Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/64

 later picked up and at least paid lip service from the sixteenth century on. Only in the nineteenth century, however, was this concept turned into a rule with classical legitimacy.

What happened to make fidelity go from something that had to be mentioned to something that had to be followed? It was the new concept of the artist that Romanticism brought us. It was Goethe, Chateaubriand, et al., and their worship of Shakespeare.

When Voltaire, the great figure of the French Enlightenment, first translated Shakespeare into French, he only published the acceptable parts, and he insisted that Shakespeare’s plays be forced into the classical rule system: all action taking place in one day, no ghosts, witches or the like, etc. And it was a long time before the Comédie Française, the leading theater company in Paris, would put on anything but a classical Shakespeare. Even the first German translators did to Shakespeare what they willed. In fact, many of the earliest Shakespeare translators did not speak English at all or very well. But that wasn’t the point, for them. The point was bringing the tragedies into their language, not getting everything right.

The following generations did not give themselves such latitude. They didn’t see Shakespeare as someone to pillage, but rather as someone to revere, someone whose words were sacrosanct. The translation of the author’s words was an enormous responsibility, a duty not to French or German, but to Shakespeare.

And how could it be any other way? I am a child of Romanticism myself, and I can’t imagine why someone would want to redo Hamlet, much less classicize, rationalize, or moralize it. Yet there have been many in twentieth-century Europe — at least among the self-consciously avant garde and the political — who continue to use Shakespeare to serve their own interests rather than work to serve Shakespeare. These translators and directors have made Shakespeare anti-fascist, anti-Communist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist. They have deconstructed his works and turned them into post-modern pastiches. In English this can be done through casting, clothing, cutting, acting, adapting. But in other languages it can be done through translation, as well.

The translator’s attitude toward an author greatly affects the way he translates; it controls his interpretive decisions. This attitude went through a sea-change in the latter part of the eighteenth 64