Translation Wars: Redefining Shakespeare in the Postcommunist Czech Republic

Abstract

In spring 2001, the front page of the culture section of a major national Czech newspaper, Lidové Noviny, featured an article in which a venerable Czech translator Břetislav Hodek charged his prominent colleague Martin Hilský with ‘betraying the Czech national culture’ by making Shakespeare too accessible.¹ A public exchange between the two quickly ensued, joined by journalists and literary scholars who compiled textual, intellectual and ideological arguments in defence of one or the other’s more ‘true’ Shakespeare. As surprising as the public nature of this exchange might seem, Hodek was not the first to publicly challenge Hilský’s popular translations, used by an overwhelming majority of proliferating postcommunist Prague Shakespeare productions. A year earlier, an eminent theatre journal, Svět a Divadlo (SAD), serially published an unfolding exchange between Hilský and a respected theatre critic and translator of contemporary literature, Jitka Sloupová. Sloupová had objected to Hilský’s translations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the grounds of excessive elitism, which reportedly presented Shakespeare as ‘a sphinx understandable only to the chosen few’ (Sloupová, 2001: 161). Though seemingly on the opposite ends of the spectrum of ‘elitism’ — one arguing that Hilský’s work is too accessible to the general populace, the other that it is not accessible enough — both Hodek and Sloupová presented a united front in suggesting that Hilský’s understanding of Shakespeare exhibited grievous flaws that needed to be exposed to public scrutiny in the interests of the intellectual and cultural health of the post-communist Czech nation.

One correct translation of Hamlet does not and will not ever exist, in the same way that there is not and will not be an only ‘correct’ interpretation of this great and mysterious play. Every new translation of Hamlet, similarly to its every new interpretation, is the seeking of something that can never be fully discovered. Still, this process itself has a meaning, and I would argue that this non-translatability and non-interpretability of Hamlet is the catalyst of the never-ending process of discovery of this ever-exciting text.

Martin Huský, 2000

It is not my intent to argue that new translations are the reason for all the absurd, and I think unfortunate productions, but they certainly open the door to them and enable them. If Shakespeare belongs in the history of our literature, theater, music and film as an extremely important and inspirational figure, any deformations in the transfer from English to Czech are the basis not only for grief… but because they create a misleading image of this genius loved and worshipped by generations, they are a forgery of Czech tradition and treason against our national culture.

Břetislav Hodek, 2001

In [Shakespeare’s] works, ‘a’ is ‘a’, and ‘b’ is ‘b’.

Jitka Sloupová, 2000