Book Review: ‘If This Be Magic,’ by Daniel Hahn

But only in Hahn’s book could I have compared those two translations to understand this, which is symptomatic of the very fullness of the book. Hahn leaves no stone unturned, informing us that the languages quoted in the book include “Arabic, Azeri, Bulgarian, Cape Verdean Creole, Danish, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, isiXhosa, Italian, Japanese, Kurdish, Latin, te reo Māori, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Thai, Turkish and Yiddish.” “Hold me back!” say I, who harbors things like an LP from the 1960s of “Kiss Me, Kate” sung in German and an Estonian translation of the novel “Ragtime.” I admire Hahn’s intent.

But there can be no one-size-fits-all guide to translating Shakespeare, as each language presents its own challenges to the endeavor. This means that the book is essentially a tourist’s guide to the array of choices translators happen to have made here, there and everywhere. On your left is how they did this passage in Turkish, up straight ahead is how this came out in Mandarin.

The impossibility of a real through line ultimately means that the book is a little too, well, generous. It could lose a good 100 pages of its 400 and remain the fine thing that it is. Also, I am always in favor of nonfiction writers engaging in a chatty tone, but for some readers, Hahn will seem to overdo it in spots. To him, “Richard III” is one of the “uncliest” of the plays, and the final words of the book, on the difficulties he encountered in finding translated Shakespeare passages as his chapter titles, are “But it is annoying. …”

But in the end, the book is about how Shakespeare comes off not only to English speakers, but to the whole world. The book is a kind of master class in translation, a chronicle of the author’s healthy obsession, and a great way to catch up with Shakespeare’s work. We should know how people experience Shakespeare worldwide if, as Harold Bloom taught us, his work was “the invention of the human.” Hahn’s tour makes a lovely case for that.

IF THIS BE MAGIC: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation | By Daniel Hahn | Knopf | 406 pp. | $35