I wonder what translation of Shakespeare, to Italian for example, Booth prefers. Translators can make the archaic stuff accessible again, and so maybe the italian crowd gets the jokes that are lost on the english one.
I've heard bits of Shakespeare in German, and I think it was pretty well done. Any good translation is going to effectively be a whole new work of art that tries to capture something of the essence of the original. But the beauty of Shakespeare is the language.
When foreign translators are doing Shakespeare, they are trying to capture the whole essence, not just a literal extraction of what it's referring to.
Example:
Yes, as sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion.
If I say sooth, I must report they were
As cannons overcharged with double cracks,
So they doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.
> The new challenge scared them about as much as sparrows frighten eagles, or rabbits frighten a lion. To tell you the truth, they fought the new enemy with twice as much force as before; they were like cannons loaded with double ammunition.
Indeed, the irony today is that the Russians, the French and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do, for the simple reason that unlike us, they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak. Shakespeare is translated into rich, poetic varieties of these languages, to be sure, but since it is the rich, poetic modern varieties of the languages, the typical spectator in Paris, Moscow or Berlin can attend a production of Hamlet and enjoy a play rather than an exercise. In Japan, new editions of Shakespeare in Japanese are regularly best-sellers—utterly unimaginable here, since, like the Japanese, we prefer to experience literature in the language we speak, and a new edition of original Shakespeare no longer fits this definition. In an illuminating twist on this, one friend of mine—and a very cultured, literate one at that—has told me that the first time they truly understood more than the gist of what was going on in a Shakespeare play was when they saw one in French!
We actually get to live intimately with his works even if we can barely understand the originals.
Granted, not all went as far as the Germans and Klingons, but thinking that only the English people have a long lived history with Shakespeare is false.
I looked at what Wikipedia had about Shakespeare's influence in non-English countries and was surprised that this is hardly mentioned.
Is this really an obscure fact that for example in the 19th century Shakespeare was widely more popular in Germany than in Britain or that Goethe and Voltaire were avid admirers of Shakespeare?
As I was reading I kept waiting for the big "..BUT.." that would talk about how Shakespeare wasn't a genius. It wasn't until I got to the section on garden path sentences that the purpose of the title clicked. The author of the article was employing one of the very "tricks" he talks about in the article!