“What's past is prologue.”
October 9, 2015 6:24 AM   Subscribe

Oregon Shakespeare Festival Launches Three-Year Shakespeare Translation Commissioning Project [Oregon Shakespeare Festival]
OSF is commissioning 36 playwrights and pairing them with dramaturgs to translate 39 plays attributed to Shakespeare into contemporary modern English between now and December 31, 2018. By seeking out a diverse set of playwrights (more than half writers of color and more than half women), we hope to bring fresh voices and perspectives to the rigorous work of translation. Play on!

- Oregon Shakespeare Festival [FAQ]
Are we looking to replace Shakespeare’s original plays?
Absolutely not. We view these translated texts as complementary, as companion pieces for Shakespeare’s original texts, not as replacements. Even when the translations get performed on their own, we expect and hope that they will inspire audience members to return to Shakespeare’s original texts, ideally with much greater understanding and enjoyment.

Are we reducing Shakespeare?
Just for clarity, these translations won’t simplify the originals. We are also not asking writers to “fix” the plays, or add their politics. Play On asks writers to take all the accepted given circumstances—character, story, action, etc.—and examine Shakespeare's language line by line, applying the same kind of rigor and pressure that he did to his language. The original plays differ enough linguistically from one another that there is no option for cookie-cutter rules; but every playwright will have to keep in mind the meter, rhyme, rhythm, metaphor, rhetoric, and theme of the original.

Are we saying “To Be or Not To Be” is not good enough as written?
The writers are empowered to leave any text alone if they want to, and we expect they often will. The goal is not to reinvent the plays, or make changes for their own sake. It will be interesting to see what each playwright does with Shakespeare’s best-known passages; we will engage in deep dialogue with them about all their choices, while of course leaving the final artistic decisions to them.
Related:

- Shakespeare in Modern English? [The New York Times]
However well intended, this experiment is likely to be a waste of money and talent, for it misdiagnoses the reason that Shakespeare’s plays can be hard for playgoers to follow. The problem is not the often knotty language; it’s that even the best directors and actors — British as well as American — too frequently offer up Shakespeare’s plays without themselves having a firm enough grasp of what his words mean.
- Why We (Mostly) Stopped Messing With Shakespeare’s Language [The New Yorker]
What is genuinely radical in the commission is not the process but the people involved. Under the leadership of O.S.F.’s director of literary development and dramaturgy, Lue Morgan Douthit, more than half of the selected playwrights will be women, and more than half will be writers of color. Shakespeare’s scripts have always resulted from collaborations among playwrights, actors, and editors. For most of the history I have traced, those collaborators were white men. Updating Shakespeare isn’t a new business, but now its ranks will reflect the rich diversity of artists who, four centuries later, both relish and renew his language.
posted by Fizz (52 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm pleased that they're treating this as a translation, not just a rewrite. I'm not sure if it will succeed, but at least they understand what they're proposing.
posted by Mogur at 6:32 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


See also: OMG Shakespeare. More about the project here. To the authors’ credit, one of the books carries the dedication: “To all my extraordinary English teachers, I’m sorry.”
posted by oulipian at 7:09 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


Jeanette Winterson also recently adapted The Winter's Tale into a more modern setting. Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson will also be reworking/adapting Shakespeare into modern novels.
[The Guardian]
I have called my version The Gap of Time because this phrase occurs twice in the play, and because this is a play where every motive is hidden somewhere, but just out of reach, dropped in the gaps. Shakespeare doesn’t give us anybody’s backstory – all we know is that Leontes, King of Sicilia, and Polixenes, King of Bohemia, grew up together. Polixenes is visiting his old friend Leontes, and after nine months, is persuaded to stay longer by Leontes’s wife, Hermione – and she’s pregnant.
posted by Fizz at 7:14 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm having a hard time imagining what this would even look like. I with there there was a sample or something.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 7:16 AM on October 9, 2015


