You actually can get away with doing this kind of thing—but only if you’re also writing in a language other than the one the original author used. You can get away with a lot more when you’re doing a “translation” because it’s literally impossible to simply leave everything as the original author wrote it.
Case in point: W.S. Kuniczak’s “modern translation” of the Sienkiewicz Trilogy.
My first experience of Shakespeare was through French translations, which I really loved. Later, when I learned enough English, I tried to read the originals… it was a suffocating exercise in frustration.
It wasn’t until I read Brush Up Your Shakespeare that I learned to appreciate the original language a little better.
You actually can get away with doing this kind of thing
Actually, that’s what interested me in this exercise in the first place; that it’s “sacrilegious” and likely to attract ire, a state of affairs that I find silly.
Reading Shakespeare without footnotes is difficult even for native speakers. Some of the plays work well enough (although there will always be some passages that will be confusing), but the sonnets are mostly incomprehensible.
To be honest, I had the opposite problem. Dialogue with no captions or directions or context? How am I supposed to guess how the characters feel?
And, honestly, moden actors take playing Shakespeare so damn seriously, they could be saying “ba ba ba ba” and still sound emotionally three-dimensional and intense and layered and stuff. I keep finding that the text often doesn’t measure up to the skill invested in portraying it.
You actually can get away with doing this kind of thing—but only if you’re also writing in a language other than the one the original author used. You can get away with a lot more when you’re doing a “translation” because it’s literally impossible to simply leave everything as the original author wrote it.
Case in point: W.S. Kuniczak’s “modern translation” of the Sienkiewicz Trilogy.
My first experience of Shakespeare was through French translations, which I really loved. Later, when I learned enough English, I tried to read the originals… it was a suffocating exercise in frustration.
It wasn’t until I read Brush Up Your Shakespeare that I learned to appreciate the original language a little better.
Actually, that’s what interested me in this exercise in the first place; that it’s “sacrilegious” and likely to attract ire, a state of affairs that I find silly.
Reading Shakespeare without footnotes is difficult even for native speakers. Some of the plays work well enough (although there will always be some passages that will be confusing), but the sonnets are mostly incomprehensible.
To be honest, I had the opposite problem. Dialogue with no captions or directions or context? How am I supposed to guess how the characters feel?
And, honestly, moden actors take playing Shakespeare so damn seriously, they could be saying “ba ba ba ba” and still sound emotionally three-dimensional and intense and layered and stuff. I keep finding that the text often doesn’t measure up to the skill invested in portraying it.
I didn’t find the sonnets too confusing, and I’m not even a native English speaker.