The language instinct

Tian Qinxin's staging of Romeo and Juliet keeps the fire burning between the star-crossed lovers, but preserves only the most important lines from the original text. CHAI MEILIN/CHINA DAILY

All the world's a stage

How I discovered the lure of Will power

The Bard in Beijing and beyond

Another complication lies in the vast vocabulary employed by Shakespeare. The Chinese translator has to possess a similar word horde in the Chinese language, or more accurately, he or she had better be armed with an even larger reserve to find the best equivalent for a certain expression. That's why the best translators tend to be those from the older generation, because they grew up at a time when Chinese classics were drummed into them from an early age and both the archaic written and the new vernacular styles were in use.

The best translators also need dramatic flair. They have to render each character in a linguistic style befitting that person. The way a king speaks should be distinct from that of a court jester. Overall, Shakespeare in Chinese translations could come over as highly literary and even pompous, with never-ending sentences and modifiers heaped upon modifiers, useful for putting the Bard on a pedestal, but detrimental to bringing him closer to the public. Because most translations were made by those who study Shakespeare rather than those who present him on a stage, theatrical adaptors and directors sometimes have to tweak existing translations to make the lines more colloquial.

Then there is the stylistic quagmire. Because of cultural differences, the early versions toned down the raunchy content by expunging references to sexual organs and other "unsavory" subjects. This is more a result of a different mentality, because Chinese classics may also contain such descriptions, but somehow people familiar with the Bard's name but not his texts often assume he was a pristine, preaching icon, or would like to shape him in this moral configuration.

Some of Shakespeare's lines are open to debate. That ambiguity is hard to reproduce in a different language. You have to pick one of the interpretations. Moreover, it takes a literary genius to even attempt puns and jokes in a totally different language with dramatic constraints. I still remember my joyous laughter when I first came across one example in A Midsummer Night's Dream when Quince uses "paramour" when he means "paragon". I read the Chinese first and then searched for the original. The resemblance, in effect, is uncanny.