The words' the thing.
posted by fairmettle at 7:17 AM on October 9, 2015


In high school, my senior year english class had a trimester where we got divided into little groups to present a Shakespeare play assigned to us (everyone had to read the plays that everyone else presented--at the time we thought of it as our teacher being lazy and outsourcing the teaching to the students). My friend and I got "Hamlet." We thought it would be great to turn Hamlet into a puppet show written in modern English. So we made puppets out of poster board, markers and paint sticks, and proceeded to rewrite the entire play of Hamlet in modern English. This seemed much less daunting than it actually was. It took forever. It took so so so long. It was so much work. I can't believe we did it but we did it. It probably wasn't good in any way. I think we gave up on attempting iambic pentameter somewhere in Act I. It got really weird towards the end. The class liked the puppets.
posted by millipede at 7:22 AM on October 9, 2015 [5 favorites]


John McWhorter wrote about this too. (He's for it.)
posted by No-sword at 7:25 AM on October 9, 2015


Incidentally, I have no problem with this—it's about time we had some modern translations from the original Klingon.
posted by No-sword at 7:29 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think if they do this it should be a radical, artistic reworking and not an attempt to make the plays accessible or relevant. I'm all for someone to take Shakespeare's insane wringing-out of the English language of his time and translate it into a modern language assault, like something off an early Busta Rhymes album.

The "good" part of a Shakespeare play is the specific language. Most of the plays don't have notable plots or characters, and those that do have generally been explored to death in modern film.
posted by selfnoise at 7:33 AM on October 9, 2015 [10 favorites]


I agree that treating this as a translation is the best way to go. They may even wind up in an interesting place - but they won't wind up with 'easy to relate to Shakespeare'. That is a different beast entirely.

Part of the problem with the acceptance of Shakespeare is that most people's first exposure to it is through reading the plays in High School. But plays were made to be SEEN, not read. You lack an amazing amount of context without actual actors giving meaning to the words. If you want someone to HATE Shakespeare, I think all you need to do is force someone to sit down and struggle through King Lear.

But flip it on its head? A different matter entirely. This is one of the reasons that re-imagining Shakespeare in a different location, or time, or gender really WORKS. It allows the director to leverage the language and their vision to convey meaning. You may not LIKE it - and there are probably more failures than successes here - but the language WORKS in this context. Furthermore, play around with Youtube for five minutes and you'll see where Shakespeare's words have really gone, and what they have affected: Rap, interpretations of Pulp Fiction, Rosencranz and Guildenstern are dead - you NAME it.

I don't think you can go the other way - dress up in classic costumes but change the words? That's just going to be strange. You have to wind up at West Side Story to really bring it off.
posted by scolbath at 7:36 AM on October 9, 2015


I wish there was a sample or something.

Here's a sneak peek at Kenneth Cavander's work on Timon of Athens.
posted by HeroZero at 7:38 AM on October 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


You have to wind up at West Side Story to really bring it off.

Or Throne of Blood!

Basically, go big.
posted by selfnoise at 7:38 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


Hey, if it gets this guy more productions, I'm all for it! Shakespeare is sadly neglected in modern theater in favor of new playwrights.
posted by maxsparber at 7:43 AM on October 9, 2015 [6 favorites]


I thought that joke would make me laugh, but now I'm bummed out.
posted by maxsparber at 7:44 AM on October 9, 2015 [5 favorites]


The New Yorker article is really good and certainly educated me about some of my assumptions about how best to approach Shakespeare. I pretty much agree with them on this assessment, though:

In light of this history, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s translation project seems fairly conservative [...] one almost wonders why O.S.F. needs thirty-six playwrights (and supporting dramaturgs) to do the sort of clarifying work that annotations to modern editions have been doing for years.

It's nice that their hiring process is so inclusive, but I just wonder how the playwrights can even get excited about this commission. I can't imagine spending three years translating like, Merry Wives of Windsor or Cymbeline from English into English without changing anything but the language, which Sparknotes, etc. basically have covered. I would be constantly haunted by the possibility that literally no one would ever be interested -- possibly not even myself? It just seems like a waste of all these diverse perspectives.

