Hvis du ku glæde mig ved at tale til mig . . .(‘If thou couldst please me with speaking to me . . .’ (from Timon of Athens), as translated into Danish by Niels Brunse).
I don’t speak Danish. But in September 2023, as I was beginning my research for this book, I spent two days in Copenhagen, where the Royal Danish Playhouse were staging a production of Richard II that I was keen to see. And I had another reason for making the trip: I’d arranged to spend the day after the performance with Niels Brunse, the translator whose work I would have just heard spoken on that stage. Copenhagen was sunny, in a lovely, crisply autumnal way, and very beautiful. The production was not altogether to my taste, though interesting enough. But day two proved to be what really mattered.
I knew that my book on Shakespeare translation would draw on the insights and experiences of actual Shakespeare translators, and sitting down with Niels for a ‘general chat’ (as I pitched it, mildly) seemed a good first step. I’d met him before, thanks to some events with mutual friends at the Globe, and was looking forward to this conversation. And because, occasionally, some things are just delightful in the state of Denmark, I got to meet him not in Copenhagen butan hour’s train ride away, in the town of his youth: Helsingør, Shakespeare’s Elsinore, home also to one Prince Hamlet.
Niels walked me around ‘Elsinore’ Castle (really Kronborg Castle), a grand, atmospheric complex in a dramatic coastal setting, where it’s easy to imagine standing watch on the ramparts at night, peering through the cold mist, waiting for the old king’s ghost to stalk the darkness once again . . . Then we crossed the road to the offices of the HamletScenen theatre festival to talk.
Shakespeare is big business in Denmark, and especially here in Helsingør. The festival offices where Niels and I talked are decorated with photos of generations of famous Hamlets, the meeting-room dotted with little ornamental glass skulls. But the intended ‘general chat’ I had with Niels that afternoon was not about Shakespeare’s global popularity and global cultural influence and the global Shakespeare industry in general. It wasn’t about historic Danish productions, or historically how Shakespeare has been received. It was about about the numbers of syllables in certain Danish verbs, about irregular verse patterns in two Hamlet lines, about one specific word in one specific line in one specific edition of The Merchant of Venice. I’m aware that not everyone would consider this a good time. I loved it.
Nobody reads more closely than a translator. If you’re translating a literary text that you think worthwhile, you will consider all of it, you’ll be aware of every comma, every little unstressed syllable. As a translator myself, working mostly on fiction, the detail-focus is a phenomenon familiar to me; where any other reader might give a novel, say, ten hours of their attention, I will spend many months living deep in the book’s guts.
You will meet many translators in this volume, and, pleasingly, most are even more obsessive than I am.
Niels is one of the few contemporary translators who has worked through the entire canon of Shakespeare plays, a labour of several decades, which meant our Helsingør afternoon focusing on a handful of micro-examples was – of course – only the tiniest tip of a very large iceberg. So after a few hours talking, as he ran me back to the station,I warned him that he’d be getting a few follow-up email questions. Ever generous, ever gracious, he told me he would welcome them. If he came to regret this at any point in the eighteen-month barrage that followed, he was too kind to mention it.
Since that time, I have had conversations – often more than one, often at great length – with people who have rewritten Shakespeare in many languages. We’ve met in cafés and in their homes and in Zoom boxes, while waiting outside theatres and over long lunches. Each of those conversations made me see fresh things in pieces of 400-year-old writing I thought I knew well, things I hadn’t bothered to stop and notice before, though they’d been there all along.
Here are a dozen of the translators you’ll meet in these pages:
- Abhijit Gupta (Bangla)
- Ádám Nádasdy (Hungarian)
- José Francisco (‘Chico’) Botelho (Brazilian Portuguese)
- Emine Ayhan (Turkish)
- Frank Günther (German)
- JC Niala (Swahili)
- Jean-Michel Déprats (French)
- Lawrence Flores Pereira (Brazilian Portuguese)
- Niels Brunse (Danish)
- Shoichiro (‘Sho’) Kawai ( Japanese)
- So Kwok Wan (Chinese)
- Te Haumihiata Mason (te reo Ma¯ori)
They are my cast of recurring characters. And you’ll see the work of many others besides. More than anything, I hope you will reach the end of this book with the same awed admiration for them that I have. And my Danish trip in September 2023 proved a fine place to begin those conversations: in real-world Elsinore, a couple of hundred yards from Hamlet’s castle, studiously ignoring all the conspicuous manifestations of the Shakespeare tourism industry and instead worrying nerdily at a line that Shakespeare decided to launch with a stressed syllable, and trying to understand how ‘The rest is silence’ can be such pesky trouble to a long-suffering Danish translator.
It’s the spirit of that conversation that I’ve tried to capture in the pages that follow.
From If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation. Used with permission of the publisher, Penguin RandomHouse. Copyright © 2026 by Daniel Hahn.
