Shakespeare's untranslatability

Abstract

When Peter Hall dismissed the very thought of Shakespeare’s translatability, he was probably not doing so out of any consideration for the theory of translation, but UDWKHUIURPDSRVLWLRQRIXQUHAHFWLYHFRPPRQVHQVH,WVHHPVWRJRZLWKRXWVD\LQJ that translation begins with a text that is, above all, original. Any transformation of that text into a different language will involve a falling off, an inevitable process of ORVV7KLVRFFXUVSDUWO\EHFDXVHWUDQVODWLRQE\GH?QLWLRQLQWURGXFHVGLIIHUHQFHRU change through the replacement of one structure with another, and partly because it must of necessity muddy the original spirit that inspired the prototext. These modes of loss are not the same. One does not have to subscribe to a Romanticbelief in the pristine genius of the author as the sole inspirer of the text to claim that translation inevitably involves its betrayal. Shakespeare may be said to be untranslatable either because he is Shakespeare, or because his texts are a unique set of linguistic patterns that cannot be duplicated in a different system. The New Criticism, for example, held the latter but not the former position: as insistent upon the intentional fallacy as any proponent of the death of the author, they also saw Shakespeare’s texts as complex poetic structures which ultimately lay beyond paraphrase or explication.1