And Gamlet is available on Netflix I see. That's one for the queue. Your comment about the mistranslation reminds me of the (almost certainly apocryphal) anecdote about the early days of computerized translation. The researcher types the phrase "out of sight, out of mind" and requests English-Russian followed by Russian-English translation, only to get "invisible lunatic".
Of course, I've also heard versions where the mediating language is Arabic, Chinese etc. But a good anecdote (even a poor one) is always more truthy than mere facts. -- R On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 11:00 PM, <plissa...@comcast.net> wrote: > Shakespeare versus Friam! Oh, My! Seems like a hugely mismatched > intellectual exercise! Well, Will wrote words for that, too! Perhaps: “A > concatenation of cats”. Or: “What fools these mortals be!” It’s poetry, > fellas! Didn’t anyone tell you? Before penning ab initio, ab ignorantio > analyses, just study a leetle of the overwhelming volume of criticism on the > Melancholy Prince. A good modern one, of the tens of 1,000’s of articles, > is in Marjorie Garber’s, *Shakespeare after All* (2004). Read, and > *then*write. > > > > But, but, but, to the horror of literalists, in the “To be, or not...” > soliloquy (III, i) our forgetful Prince describes death as “The undiscovered > country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” when two acts earlier (I, ii, > iii), on the battlements, he’d actually been hearing some unpleasant > revelations from his father’s ghost, “sy pappie se spook”, as the inelegant > Afrikaans translation has it! Ah, consistency -- the hobgoblin of small > minds -- but nevah the Bard’s! > > > > I view with delight all foreign versions of the play in “tongues unknown > and accents yet unheard” that I can dig up. The Russian “Gamlet” (1964), > with Smoktunovsky, and Shostakovich’s score, is pretty good. A darkly > grand gothic revenge horse-opera. Much cold steel and poisoned > chalices!! The Russian dialog is very impressive, sonorous and sinister, > but a particular delight are the English captions. They are good, and > grammatical, but *weirdly,* *unaccountably,* contain none of Shakespeare’s > lines!! I have a vision of some good, grey Apparatchik Soviet State > Translator, in the editing room earnestly listening to the spoken words > and transcribing same into nice twentieth century English dialog with not > the slightest inkling that there had actually been an English script (First > Quarto, 1603), that a lotta Capitalists, over the centuries, found pretty > inspiring! > > > Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures > > Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. > > 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA > tel:(505)983-7728 > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
