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Shakespeare & Beyond

Play on! Yvette Nolan on translating 'Henry IV, Part 1'

Playwright Yvette Nolan translated Henry IV, Part 1If you’ve been following the Shakespeare & Beyond blog, you’ll know that the Folger has been doing a monthly series of Q&As with some of the playwrights and dramaturgs involved with Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play on! project to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into contemporary English.

This month’s post breaks out of the typical Q&A format as Yvette Nolan shares reflections from her work translating Henry IV, Part 1, just after hearing it read aloud for the first time in April.

⇒ Read an introduction to the Play on! project by Lue Douthit, the project director at OSF

Read previous Q&As in the series:

⇒ Q&A with Lillian Groag about translating Troilus and Cressida

⇒ Q&A with Ellen McLaughlin about translating Pericles

⇒ Q&A with Migdalia Cruz about translating Macbeth

⇒ Q&A with Kenneth Cavander about translating Timon of Athens

⇒ Q&A with Caridad Svich about translating Henry VIII

⇒ Q&A with Elise Thoron and Julie Felise Dubiner about translating The Merchant of Venice


I am on the plane on my way back to Saskatoon from New York, where I just had four days in the room with actors and my translation of Henry IV, Part 1. What a joy it has been to hear the play, to really hear the play.

This is my third draft. The assignment required two drafts, but I cannot seem to stop. I love being inside the language. I have been studying public policy this year, and often, falling into the play, working on fixing the meter, matching the rhythms, has been like medicine for me, a stress-busting exercise.

A series of accidents and circumstances led to my arriving in the room with a third draft instead of the required second, and I am so grateful. It meant that I could really hear the play, because I was so much closer to what I intended, and because I was far less apprehensive. I talked the first day about how a playwright often has a hard time hearing the first read of a new play because of nerves.

The clarity of the translation and the actors’ voices on it illuminated some things for me: Hal is really a jerk, Falstaff is really agitating from the word “go” to be not cast off, and Vernon is really hot for Hal. Also, after four days of working through the translation line by line, we read the whole thing and it clocked in at 2 hours 20 minutes, with the interval. Yes, it is no Hamlet, but still, this was also without cuts – because that is one of the Play on! rules – and still it clipped along, clear and lean and muscular. I wondered about how the archaic English in the original slowed us down because we were working so hard to be clear, working so hard to bring the audience along with us, working so hard to simultaneously translate and deliver the text.

I love the Henriad, and of all the plays, I love Henry IV Part 1 the most. Or I did. When I chose the play (after a few of my other choices were gone; “hesitation is fatal,” the late, great Bernard Hopkins used to tell me), I believed that of the four plays of the cycle, this one was the most hopeful, because it was about the potential of the young prince, because Falstaff was still jolly and funny, because it was about stepping into one’s role as a leader, about honour.  Now, I am not so sure about any of those things. My own translation has coloured the whole thing a little darker.

Comments

Why? Why translate? I saw the plays as a young child, no one translated, I’m of average intelligence and education and frankly I’d be very put off to see the plays without the words.
Is it thought that only scholars can understand the plays?

Tamara Jenkins — October 31, 2018

[…] ⇒ Reflections from Yvette Nolan about translating Henry IV, Part 1 […]

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