The Translator's Art and Shakespeare, with Daniel Hahn

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.8 • 878 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2026

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

Is Shakespeare still Shakespeare even if every word is changed? While Shakespeare’s work is often hailed for its universality, its meter, metaphor, and wordplay pose special challenges for translators. How do you convey the rhythm and spirit of Shakespeare’s words in a language that follows fundamentally different rules? Author and translator Daniel Hahn explores these questions in his book, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation. He interviews translators from around the world, providing unique perspectives on Shakespeare’s language and impact. Some of Shakespeare’s best-known lines can prove the most difficult to capture, like Henry V’s “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Even something seemingly simple like Lady Macbeth’s “Are you a man?” may be tricky to translate when the word “man” carries different connotations in different languages. In this episode, Hahn dives into the challenges and rewards of translating Shakespeare, exploring not only what is lost in translation, but also what is gained.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:07.0	I'm Farah Kareem Cooper, the Folger director.
0:11.0	When we read a novel or watch a play in translation, what are we really getting?
0:18.0	A work in translation is like the ship of Theseus.
0:22.6	Every word is different from the original.
0:25.6	It's completely changed, but also still the same.
0:30.6	This work is the underappreciated job of the translator.
0:35.6	They have to completely rewrite the original, get inside the author's head,
0:41.5	and figure out what they were trying to do with each word. And it's not just about getting the
0:47.1	meaning right. Think about the sound of the words, their rhythm and rhyme. For translators working in other languages,
0:55.9	Shakespeare might be the Everest of English Lit.
0:59.2	His compression, wordplay, and metaphor
1:02.0	make the translator's job impossible.
1:06.1	Almost.
1:07.3	The author Daniel Hahn translates from Spanish, French, and Portuguese into English.
1:13.7	For his latest book, Han interviewed translators around the world about the difficulty of rewriting Shakespeare.
1:22.0	Hahn's book is called If This Be Magic, the Unlike unlikely art of Shakespeare in translation.
1:28.4	Here is Danny Hahn in conversation with Barbara Bogave.
1:37.6	Well, Danny Hahn, welcome to the podcast.
1:40.6	Thanks so much. I'm so glad to be here.
1:42.7	And I'm so glad to have you here.
1:45.1	And I'm going to ask the top of mind question, which is, how do you get over that feeling of how dare I translate Shakespeare?
	...

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