A Brill Calendar: March 11

Translating Shakespeare and Others

Few aspects of scholarship over the last thousand years or so were more important than the need to translate enigmatic texts in Arabic, Greek and Hebrew into the post-classical Latin familiar to learned men.

That language of the western Roman empire had already bowed its way out of universal usage a long time ago; however it transformed itself among specialists: namely lawyers, scribes and monks. By way of a collateral, new vernaculars began to surface; first spoken and understood in their geographical region of origin, while many developed a literature and a corpus of texts; building a nursery of modern languages as we know them a millennium later. It is said that people who know to speak just one language don’t understand that language fully; and there may be some truth in that idea, although it couldn’t be the whole truth.

Be this as it may: translations and translating have remained basic dimensions of scholarship and cultural awareness ever since. The trans-national impact of Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe and Poesjkin depends largely on the translators these giants happened to inspire; sometimes after a strikingly long deferment, occasionally soon after their miracles were written. In the second class John Florio’s superb translation of Montaigne’s ‘Essays’ in English of 1603 is a fine example.

In assessing cultures on national level it is seldom taken into account how long it took for foreign, individual, ‘timeless’, classics to appear outside of their original linguistic domain. The first Dutchman, for instance, to translate Shakespeare’s Collected Works with devotion in their entirety, Leendert Burgersdijk (March 11 1818 – January 1 1900) published them in 12 volumes between 1884 and 1888 as an old man, retired as a high-school teacher of Biology; unencumbered by academic qualifications with regard to the Bard’s medium of expression.