Shakespeare, like some other classic authors, has been a beneficiary of globalisation and is often cited today as the world’s most performed dramatist. According to statistics, translations of his works come a distant second to those of the UK detective-story writer Agatha Christie, but his plays have still been translated into more than a hundred languages.
The story of the translation of Shakespeare’s plays is an intriguing one, particularly since he apparently set so little store by the verdict of readers. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not arrange for the publication of any of his plays or even ensure that those who did had access to reliable materials.
Fortunately, his friends and associates stepped in. It was they who produced a collected edition of the plays in 1623 that unlike earlier printed versions of individual plays was designed for readers. It was not just a collection of acting scripts or a souvenir of performances.
Translation of the plays into other European languages took off in the 18th century. Translators in France and Germany began to produce versions of the plays, and suddenly German and even French speakers became used to Hamlet’s questioning, Othello’s jealousy, and the ravings of King Lear. The famous Schlegel-Tieck translations of Shakespeare’s plays done in the early 19th century became a kind of honorary work of German literature.
Some of this history is recounted in a new book by UK translator Daniel Hahn, who has had the good idea of sampling versions of Shakespeare’s plays in several dozen languages while also discussing the challenges that translators face in rendering material that is bound to the time and place of its production in ways intelligible to modern global audiences.
His book, titled “If this be Magic” – a quotation from one of the plays – looks at examples of translations taken from familiar languages (to Europeans) like French or German to more unfamiliar ones like Japanese or Korean, analysing them not only in terms of how far they attempt to render the original words in another language and how far they adapt them to the needs of new and different audiences, but also in terms of special problems presented by Shakespeare’s material.
Early chapters of the book look at issues such as the translation of verse and prose and vocabulary derived from Latin and from Anglo-Saxon, while later ones run through problems such as the translation of jokes and translation for performance or for study.
Hahn himself translates from several European languages and says that for all the other languages considered he has had to feel his way, often by talking to the translators concerned or even mugging up the basics of a particular language in order to identify special challenges. He does this with Turkish, for example – not a language he knew when he started the book but one he is likely to have had a better grasp of by the time he finished.
One of the losers in this procedure, however, is Arabic. Hahn has a few examples of translating Shakespeare into Arabic, used to discuss the ways in which Arabic’s famously extensive vocabulary can be used to render shades of meaning in Shakespeare’s texts that are produced not so much by the use of different words but from the use of the same words in different contexts. Different ways of rendering shades of love and friendship in Arabic and in Shakespeare’s English are discussed.
However, he has not talked to translators of Shakespeare’s plays into Arabic or gone very far into the corpus of published translations. While he mentions the translations by Khalil Mutran, a leading figure in Egyptian theatre, that were done in the early 20th century, he does not make much use of them. He mentions the translations done by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra in the middle of the last century while not mentioning the extensive work done by the late Mohamed Enani.
He mentions a translation of Othello done by Fatma Moussa into Egyptian colloquial Arabic but not the earlier version done by Moustapha Safouan. He does not mention the translations by Iraqi translator Salah Niazi, also known for his translation of Irish writer James Joyce’s novel Ulysses into Arabic.
Hahn does not stray far from Jabra and Enani’s versions of Shakespeare’s plays in Modern Standard Arabic or from an example of rendering the material, in the case of one play, into the Egyptian dialect.
Traditions: Hahn’s subject is Shakespeare in translation and not Shakespeare in Arabic translation, so he can be forgiven for many of these lacunae.
However, readers of his book might want to go further than Hahn is able to in investigating the history and challenges of rendering Shakespeare’s plays in Arabic, not only because the subject is intrinsically interesting, showing how the two languages, English and Arabic, have historically touched in the context of formidable challenges, but also because the history of Arabic translation of Shakespeare has a lot to say about the history of Shakespeare in performance – not least in Cairo where a long-running production of King Lear with Yehia Al-Fakharny in the title role continues to attract theatre-goers at the National Theatre.
The earliest versions of Shakespeare in Arabic, dating from the late 19th century, were adaptations rather than true translations. They were not systematic in their approach, did not hesitate to chop and change the source material in the interest of what was likely to go down best with local audiences, and were useless as reading texts unlike the best of later translations.
Some of them were vaudeville versions of Shakespeare’s plays, possibly rather like the rewritings familiar from late 17th-century English dramatists or from the amateur theatricals that spread across middle-class homes in the 19th century. The emphasis was not so much on the plays as a whole as on selected passages that could be read aloud for entertainment.
Mutran was determined to change this approach for reasons Hahn mentions. Shakespeare’s plays have sometimes functioned as a kind of test case for translators, he says, since their range and difficulty can require exceptional linguistic competence on the part of those aiming to produce their effects in another language.