It would be so much more interesting to do translations in various World Englishes and English creoles. Pay somebody to do it in Jamaican.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 7:45 AM on October 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


Here's a sneak peek at Kenneth Cavander's work on Timon of Athens.

I read this. It made me sad.
posted by selfnoise at 7:45 AM on October 9, 2015


Thanks HeroZero. This is actually surprisingly appealing.

But pretty much every line is vulnerable to nitpicking. For example Cavender thinks that "satiety" trips up the modern ear, so it can be replaced with... "superfluity". What?
posted by paper chromatographologist at 7:56 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


THE SKINHEAD HAMLET
by Richard Curtis
ACT I SCENE I

(The battlements of Elsinore Castle)
(Enter HAMLET, followed by GHOST.)

GHOST:   Oi! Mush!
HAMLET:  Yer?
GHOST:   I was fucked!
   (Exit GHOST)
HAMLET:  O fuck.
   (Exit HAMLET.)
posted by ardgedee at 7:58 AM on October 9, 2015 [10 favorites]


Rewriting Shakespeare's plays to serve one's own ends is a fine and noble tradition. As it happens, for reasons lost to the mists of time, I personally spend a fair amount of time in 2001 rewriting A Midsummer Night's Dream with imperfect couplets of my own construction and a cast consisting of the characters from Gundam Wing. Why? Lost to the mists of time, I said. LOST TO THE MISTS OF TIME.

Sample, from where the rude mechanicals are rehearsing the play:
We could do that, or let an actor stand
with bush and lantern held up in his hand.
Moonshine would then be an actor's station --
Anthropomorphic representation!


Where's my commission?
posted by which_chick at 8:06 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


I am for both "modern" translations and the original works. The performance aspect really takes out a lot of the "hard to understand"-ness of it all.

Interestingly enough though, many linguists think that 500-700 years is about the limit for mutual intelligibility within a language, that is, speakers of the same language at the beginning of the 500-year period would be able to understand speakers at the end of the 500-year period. This means that we are on the cusp of aging out of that mutual intelligibility window, so Shakespeare's English will soon be as opaque to us as The Canterbury Tales is now.

The More You Know 🌠
posted by chainsofreedom at 8:19 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm reminded of Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Hofstadter asks — and tries to answer — the question of what it even means to translate a work. He specifically notes the added complications of translating verse.
posted by thedward at 8:19 AM on October 9, 2015


Interestingly enough though, many linguists think that 500-700 years is about the limit for mutual intelligibility within a language, that is, speakers of the same language at the beginning of the 500-year period would be able to understand speakers at the end of the 500-year period. This means that we are on the cusp of aging out of that mutual intelligibility window, so Shakespeare's English will soon be as opaque to us as The Canterbury Tales is now.

I think the explosion of literacy over the past 500ish years is going to do weird things to this theory. Not that things won't continue to change, but they're not gonna change in exactly the same ways.
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:46 AM on October 9, 2015 [8 favorites]


Didn't Shakespeare create a lot of words and phrases that came into common usage? I wonder if the translators will aim for the same. I hope that they will since even though most of the attempts will probably fail, eventually something good might come out and stick and it'll be fascinating watching language develop in front of us. I mean, we experience it all the time but as more of a background effect. This one might be more traceable.
posted by I-baLL at 8:49 AM on October 9, 2015


Didn't Shakespeare create a lot of words and phrases that came into common usage? I wonder if the translators will aim for the same.

“To bae or not to bae, that is the question”
posted by Fizz at 9:04 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


Didn't Shakespeare create a lot of words and phrases that came into common usage?

I heard a man say once, "The Bible says, neither a borrower nor a lender be", in total seriousness.
posted by thelonius at 9:23 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


Multiple people in my FB feed are having heart attacks over this - one of them (an English teacher) said that this is like charging an audience to watch people walk through a ballet in street clothes.

