But if you're sensitive to the sounds of things the way we use words. That's, I feel like that's sort of the job, if you know if you know what I mean.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To an effect. It might be that you're translating angels and ministers of grace and you can only do it by saying ministers of grace and angels because in your language ministers happen to have a hard stress or whatever at the top. And you're changing it, but really what you're doing is you're deciding what is important and you're prioritizing giving Paul Mascold, who doesn't need to think about exactly what's happening in that line, but giving him exactly the thing to work with as an actor. And that's another thing that a lot of the translators I spoke to talked about, probably all of them, was being aware of these things they're producing as a score for an actor. And thinking about if I'm going to give, if Shakespeare is giving, the actor playing bottom in midsummer night's dream this particular joke.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the meaning is the same. It'll be hard to draw a really clear distinction between what they mean. They sound different, they have different numbers of syllables, they have a different register and all sorts of things. But I think if you... A great translator, you would translate those two lines really differently, despite the fact that the meaning, just the meaning, is the same. And so I do think there's merit in the idea that, yes, of course, we are concerned with meaning because that is one of the things that is happening in a piece of writing. But what makes translation interesting, what makes, at least literally translation interesting, is that literary translation is not concerned only with meaning. And there are sometimes when meaning is almost incidental to”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exclusively entirely, not just printably, but entirely, if you understand the meaning of something, you can translate it. But if you take to be or not to be, that is the question. and being or not being, well, that's the issue, isn't it? They mean the same thing. But they, I mean, one of them is.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there is no dictionary in the world which will say d means seven. But actually what the house number was was not in any way significant in this book. What was significant was that it had a certain sound, it had to rhyme with something, it had to be funny, it had to have certain properties, this word, that were more important than is it a two or is it a seven. And so often as a translator, you're figuring out ways of optimizing whatever you think is the important part. There will be a hundred things happening in a line. You will probably be able to do half of them if you are an amazing translator, bring some new things which you and your language can do. But you're having to make choices. And I think one of the things that I think people misunderstand about translation in some ways is that it's about meaning.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you're going, okay, well, this means there's a fairly straightforward meaning to this, but it also has a certain number of syllables, and it also has a rhythm that moves around in a surprising way. And these two lines also rhyme with each other. And they also end on a monosyllable, which is quite surprising given the shape of the speech or whatever. And they also include a sustained image from something that we've just seen before. The precise meaning might not be the most important of those things. So I'll give an example of just a little translation I did a while ago where I was translating a children's picture book and in the original character was living at Numehood, I think, number two of a house on the street. And in my translation, Numerhude became number seven.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that is quite an embodied thing, as he's describing. You breathe where the lines tell you to breathe, you stress the syllables, the lines tell you to stress. So, I do think that's part of it. And I also think that you're right in saying that meaning is, you know, as you say, words have meaning, the plays have meaning, but meaning is not the only important thing, and sometimes it's not the most important thing. And as a translator,”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a lot of merrit in what he said. I mean, I think there are two things. One of them is you trust This is less controversial thing to say trust that Shakespeare knows what he's doing. And what that means is you as an actor don't have to notice the changes in, you don't have to notice consciously when there is a change to the meter of a line, to the rhythm of a line. But Shakespeare is making you do it anyway. Shakespeare makes you stress this first syllable of angels and ministers of grace, not because you notice as an actor, but because he makes you do it. When Juliet says, Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, that also begins with a stressed syllable, and the actress doesn't need to go, let me just sit down and count the syllables. She just has to say the word gallop. And Shakespeare is making these things happen. As an actor, if you are attuned to what words sound like, you're given a score to perform. And so you don't need to be conscious of everything.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look at how well constructed this joke is. I wonder why this line has an impact on me. Oh, it ends on a monosyllable. Well, of course, what do you expect? No wonder it's having an impact on me. I don't feel like you need to be aware of those things in the moment, just as when Hamlet says angels and ministers of grace defend us. I don't think in the audience you go, oh, that's a trochaic opening to a line rather than an Aambic opening to a line. What you notice is this big kind of explosive, wow, moment. And Hamlet seeing his dead father. But that doesn't mean that we don't find a way of valuing or celebrating and acknowledging the fact that the actor or the director or the pianist or the translator or whoever it is, his work we're also seeing in addition to Shakespeare's has contributed something that has created the effect for us.