The Sydney Morning Herald
For the past three months, Tokyo's finest Shakespearean theatre company has been rehearsing a version of Macbeth which, the director swears, is a word-for-word translation. He is probably wrong.
If he were correct, the audience in Japan would get to the three-hour mark, a normal limit, and still have hours to go. Double, double, toil and trouble, indeed.
"So you have to cut Shakespeare down," says one of the country's most eminent translators. The Bard confounds translators everywhere. Getting a work from old English into contemporary speech is hard enough, but it is as nothing to the challenge of translating old English into Japanese.
Professor Edward Seidensticker, an American sometimes described as "the best translator of Japanese that has ever lived" reflected on the impossibility of the task in The East, a Tokyo magazine. For example, the line at the end of Hamlet: "Good night, sweet Prince, and flights of angels see thee to thy rest."
"It is an utterly simple line and I think it is a very, very beautiful line," Seidensticker said. "It contains 15 syllables in English. I have looked at all the main translations into Japanese and they all contain at least three times that number of syllables."
In the time that it takes to say "Good night, sweet Prince" the audience, tragically, would have nodded off.
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