Dr. Chandrani Chatterjee

LangLit
IMPACT FACTOR – 5.61 ISSN 2349-5189
An International Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journal

SHAKESPEARE IN TRANSLATION: SOME THOUGHTS
DR. CHANDRANI CHATTERJEE

Department of English,
Savitribai Phule Pune University,
Pune
chandrani@unipune.ac.in
ABSTRACT
The present paper attempts an eclectic and sweeping overview of Shakespeare

performances in India through the lens of translation. Avoiding the narrow
and commonplace understanding of translation as mere transference of
meaning, the present paper locates translation as an ongoing process of
human communication indicative of a larger traffic of thoughts, ideas and
worldviews. It is in this context that the circulations of Shakesperean play
texts in India in particular can be meaningfully studied through the framework
of translation.
Key words: Translation, Shakespeare, Reception, Culture
Introduction
Professor Ananda Lal, a noted theatre critic, director and academic, in the ‘Introduction’ to
Shakespeare on the Calcutta Stage: A Checklist (ed. Ananda Lal and Sukanta Chaudhuri,
Kolkata: Papyrus, 2001) points towards the graph of Shakespeare productions on the Calcutta
stage as follows - the graph like in all former British colonies, follows a pattern – 1) garrison
theatre for the entertainment of the soldiers and traders 2) ‘gentlemen amateurs’ practising
more ambitious plays 3) transitional phase in which Prospero’s tongue became calibanized
and texts naturalized in local languages and finally 4) post colonial Independence, which led
to either a denial of the colonizer’s legacy or of total appropriation of it in native terms.
This brief graph is indicative of the major shifts and transitions that the reception of
Shakespeare, in India in particular, and the former British colonies in general, underwent. It is
here that I locate the role and importance of translation in the dissemination of Shakespeare. I
am interested not only in the dissemination of Shakesperean texts through linguistic
transference; but also in the transference of Shakespeare as an ‘Idea’ that has continued to be
churned and re-churned through contemporary remakes and re-articulations.
In exploring these shifts, I am therefore, not using the term ‘translation’ in its narrow sense,
that is, of transfer of meaning from one language to another. Rather, I am interested in the
several ways in which the term ‘translation’ can be meaningfully used to connote a larger
traffic of thoughts, ideas and world views. I suggest that in revisiting Shakespeare through the
framework of translation would open up hitherto unexplored areas of possible research.
Vol. 6 Issue 3 1 February, 2020

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Several new researches in the discipline of translation studies are indicative of this shift.
Translation scholars in north America and Canada in particular, but also in Italy, India and
several parts of the world are suggesting the need to break free from narrow linguistic
understanding of the field to exploring concepts and ideas that were not hitherto understood
as translation. So, translation is being used as a trope to understand war, trauma, gender,
caste, society, immigration, music to name just a few. In this widening of the field and in
extending its boundaries, several disciplines have been interlocutors with translation studies,
like, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, performance studies to mention just the tip of
an ice berg. Our concern in this paper, however, is with the interface that performance studies
and translation studies share, that makes it possible to talk of global Shakespeare through this
framework.
Both translation studies and performance studies have emerged and prospered as significant
interdisciplinary fields. One of the ongoing debates in theatre studies (as a sub part of
performance studies) concerns the place of the theatre text. Many scholars have maintained
that the theatre text is singular because of its performance aspects, which means that it cannot
be translated in the same way as other texts. As, Susan Bassnett, the noted translation scholar,
claims, “the linguistic system is only one optional component in a set of interrelated systems
that comprise the spectacle” (Bassnett 1980, 120) and the process where the linguistic sign is
transferred into another and subsequently retransferred onto a visual and auditory spectacle is
a multilayered one. As a result, theatre texts and therefore also their translation, do not
necessarily follow the same rules as texts in a literary system” (Aaltonen, 2000, 7). The
auditory and visual components and the live audience make theatre texts different from other
textual translations.
I wish to take this argument ahead by indicating the collaborative nature of a theatre
performance where the translator, the director, the performers and the audience, collaborate
to co-create the performance text. It is in this process, I suggest, that the ‘Shakespearean text’
gets made and remade, translated and circulated, with every receiving audience making
meaning of the semiotic shifts. In fact, theatre texts thwart the myths about translation – the
presupposed linearity between texts and performances.
A Brief Overview of Shakespeare Performance in India
In this section I will provide an overview of Shakespeare performances in India. This