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't want to spend three and a half hours going, oh, look at all that acting. Oh, there's some more acting. Look, look, he's raised an eyebrow. Look, he's acting again. You want to be seduced by this thing when you're in it real time. But you also get to the end and you know that what you've been watching is a deception. It's been someone putting on the costume and pretending to be this thing. And so I like the idea of someone reading a translation of mine and getting to the end and going, Oh yeah, but I don't read Portuguese, actually. That was a whole other thing happening. But that doesn't mean that kind of when you're in the moment you need to be going.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not to say that while they are reading it, I want them constantly to be marveling at my choices, or sneering at my choices. But that's partly because I think it's partly because of the kind of reading I like to do. I don't tend to read what I'm really engrossed in something. I'm not thinking about the writing of it. I will be transported by it and engrossed by it, and I will laugh at the jokes. But I don't think I want to be aware usually, obviously there are exceptions. Usually I don't want to be aware when I'm reading of the... That is kind of happening, that is creating its effect on me. And I think thinking about acting as one of those metaphors we use for translation quite a lot. And I think it's quite a useful one here. I think You watch someone doing Hamlet.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really interesting one. We talk about this, as you can imagine a lot as translators when we are complaining that no one notices us and no one appreciates us, which is a thing that we do occasionally. And I've already mentioned that once. And you could argue that if somebody reads my translation I do of a novel, say, and they are not aware of me being there, that is a compliment in some respects, which I think is true, but I would kind of put a nuance there. Want people to get to the end of the book and understand what has happened. So they understand that I have done quite a lot of work, all of the words I've read are my words. And if they are, for example, going to review it and talk about how great the jokes are, I would like them to notice that I made the jokes.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other thing that is revealing about it is her name is not on this translation. Translators are often under noticed, let's say, and there have been lots of translations published by great translators who didn't have their names on their work for various reasons. This is a particular case because one person does have his name on the work. And he's an interesting man. His wife, Mrs. Baldini, who is one of the great, great 20th century Italian writers, kind of helps out in ways that we don't completely know, or at least I don't understand exactly how this works. But also whose labor is visible, I think is not at all irrelevant. And part of a trend that we see in many cases.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Completely be his translation of the songs. And there are particular markers that we found. So we sat down together, Thea and I, and kind of looked at them. We found really specific things. Like she had a couple of really idiosyncratic non-standard spellings she likes. And one of them appears in the translation of the song, but like nowhere else in the play. But it's like Natalia's own spelling of this word. And there are a couple of things like that. And it's interesting, partly because, as you say, it reveals something about a translator. So we can see her fingerprints, so we can see this has Natalia's fingerprints, which is not the same as Gabriele, her husband's fingerprints.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just when there is a song, almost nowhere else I think in the place, when there is a song in the place, suddenly the translation becomes incredibly tight, beautiful, really sharply focused. And in fact, that similarine thing with the dandelions, which is thinner more, the heat of the sun is the song, is one of the examples that I look at. And it suddenly feels like Baldini has all kind of skills that we didn't know he had. You know, he was producing something interesting, but he wasn't producing something. You know, the songs, the Italian translation of the song is really beautiful and it's rhyming and it's really structured. And I was talking about this to Theo and Ardutzi, who was just writing, which is now finished, I think, writing about Rogy of Natalia Ginsburg, who basically said, you know that Natalia was married to Maldini, and you also know that translations of the songs might not...”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a really interesting one. So Baldini was doing these translations of Shakespeare plays, middle of the last century. They were all in prose. They're very, very long. They're all kind of expansive because he's not limited by scriptures a verse. He explains everything. So I think they're basically unperformable, these translations. They're kind of useful as explanatory things, but you can perform them because they take weeks. But they're interesting, I think. But then there are these moments where”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like I say, translators are often having to do the kind of research that certainly would have been very difficult if my great-grandfather 100 years ago, translators are using annotated editions and the internet and so forth. But it means you can almost trace the theories. Looking at when the translations were produced, translations produced today of Cymbaline would not have dandelions in them. Gabrielle Libaldini translation of Cymbaline in the middle of the last century also would not have had dandelions in it because it precedes that theory. I really like that theory, and I'm sorry it's probably not true.