Looking round at the few scraps of Shakespeare available to Arab audiences in the early decades of the last century, Mutran decided to remedy the situation by producing accurate versions of at least the major tragedies, translating them into an Arabic idiom that he felt would best convey the character of the originals. He wanted to go some way towards correcting what was clearly an unsatisfactory situation and also to provide reading – and acting – texts that could suggest how Shakespeare might properly sound in Arabic translation.
Hahn says of Mutran’s translations that while they invested the plays with a certain grandeur, his decision to use a classical register of Arabic also gave them a possibly unwelcome monumental character. They were so distant from ordinary speech that it would take a brave director to choose them as acting versions unless the idea was to turn the plays into the grandest of grand opera.
While this might be thought appropriate to render the 17th-century language of the originals, the results could come across as stiff and artificial, making it difficult for actors to invest the dramas with psychological immediacy and erecting unnecessary barriers for audiences.
Hahn’s way of putting this is to say that they could flatten out the individuality of different characters and therefore drain the interest from dramatic situations. It could be like wheeling on a symphony orchestra when the plays are more like chamber pieces – and this without even addressing the fact that stretches of them are written in vernacular prose not poetry and many of them are comedies.
Addressing these issues in an article in Al-Ahram Weekly in 2006, Mohamed Enani, formerly professor of English at Cairo University, said of his translations that they had attempted to leave the artificiality of earlier versions behind and to translate Shakespeare’s plays into a modern idiom that would do justice to the literary character of the originals without seeking to turn them into monuments.
While Arabic had not historically developed a theatrical tradition of its own, Enani said, and the gulf between the written language and everyday speech could sharpen the problem of where to pitch a translation, the dramatic language developed by Egyptian and other playwrights from the early decades of the 20th century onwards could suggest where the ball might fall, perhaps particularly if one went to the plays of Egyptian dramatist Tawfiq Al-Hakim for inspiration.
Over the course of a long career stretching from the 1920s to the 1970s, Al-Hakim wrote classical tragedies, sociological dramas, and plays inspired by the European Theatre of the Absurd. Enani said in his article that the development of a modern dramatic language had suggested an appropriate pitch for his translations. While there was a residual feeling that a king, a military commander, or a Roman potentate, all of whom figure in Shakespeare’s plays, should speak in the “oratorical tones of an ancient Arab,” this would hardly do for a comedy such as The Merry Wives of Windsor, which he decided to translate into Egyptian dialect.
Enani’s answer was to translate the plays into Modern Standard Arabic. “My contention was that if Shakespeare had been an Arab writing in the 21st century about the same characters and the same dramatic situations in Arabic for an Arab audience, he might have done what I have done,” he said.
However, deciding on a general approach could hardly solve more local problems, including Shakespeare’s sometimes dense metaphors – often mixed metaphors strictly speaking – the sense of which might be lost or only approximated in translation.
When Macbeth talks of “sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care” in the play of the same name, for example, he is at once picturing care as a “sleave” – not the kind of thing one might find attached to a pullover but a tangled mass of thread – and claiming that sleep can “knit it up,” unravelling or straightening it out rather than producing a kind of textile from it.
In his famous translation of Macbeth, one of the four great tragedies that he translated in the 1950s and 1960s, Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra translates this as something like “sleep that mends the torn fabric of care” – al-nawm alladhi yartiq qimashat al-hamm al-mumazzaqa – which captures the idea of the restorative quality of sleep but misses the original image. Since he was also producing a reading version of the play, Jabra added a footnote explaining the original wording.
Local problems of this sort are grist to the mill of any translator. More recently, the whole question has been complicated – or possibly simplified – by the development of large language models able to give real-time translations. Asked to comment on Jabra’s translation, ChatGPT described it as “poetically faithful but not literal,” noting that while “torn fabric” does not reproduce Shakespeare’s image of tangled thread, the Arabic has “a natural and almost proverbial quality.”
It suggested al-nawm alladhi yansuj khutut al-ham al-mutafakkikat as a possible substitute, meaning something like “sleep that weaves the unravelled threads of care.”
Hahn includes a final chapter in his book in which he fulminates against the use of large language models for translation, claiming that they can never replace an appropriately qualified human translator, at least in the case of Shakespeare. But whether or not they eventually become competent literary translators, they have already joined a conversation that has long occupied translators of Shakespeare – how to balance fidelity to the original with the demands of new languages and new audiences.
Daniel Hahn, If this be Magic, the Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation, New York: Knopf, 2026, pp406.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 16 July, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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