What is true for battles is definitely true for conferences: one needs to pick them. When I was a PhD student, I went nerdily wild, and presented at five or six a year all over the world. But with experience and wisdom (jaded, anyone?) I now focus on what’s immediately important for my field, rather than just interesting – though nothing wrong with that if the conference is not expensive, and you can pick it up on the way to the library, as it were, rather than having to fly. Oh, all you London people, we provincials can only envy you.
So, here I am, off on a home visit in Berlin, and a little detour to the German Shakespeare Society Conference in Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller, one of my favourite places. As was to be expected, 2019 is all under the sign of inter-culturality and translation, both in Weimar as well as at the British Shakespeare Association conference in Swansea in July. Once again, this year more than ever, poor old Shakespeare has to serve as straw man: European for Remainers, Islander for Leavers, for or against immigration, women, gays, Jews, Blacks – you name the marginalised group or political issue, and he’ll have something to say about it, and it’s going to be what you want it to be. In any case: translation, and I’m presenting on what it means to translate women (and when women translate) across languages, plays, and times.
I’m looking at Ariosto’s 1509 comedy I Suppositi (roughly, The Changelings), George Gascoigne’s 1566 English translation Supposes, Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew (which uses the Supposes for the Bianca plot), and an anonymous late seventeenth-century German version of the Shrew, called Kunst über alle Künste: Ein bös Weib gut zu machen (An Art beyond all Art: How to make an Evil Wife Good – all translations here my own). Phew, that’s a lot of words to mean this: I’ll compare four plays in Italian, English, and German, and explore how the women are being treated in each of them, in the sense of how do the authors portray them in relation to genre, and the language they write in, what do they omit or add. Is there something lost or acquired in translation?
It’s exciting, and I’ve got lots to say, most of all because I’ve been working on the Shrew since September 2016 when I started my first postdoc at the University of Geneva (more info in the RESEARCH part of my page). We worked on four plays by Shakespeare which had found their way onto the continent via travel troups and in the entourage of diplomats. There are plays in Dutch, German, Danish, Czech and other European languages from pretty soon after Shakespeare’s death – not of an age, and not of one place either!
There are bits and pieces of Shakespeare’s plays in German here and there (e.g. the Pyramus and Thisbe inlet translated by Alexander Gryphius); we have given attention to those four which are extant in substantial ways, that is, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, and The Taming of the Shrew, the play I worked on. Check out the website of the project here: https://www.unige.ch/emgs/
What we did is re-translate the plays into English since they are substantially different (all of them in prose, for one!), give them annotations that explain the German and compare the Shakespearean original, a bibliographical apparatus collating German editions, and an introduction on both the play itself, and the historical background of the travelling players in German countries at the time. It’s gonna be yuge, and it’s going to be published with Arden Bloomsbury. We hope to bring attention to the very early reception of Shakespeare in Germany and the continent in general, and to spark lots of cross-linguistic cooperation.
And now, for some late-minute paper preparation. Conference reporting to be continued tomorrow…