overview will help us locate the ways in which Shakespeare was translated, performed and
made indigenous time and again emphasizing the adaptability of the Bard to local cultures
and traditions and the fact that he continues to be the most popular playwright In the
subcontinent till date.
Introduced as a part of the colonial model for education, theatre was patronized by British
officials lIke Warren HastIngs, among others. Plays also provided a source of entertainment
for the British officials. Between1775-1808, many new theatres were built In Calcutta and
largely an English repertoire of plays was performed. Plays like Othello, Merchant of Venice,
Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, Comedy of Errors are reported
to have attracted the attention of the Indian elite audience as well. This marks the beginning
of several translations of Shakespeare Into Bengali and later Into Marathi and other Indian

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languages. By 1850, there are records of Shakespeare having been translated into the major
Indian languages. The role of the Parsi theatre companies In making Shakespeare a part of
popular culture has been documented by several scholars. It is the Parsi theatre that took the
liberty to Indianize Shakespeare by adding folk songs and dances and deviating substantially
from the ‘original’ Shakespeare. It is here that the many layered nature of the Shakespearean
play text is depicted at its best and there’s a questioning of the canonical and monolithic idea
of Shakespeare, which was taught in schools and colleges. Though the Parsi theatre did come
under scrutiny and criticism of the purists who criticised it for being vulgar and cheap, yet
there was no stopping of the experimentations that were to continue in the staging of
Shakespeare in India.
The British actor Geoffrey Kendal’s Shakespearana Theatre Company added a new height to
Shakespeare performance in India. Formed in 1947, the year of Indian independence, this was
a touring company that presented Shakespeare in English across the length and breadth of the
country. Of the several people who worked with Kendal’s company, was the noted Bengali
actor, Utpal Dutt, who later would translate and adapt Shakespeare for his own company
called the Little Theatre Group. One of the most noted performance of this group was King
Lear which was adapted into a jatra performance as ‘Ajker Sahajahan’. Interestingly, ‘Ajker
Sahajahan’ became the source text for the 2007 film ‘The Last Lear’ directed by Rituparno
Ghosh.
It is in such ramifications and circulation of Shakespeare’s plays that I locate this paper’s
translation framework. The notion of sanctity associated with the ‘original’ is contested in
such instances and what acquire importance are the variations and transformations at every
stage of a play text’s transmission. These transformations in their turn create new originals –
Ajker sahajahan in the above case, with local histories and embellishments which make us
return to the question of original with more critical and analytical acumen.
This becomes even more meaningful when one locates the already textured and layered
nature of Shakespeare’s source texts which the Bard rewrote and translated repeatedly for his
plays. As Edwin Gentzler illustrates in his recent work on translation and rewriting, there is a
need to recognize and spend some time discussing Shakespeare the translator.
“when turning to Shakespeare, most translation studies scholars focus on translations of

shakespeare’s plays, and seldom consider Shakespeare himself as a translator or rewriter.
Shakespeare was continuously rewriting and updating his own work.” (p31)
As is well known, Shakespeare’s sources for his plays were varied and multiple. In A
Midsummer Night’s Dream for example, Shakespeare draws on sources as diverse as
Chaucer, Theseus, Ovid, Spenser, and King James. He then crafts a play that is about
translation and transformation. When such a play travels to distant parts of the globe through
translations and rewritings, questions of control, authorship and authority would take a
backseat and ideas related to creativity and transformations and modifications of the text
would become more relevant. In fact, in such instances, translations and transformations,
modifications and re-articulations would become new kinds of authorships!