I for one support it - I think a translation would be really interesting, and as a former ESL student, any attempts to make works like these easier to understand is great! I learned little from Shakespeare in high school, even watching the plays, because I didn't understand the language well enough to catch the turns of phrase.
posted by cobain_angel at 9:41 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


I tend towards the NYT position, I think. Perhaps the single most memorable high school class I had was an English class where the teacher broke us out into sections and assigned each one to adapt and present a Shakespeare play -- but we had to cut it down to fit a timeslot. So we had to read it, discuss it, then figure out what we could cut out. And to do that we had to really understand the work. So over the next few weeks we really got to grips with the text and the meaning, and by the end, even in the hands of callow high schoolers, the plays were perfectly understandable to others, because *we* understood what we were saying.

Hell, our Touchstone was seriously funny (my section got _As You Like It_) and years later having watched a lot more productions by actual professionals or at least semi-so, that's not the easiest.
posted by tavella at 9:52 AM on October 9, 2015


The "good" part of a Shakespeare play is the specific language.

Yeah, language... Remember how fucked up the Hitchhiker's Guide movie felt? They got all the basic concepts down okay, but they went through and destroyed Adams' beautiful language. The rhythm and poetic complexity that made the original radio series and the books were utterly gone. And the movie felt flat and difficult because of it.

That's pretty much what is going to happen with Shakespeare here, I'm pretty certain.
posted by hippybear at 9:56 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


Sweet Jesus. I need to go take my blood pressure pill before I respond to this.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 10:06 AM on October 9, 2015


That's pretty much what is going to happen with Shakespeare here, I'm pretty certain.

I don't think you should be certain. A while back I read a translation of Dante's Inferno where the translator had gone to the trouble of translating the text into metered rhyming verse. And it was brilliant! Accessible and modern, yet totally in keeping with the spirit of the original. Such things are not impossible.
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:08 AM on October 9, 2015


Ergh. I fully agree with two or three cars parked under the stars: What is the point? There are already a million simplified and modernized language "translations" of the plays. If they had commissioned 36 different adaptations and modernizations, that would have been interesting and cool. (I mean, yeah, there are a lot of adapted versions of some of the most popular plays, but it would be great to see that expanded to the less famous ones.) This seems like the most boring thing you could do with the project.

For those of you who are interested in translations of poetry to modern poetry, you might find Tha Illiad of MC Homer interesting.
posted by phoenixy at 10:12 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


A while back I read a translation of Dante's Inferno where the translator had gone to the trouble of translating the text into metered rhyming verse. And it was brilliant! Accessible and modern, yet totally in keeping with the spirit of the original.

Were you reading a modern Italian "translation" of Dante's original verse? Or were you reading a modern English translation?

Because we're literally talking about people being tasked with "translating" English to English here. And the original language is not impenetrable. It's not even difficult. It takes about 10 minutes of exposure to Shakespeare language rhythms and style before one's brain just clicks and suddenly it all makes sense.

Removing the language from the plays... what will it accomplish? It's the continual unfolding of poetic description and sideways reference that makes his stuff so rich and wonderful.
posted by hippybear at 10:22 AM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


We did just have a thread about understand Hamlet as possibly being a fat character that went into the various ways that Shakespeare used the word, and how the word changes depending on context, and the ambiguous sense it gives us of the character.

Yeah, the original language is sort of important.
posted by maxsparber at 10:24 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


Removing the language from the plays... what will it accomplish? It's the continual unfolding of poetic description and sideways reference that makes his stuff so rich and wonderful.

You say that as if Shakespeare is the only person capable of doing that. (And it's a little pretentious to say "it's not that difficult" when plenty of people in this thread have said they found it difficult!)
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:25 AM on October 9, 2015


Shakespeare's place in history has survived the depredations of Thomas Bowdler. It's endured despite, not because of, ham-fisted adaptations.