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so there was a big furore about this. One of the reasons it's interesting to me is that around the time when this theory was being given, given some kind of credence, the translations that were produced around that time took account of this. So translators often are doing research, they're looking at annotated editions, etc. And so there are some translations that were done 20 years ago where it is the word for dandelion has run the word for chimney sweepers. And there is this kind of window between someone proposing the theory and the theory being basically disproved or debunked when translations being produced around that time, either used the word dandelions or use the word chimney sweeps but had a little footnote saying commonly believed to be, you know,”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we think that chimney sweepers mean standalience, maybe we could just swap the word chimney sweepers for the word dandelions if we were doing production of cymbaline. It has the same number of syllables. It fits in the line really nicely. Golden ladder gold must like dandelions come to dust. You end up bringing the meaning a little bit closer to an audience in the same way that a translation would. It's not disrupting the song, not disrupting the meter, and so on. This was the end of the world, obviously, because people weirdly have no problem in translating Shakespeare into 25,000 words of Polish, but the idea of changing any of the words in English, like even one of them, was obviously sacrilege.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which you then are blown out and they come to dust. There are lots of reasons, I think, not to believe this theory. Not least I don't think those are the brushes that we use. Anyway, but it's a very nice idea, I think, that actually what is talking about is this flower that begins in its golden and then it turns into this thing that looks like a brush and then it comes to dust. And it was suggested Emma Rice, when she was artistic director of the Globe, a brilliant director, and she said in an interview on, I think it was today, it was on a BBC radio interview,”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there was a theory some decades ago that has now, I think, not given much credence, but there was a theory some years ago that Chimney Sweepers was, I think, like a Warwickshire local dialect way of talking about dandelions. And there is a bit of a song in Cymbaline which ends Golden Lads and Girls All Must, like chimney sweepers come to dust. And the theory was that the Golden Lads, I think that's the mine, I hope I've not misquoted it, or Golden Boys is dandelions before they are in their full chimney sweep mode, as it were. And then their chimney sweepers because they look like those brushes.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What Shakespeare is doing because there is a reason you have a stress syllable at the beginning of that line and there is a reason King Lear uses monosyllables and really specific moments. But not only does it reveal something about Shakespeare looking at it as a translator has to and noticing these tiny granular things. But also I think these examples tell you something about translation because you then have to figure out, well, what are you going to do if you're M&A Ian trying to make Turkish do something that does not come naturally to Turkish?”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in a way, the whole book is looking at the ways in which these amazing people I talk to found these really small things, but also then thought about the ways in which they could create those effects. English is a very monosyllabic language in lots of ways. How do you figure out if you're a translator into Hungarian or into Turkish? Into either agglutinative languages like Turkish, for example, how do you create the effect of really, really sharp little monosyllables that Shakespeare uses all the time using whatever Turkish has available to you, what Hungarian has available to you. So yes, it's a lot of the time those very small and absolutely nerdy things, but which I feel revealed something about”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that I love about the really great translator that I talk to is that they notice things on that level and then they have to figure out how to do them. So if you're Niels Brunser, you have to notice that there is a little metric flip at the beginning of that line. And then you have to think, well, what can I do in Danish, which is not English, to create the same effect? In that instance, Niels basically produced a nine-syllable line. He lopped the first syllable off and you kind of come in with the second syllable.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he mentioned a line in Hamlet where Hamlet sees his father's ghost for the first time. He, like most people, have been speaking in iambic pentameter and has been fairly regular, which means it's been going dumb, d-dum, d-dump, de-dum, d-dum, and the lines start on stressed syllable, like to be or not to be. And then Hamlet sees his father's ghost, and his line is Angels and ministers of grace defend us. This is Hamlet calling for aid but also exclaiming in a moment of shock. He doesn't say angelic ministers of grace. He says angels. There's a very hard first syllable there, which is a way of Shakespeare giving an actor a kind of almost unavoidable bang at the beginning of the line.