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This is further enhanced by the new media. The new media not only alters how authors and
translators write, translate and rewrite stories but also alters how readers and viewers navigate
the rewritten text. This has become increasingly visible in the screen renditions of
Shakespearean play texts in India. In most of the screen renditions there is a complete
relocation of Shakespeare through the ramifications of its intercultural contexts, suggesting
thereby that the only possible way of being faithful to Shakespeare was to relocate him fully.
The most innovative experimentations with Shakespeare in the domain of films have been
Vishal Bharadwaj’s renderings of Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet as Maqbool (2004), Omkara
(2007) and Haider (2014) respectively. Bharadwaj rewrites Shakespeare and relocates him to
the specificities of a contemporary postcolonial India. He translates and retransmits an entire
trajectory of thoughts, emotions and belief systems to a different cultural locale to
communicate the anxieties of his times. Can we rethink translation not as a short term product
or process, but as a cultural condition underlying communication itself – the primordial urge
in humans to tell and retell stories, rearticulate and rewrite cultural histories where the
distinctions between originals and translations become more and more blurred? It is perhaps
more enabling to locate the circulation of Shakespeare In these transgressive
translations/rewritings that help us challenge notions of ‘standard’ translations.
By Way of ConclusIon
Jorge Luis Borges, the acclaimed Argentine writer, wrote a short story called ‘Shakespeare’s
Memory’. It narrates the story of Hermann Sorgel, a Shakespeare scholar who is gifted the
most unusual gift, the very memory of William Shakespeare by one named Daniel Thorpe,
who says he himself had accepted the gift from a dying enlisted man. For the gift to work,
both the offer and the acceptance have to be made out aloud. Sorgel accepts and gradually
starts remembering Shakespeare’s bits and pieces of existence and experience in a
fragmentary and chaotic manner. Needless to say, a man’s memories do not make the poet
and sooner Shakespeare’s memory becomes overwhelming for Sorgel. Sorgel decides to
transfer the burden of the memory to someone else and finally does find one who is willing to
accept the gift.
Borges’s story in its many layers perhaps urges us to dwell on the relation between the
author, the works created and the readers. Sorgel’s wish and claim at one point In the story to
‘possess’ Shakespeare remains futile and he is not able to write anything that would perhaps
bring him anywhere close to the fame of William Shakespeare. Somewhere Borges also
seems to be harping on the ‘authenticity’ of Shakespeare by telling us that even when one is
in possession of the Bard’s ‘memory’ – that is, the very intimate and personal – there is a
possibility that he would not be able to create. It seems to me, Borges’s story becomes a point
to reflect on ‘what we make of Shakespeare that Shakespeare becomes’! That is, there is
perhaps nothing called the ‘true’ ‘authentic’ or ‘only’ Shakespeare. In fact, Shakespeare’s
plays themselves can be looked upon as this repository, a melting pot of diverse elements.
Just as Shakespeare was a result of certain socio-cultural circumstances in which he lived. As
we remember and remake our Shakespeares, we cannot but forget that this process of
remaking is made possible by the textual traces that have been left behind. As Stephen
Greenblatt suggests that his desire to speak with the dead may end in hearing to his own
voice and yet his, “[...] own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to

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leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of
the living.” (Greenblatt 1988: 2)
This conversation is what perhaps contributed to the circulation of the ‘Idea’/ ‘concept’ called
Shakespeare that lives even beyond the textual artefacts, in the several ways in which we
remember and refashion our Shakespeares. The role of translation in this dissemination has
been the subject of this lecture. Translation, not in the narrow sense of textual transfer alone,
but rather, as a conduit for the circulation of ‘social energy’. What we are left with thus, is a
palimpsest, waiting to be erased and written over.
REFERENCES
1. Chaudhuri, Sukanta and Lim, Chee Seng (ed.) Shakespeare Without English: The
Reception of Shakespeare in Non-Anglophone Countries. Pearson, 2006.
2. Gentzler, Edwin. Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies.
Routledge, 2017.
3. Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa, ‘Shakespeare in India’, Indian Literature, Vol. 7, No. 1
(1964) pp 1-11.
4. Lal, Ananda and Chaudhuri, Sukanta (ed.) Shakespeare on the Calcutta Stage: A
Checklist. Kolkata: Papyrus, 2001
5. Lal, Ananda. ‘Rewriting the Originals in Different Ways’, The Telegraph, 10/12/2016
6. Panja, Shormistha and Saraf, Babli Moitra. Performing Shakespeare in India:
Exploring Indianness, Literatures and Cultures. Sage, 2016.
7. Panja, Shormistha (ed.) Shakespeare and the Art of Lying, Orient Blackswan, 2013.
8. Trivedi, Poonam and Bartholomeusz, Dennis (ed.) India’s Shakespeare: Translation,
Interpretation and Performance. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005.


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LangLit

IMPACT FACTOR – 5.61 ISSN 2349-5189

An International Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journal