If any of these translation efforts become great art, they'll survive. If not, they'll be forgotten as much as many previous efforts have. Fretting over how this will affect Shakespeare and his literary legacy, or getting angry about the transgressing on his words, are pointless hand-wringing.
posted by ardgedee at 10:40 AM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's true. After almost two decades of being a theater critic and playwright, I have come to the conclusion that the genius of Shakespeare is that he can survive so many bad productions.
posted by maxsparber at 10:49 AM on October 9, 2015


In related Shakespeare adaptation/re-interpretations [The New York Times]. This is just delightful, I cannot wait:
In Mr. Nesbo’s version, due out in 2017, Macbeth is the leader of a SWAT team in a gloomy, coastal European city, where crime and corruption are rampant. The three witches are making illegal drugs rather than a witches’ brew, and promise Macbeth that he will ascend through police ranks – but only if he kills Duncan.
posted by Fizz at 10:50 AM on October 9, 2015


In other news, The Metropolitan Opera is commissioning a team of 36 composers to write new musical settings for the librettos of Carmen, The Barber of Seville, The Magic Flute, and Wagner's Ring Cycle.
posted by straight at 11:30 AM on October 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


No. Just...no.
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:42 AM on October 9, 2015


I was taught in a Theater class that translations of Shakespeare's plays into other languages ( modern languages, that is) are quite popular. Does anyone know if this is true?
posted by wittgenstein at 12:25 PM on October 9, 2015


MetaFilter: You lack an amazing amount of context without actual actors giving meaning to the words.
posted by oulipian at 12:39 PM on October 9, 2015


Shakespeare is popular in the German language area to the point that he is practically accepted as a German author. I have some very vague undergrad recollections of reading an essay by Johann Gottfried Herder that claimed Goethe is the Robin to Shakespeare's Batman. In any case, German translations of Shakespeare got going around the mid/late 18th century and per Sturm und Drang are darker and moodier than the originals. Some say better. In any case, succeeding generations kept up with the translating and there are multiple versions of the plays.
posted by knuspermanatee at 12:43 PM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


In other news, The Metropolitan Opera is commissioning a team of 36 composers to write new musical settings for the librettos of Carmen, The Barber of Seville, The Magic Flute, and Wagner's Ring Cycle.

"It's going very well so far," said Mr. Kürsch, who has been working on the Ring adaptation. "I feel that if Richard Wagner had been able to avail himself of 600 overdubbed guitars, it's exactly what he would have wanted."
posted by Wolfdog at 1:47 PM on October 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


I'm in favor of this. The language is pretty hard to read and I find Shakespeare easier to deal with when seeing it rather than reading it. Also (I know, I am literally looking for ANY EXCUSE AT ALL to bring this up all the time, everywhere), look at Hamilton these days-- it's translating concepts into a snappy modern vernacular. We get what the Founding Fathers were saying in that a whole lot better than trying to read the old tymey text with kr8tiv Spellings and Interesting Capital Letter Use for No Good Reason. People have been turning Shakespeare plots into teen love movies for yonks now. Why not? I'd totally be into doing this.

Last year's NaNo novel was a mashup of Much Ado and another novel or two, um.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:23 PM on October 9, 2015


Didn't Shakespeare create a lot of words and phrases that came into common usage?

I thought he just stitched a bunch of famous quotes together.
posted by sebastienbailard at 4:25 PM on October 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


I am not against this kind of undertaking in principle, but from looking over the Cavander I can see I am going to be strongly against a lot of particular choices taken.
posted by juv3nal at 4:34 PM on October 9, 2015


I think the idea of the work and interrogating the text on that level is really useful. They are clearly not proposing to replace anything but instead take a look at each of the works generally accepted to be written by William Shakespeare and re-framing them by people who are decidedly not a dead white Elizabethan dude. Some of the plays are not often done because they are incredibly hard to put on, for a lot of reasons (A Winter's Tale and Titus Andronicus among them).