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was often the things that seemed much more straightforward in English that challenged the translators and the required using certain ingenuity. I talked to an amazing M ⁇ ori translator who was just working on Macbeth when I talked to her. She's called Tehomiata Mason. And the line that she was struggling with was the line, Are you a man? Lady Macbeth's estimate Macbeth. And you wouldn't think reading through Shakespeare plays that are you a man is going to be the difficult line. But often it was things that seemed quite simple and often it was things that were very, very kind of granular. I'll give you one little concrete example. The first person I interviewed was a translator called Niels Brunser, a Danish translator who's now completed the calendar of play.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I mean, I feel like there are some things that are obvious, as it were. I think people would guess that puns are going to be difficult, like wordplay is going to be difficult because they are built around a word having two meanings, for example. But what interested me a lot of the time was that the things that really challenged translators were not so much the puns, though they're difficult and you take them apart, you look at the moving parts and you build a new one in your new language out of similar moving parts.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Tishtell, my great-grandfather's decision to do this sort of archaicizing thing feels to me like an interesting experiment, but I can't quite get over that. I can't quite get over the fact that it feels like an experiment and it doesn't quite feel like it's people talking to each other, which is what you want rather than that sense of, oh, here's a very old poem. I feel like we're being reminded of that in a way that is not helpful. But I also feel slightly guilty saying this because, you know, he was my grandmother's father and she adored him. And I don't want to be mean.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's part of it. I think it's tried to make it sound. Old sort of venerable and try to make him sound grand and try to make him sound like poetry, capital P poetry. And one of the things that Louis says is that the fact that when Shakespeare was writing, he was principally not writing in language that would have been 400 years old to. Translations tend to bring people who consume Shakespearean translation are usually consuming something that has been brought closer to them. We English speakers are the ones who are sort of stuck with 400-year-old Shakespeare. No one else is in that position. You know, most people have Shakespeare that has been produced for them in the same way that our Czech-off in English is not normally a 100-year-old Chekov.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of 17th century Portuguese to recreate something it's not exactly but it's got markers of 17th century Portuguese and so he's putting on this sort of slightly phony literary yol-y voice For reasons I understand, and I have translated 100-year-old books and wanted them to sound like 100-year-old English writing, I don't completely think it works. And it's an interesting decision. Now, I don't know any translators who will do that now, partly because I feel like one of the things you get from translation is you get something that is produced for a reader or for an audience today. is sort of fresher than the original in some respects. But it's a curious one to look at, this attempt to make Shakespeare sound like, as it was then, 300-year-old text.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're called, right? And so French was used as it was in many places, as Russian was used in other places as the source, if you like, for the translation into a third language. So that's one thing that I think is quite interesting and quite revealing about just the fact that he was translating from English and that no one had done that before. There have been plenty of translations into Brazilian, Portuguese, but the fact that he was going directly from English is the thing that was the novelty in the early 1930s and 33. The other thing that I think is interesting about his translation and that I am sort of ambivalent about is he decided, this is at the point when modernism was beginning to be a thing in Brazil, that the best way to produce Shakespeare in Brazilian Portuguese was to try and effect a Portuguese”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really has, or I it one way or another. So I've known about his translation. It's an interesting one in a couple of respects. One of them is that it wasn't strictly speaking the first translation of a play in Brazil. It was the first translation of a play directly from the English into Portuguese, in Brazil because Shakespeare had been translated, but via French. And I think that already tells you something about translation, but also about the role of different languages in Brazil at the time.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting because I I've sort of always vaguely known that my great-grandfather had done this thing, but it only occurred to me when I was some way into writing a book about Shakespeare translations that maybe the fact that my great-grandfather translated Shakespeare was A, relevant and B, worth mentioning. So he does, in fact, feature in the book, but it's only in retrospect that I can see that... It's sort of inevitable that I would end up writing this. You know, I also wrote an essay about translating Shakespeare as an undergraduate 30 years ago.”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suppose try to maximize how much of the Shakespeare they keep, but also how much they are able to take opportunities from the fact that Turkish allows them to do all sorts of things that actually Shakespeare would have struggled to do in English. So it's not just, I think there's this assumption that translation is always going to be kind of. Damage limitation basically, you try not to lose too much. And actually, if you think of it as an actor's kind of personal interpretation and expression with, like I say, the limitations and opportunities of a language and an individual. Then I think it becomes something incredibly valuable and interesting and surprising”
2026-04-11 · Intelligence Squared · How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT