Shakespeare and the Language of Translation by Ton Hoenselaars

Abstract

MLR, 101.3, 2oo6 82I both Johnson's relations to those, likeWarren Hastings, who were intimately con cerned in Indian politics and the representation of India and things Indian in his writing. One of themost satisfying, however, isKathleen Nulton Kemmerer's piece, 'Domestic Relations in Samuel Johnson's Life ofMilton', in which she places his treatment ofMilton's attitudes towards the women in his domestic life, and to an ex tent in his writing, alongside Johnson's own, quite different, principles and behaviour. Johnson, she argues, is unique among early biographers of Milton in choosing not 'to de-emphasize some of the incidents inMilton's private life that suggested that he was "arbitrary and severe"', but rather to show 'that these facts should trouble both biographers and readers of biography' (p. 78). Of the non-Johnsonian essays, Erik Bond writes a lively account (it is, of course, hard not to be lively when writing about Boswell) of a slightly worn subject, Boswell's self-fashioning, albeit from an unfami liar angle, that of 'the status of genre during the I760s' (p. I5 i) and in particular of dramatic criticism. Robin Dix has a short piece on 'Eighteenth-Century Develop ments in the Patronage System' and Kathryn J.Ready writes about 'Hannah More and the Bluestocking Salons', but themost compelling, and also most ambitious, non Johnsonian essay isCarol Percy's 'Plane English; or, The Orthography of Opposition inMid-Eighteenth-Century Britain'. Percy is interested in spelling variation and its relation, during the years of theWhig ascendancy, to social networks, to retirement, and to opposition politics. This is a long and richly detailed examination that well repays careful reading. Whether such contributions would ever persuade the scholar in the street actually to buy The Age of yohnson Idoubt, but if it continues to provide a home, albeit only on library shelves, for challenging criticism, then itwill deserve its longevity. NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY ALLAN INGRAM Shakespeare and the Language of Translation. Ed. by TON HOENSELAARS. (The Arden Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Language) London: Thomson Learning. 2004. xiv+346 pp. C45. ISBN 1-90427-I45-6. In his exemplary introduction to this much-needed volume, Ton Hoenselaars claims that he aims to bring the 'Cinderella' issue of translation into the centrefield of Shakespeare studies. No less usefully, however, Hoenselaars also brings Shakespeare into the centrefield of translation studies: though individual articles and book chapters have discussed drama translation, this is the first book I know of that is dedicated to the topic. Hoenselaars outlines translation as language transfer that also involves 'trading between cultures, between different ways of imagining the world' (p. 2, citing Michael Neill). He then sites Shakespeare's plays within the Renaissance's 'preoccupation with translation' between and among Latin, Greek, and the European vernaculars. Describing Shakespeare's use of classical sources and early translations of his plays, Hoenselaars shows how adaptation and cheerful plagiarism reigned: only with the Romantics' stress on the source writer's 'exclusive genius' (p. 9) did fidelity become the translator's dominant ethic. Fidelity is often not easy, as several contributors explain. Thus, in Twelfth Night, the cross-dressed Viola and his/her master Orsino flirtingly subvert differences of gender and social rank-differences whose linguistic expressions inEnglish are subtle and optional. In Japanese, however, asTetsuo Kishi beguilingly shows, these are overt and unavoidable, forcing a Japanese Viola tomake himself toomuch of aman or reveal herself as awoman. The type of fidelity can also vary. For Shakespeare students, Werner Bronnimann advocates literal translations with exegetic footnotes. Jean-Michel Deprats, by con trast, explains passionately and convincingly how directors and actors need a version 822 Reviews that conveys the rhythmic pulse, tone, and gestic potential of Shakespeare's lines. Deprats, however, like Alessandro Serpieri, stresses that the translator should keep faith both with stagecraft and with text. Thus Serpieri shows how his painstaking editorial unteasing of the First Quarto Hamlet enabled him to produce a stageable Italian version of a text normally seen as corrupt. Translators rarely advocate fidelity to Shakespeare's archaic texture, however: vir tually all translate the plays into a contemporary idiom. This, as several contributors point out, makes the translated plays easier to understand by...