Yes, of course, it's been done before. Hamlet, Blood in the Brain did a version of this with Hamlet by setting it in Oakland, California in 1989 as the gang wars were truly escalating. The playwright used none of Shakespeare's language in the end but produced a powerful work. In 2010 a local Oakland high school put on a production of it and that work meant so much more to them than the 'traditional' text because these were streets they knew and people they knew. (Last link includes some audio clips from the script.) They also were expected to be familiar with the original work but the adaptation gave them a doorway into that may not have happened otherwise. Anything that can do that? That can show the universality of human experience is worth the exercise to me, especially for live stage.

Most of the Shakespearean actors I have been fortunate know work hard to understand their characters and give the truest performance they know how. Michelle Hensley (TEDxtalk) runs a theater company that strips the classics, Shakespeare among them, back to the barest basics and lets the words speak for themselves. The way she puts on plays is to have them in small spaces (no bigger than a 50x50 room usually) with an audience of less than 100 and it's done in the round with the space between the actors and the audience often measured in inches. It's minimal props and costumes. It rests all on the strength of the story, the characters and the play. Ms. Hensley explains it much more eloquently than I ever could, so please do take a look.

So I think there is space for all of the above and the theater world will be richer for it in the end.

Full disclosure: I work at a theater company that hired Michelle Hensley and we have some very loose ties with OSF. I am not in the artistic department but clearly I have feelings about our product, our audiences, and dear ol' Will.
posted by ladyriffraff at 9:41 PM on October 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


You say that as if Shakespeare is the only person capable of doing that

He's not. From my perspective, that's why it does seem a shame that this isn't funding for the writing and staging of 39 new plays, just more money spent on the works of a dead bloke from the Midlands.

Shakespeare is certainly one of the very greatest dramatists and poets to have worked in English, but I do struggle to see what significant purpose this project serves. It's fine, no problem with it, but..meh.
posted by howfar at 12:18 AM on October 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


I linked to it in a comment earlier but it might have been buried. Found the original press release from Hogarth. Hogarth Press has commissioned a number of novelists to re-imagine and update the plays in a long form.
The Hogarth Shakespeare series will launch in October 2015 with The Gap of Time – Jeanette Winterson’s reinvention of The Winter’s Tale. This major international project will see Shakespeare’s plays reimagined by some of today’s bestselling and most celebrated writers. The books will be true to the spirit of the original plays, while giving authors an exciting opportunity to do something new. [...] A further three novels will be published in the series during the 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare’s death in 2016: Howard Jacobson’s The Merchant of Venice in February, Anne Tyler’s The Taming of the Shrew in June and Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest in October. The first four in the series will be joined by Tracy Chevalier’s Othello, Gillian Flynn’s Hamlet, Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth and Edward St Aubyn’s King Lear.
It seems there is plenty of room for all kinds of reinterpretations, re-imagination, adaptation, etc. I'm only a few pages into Jeanette Winterson's adaptation of The Winter's Tale, The Gap of Time, and I'm already enjoying it.
posted by Fizz at 4:23 AM on October 10, 2015


Well shit. It don't go all the way to China, and it ain't as big as your moma's ass, but it gets the job done. Geeevum, Romeo.
posted by mule98J at 7:45 AM on October 10, 2015


a dead bloke from the Midlands

Heh, kinda like the religion based on a dead bloke from Palestine.
posted by Mental Wimp at 8:43 AM on October 13, 2015


Bill Rauch, artistic director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, responds to the (IMHO) hysterical elitist critique of the Play on! project:
There are shocking and glorious layers embedded in some of the language that are only accessible to most people by footnotes (at best), including references to events that were completely local and contemporary to the playwright’s first audiences. Part of the promise of this exercise is to excavate some of the specificity and detail that may be lost to contemporary audiences. The clarity we aspire to get from the translations will make us better appreciate the vibrancy of the original. In this aspect of our endeavor, I am reminded of restorations of old paintings. When the layers of brown glaze that have accumulated over the centuries are carefully removed, the original colors can be astonishingly revelatory in their intensity.
posted by HeroZero at 5:44 AM on October 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


« Older The Fluffernutter   |   Happy seventy-fifth birthday, John Lennon Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments