Reviews

to ruins, a shockingly specific outrage to match the gutter insult of

bedlam bitch and make the insult an expression of horrified pity.
A spare choral warning about the perils of high estate placet in
vulnus maxima cervix (the loftiest neck pleases the axe, 100)
becomes pungently physical: Whose neck is larded best his throat shall
first be cut (1.Cho.52). The rudeness of the metaphor isnt just the
speakers sarcasm, it is also the sarcastic rudeness of fate itself (As flies
to wanton boys . . . ). At moments such as these, Studleys encounter
with Seneca seems to lead him to bitter wells from which others will
draw memorably in the decades to come.
Gordon Braden
University of Virginia
DOI: 10.3366/tal.2013.0119

William Shakespeares Sonnets: For the First Time Globally Reprinted. A

Quartercentenary Anthology 16092009. Edited by Manfred Pfister and
Jrgen Gutsch. Pp. 752. Dozwil TG, Switzerland: Edition Signathur,
2009 (New Edition with DVD, 2010). Hb. e63.

While this compilation of translations and essays documents nothing

less than the reception of Shakespeares Sonnets on six continents,
its editors regret that contributions from several countries were
unforthcoming, leaving them unable to plot the sonnets progress in
Vietnamese or Kazakh. But even the most fastidious reader, who, with
an eye to alphabetical or cartographical symmetry, feels alarmed by
the absence of articles on the Bards reception in Wolof or Xhosa,
is unlikely to judge that the vast scope of this multimedial project
falls short of its editors intentions to build a global monument, to
recall and celebrate the power of these sonnets to move their readers
across the centuries and continents. According to the editors some
200 informants contributed to this labour of love, and yet the further
the reader delves into the multifarious resources assembled here,
exploring varieties of transmutation, reconstruction, or adaptation (for
stage, film, music, artwork, or text) which only a generous concept
of translation can accommodate, the more apparent it becomes
that a more complete list of contributors, including translators,
scholars, artists, film editors, composers, actors, chansonniers, and
book designers, might number closer to 1,000.
While the volume itself, as one might expect with seventy-
three essays by different hands, shows considerable heterogeneity in
approach and, especially in the editors introduction, some stylistic

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unevenness, most of the material is nonetheless structured according

to common principles. For each country, region, or language an
essay in English, usually by a distinguished Shakespeare scholar or
translator, recounts the history of Shakespeares reception, and in
particular that of the Sonnets. Bibliographical details of a handful
of seminal critical contributions to Shakespeare reception and
translation are then followed by a selection, complete with sources, of
between one and fifteen sonnet translations. These come in accents
as unknown to many of us as Amharic, Cimbrian, West Frisian,
Malayalam, Maori, Plautdietsch, Romani, or Sorbian but also in
more predictable languages such as Spanish, Russian, German, French,
Italian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, or Norwegian. Each
selection represents the history of Shakespeares sonnets in a specific
language, often illustrating different approaches to translation over the
centuries. The volume closes with short biographies of the contributors
whose services the editors called upon.
The stupendous weight of detail gathered in the book, as well as
the difficulties the reader is likely to encounter when following ideas
and comparing individual sonnets across the range of essays and
languages, would have made an index and running titles particularly
welcome. The index might usefully have been cross-referenced with
the contents of the accompanying DVD, whose value to this projects
interrogation of the global reception of Shakespeares sonnets cannot
be overestimated. As well as containing the present book itself in
PDF format, and John Dover Wilsons modern English edition of
the sonnets (1966), the DVD provides facsimiles of Thomas Thorpes
entire 1609 text, a complete word concordance according to the Wilson
edition, recordings of the Sonnets delivered in original and modern
English by David Crystal and Chris Hughes respectively, recitations
of the translations in some 72 tongues from Afrikaans to Yiddish,
and facsimiles of book covers in various languages, including title
pages of the major English editions. It further treats us to a gallery
of artists illustrations and visual sonnets, musical adaptations by
classical and non-classical composers, including more than 100 settings
in English and renderings of Sonnet 66 by Hanns Eisler (1939), Dmitri
Shostakovich (1942), and Wolf Biermann (1989), a dozen recordings of
stage adaptations, more than fifty clips of sonnets found within films
by directors as various as Derek Jarman, Peter Weir, Nicolas Ray, David
Lynch, Ben Elton, and Tengis Abudladze, and finally a selection of
internet adaptations and a directory of links to online Shakespeare
resources. There are references to this material in the volume itself, but
the DVD can rewardingly be explored as a publication in its own right.

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 Reviews

Most readers will be glad to have the supplied digital facsimile

of the 1609 Quarto, which, as most modern editions of the sonnets
point out, is the sole true source of Shake-speares Sonnets, the basis
of Malones hugely influential 1780 edition, and the wellspring,
directly or indirectly, of many of the mysteries surrounding the Sonnets
authorization, sequence, dedication, and addressees mysteries with
which many of the contributors to the present volume engage. It is
instructive, for example, to compare the 1609 facsimile with editions
prepared by distinguished English-language Shakespeare scholars
since the early nineteenth century, and to find that even the best
include silent emendations and modernizations (as Thorpes Quarto
may give us to understand) which can affect the progress of the
sonnets as Weltliteratur. The comparative influence of English editions
on Shakespeare reception in different languages is beyond the scope
even of this mighty volume, but research in this direction might show
that textual cruxes are amplified as the text exfoliates in translation. In
the light of the global Sonnets project, then, perhaps it is not going too
far to picture the brackets omitted in Sonnet 27 by Katherine Duncan-
Joness Arden edition as flaps of a butterflys wings that could touch
readings in places as distant from Stratford-on-Avon as Ulaanbaatar
and Albena.
Attempting to map the extent and boundaries of a work of such
encyclopedic aspiration, the reviewer can hardly avoid the game of
facts and figures proposed by its various catalogues, directories, lists,
cycles, sequences, and galleries. All the same, it is surprisingly difficult
to ascertain just how many languages feature in the anthologies and
recordings presented here, and perhaps it is not the most important
of questions. The final figure may depend, for example, on what the
reader thinks a language is. We know, along with Max Weinreich,
that a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot, so the four
different chapters on Spanish (Iberian, Rioplatenese, Cuban, and,
especially, other Latin American) might be said to represent a fair
number of Hispanic dialects with armies and fleets. Somewhere in
their introduction the editors suggest the number of languages is 73,
which, although they do not mention it, chimes with the number
(often given as 72) which many ancient sources, including Isidore of
Seville, St Augustine, and Clement of Alexandria, calculated for the
number of tongues scattered by the confusion of Babel. Be that as it
may, what we do know is that none of us is likely to be able to read
all of the approximately 500 translations collected in this book. Not
that such a feat must necessarily be counted beyond human grasp.
Polyglots such as the Bolognese Cardinal Guiseppe Caspar Mezzofanti

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(17741849), reputed to have spoken sometimes 39, or sometimes 72

languages, or the German Sinologist Emil Krebs (18671930), who
spoke 68 languages, might tackle the entire text of this Quartercentenary
Anthology, including the sonnets in Basque, Scots Gaelic, and Japanese,
and proving their mettle by using the poems themselves as a primer
for Esperanto or even Klingon whose champions evidently claim
Wilyam Shexpir as one of their own. Conversely, it is rare that a
reviewer can admit with hope of impunity to finding himself incapable
of accessing a significant portion of the book in hand.
The majority of essays document the gradual development of
Shakespeare reception in different countries a process generally
beginning earlier for the plays than the Sonnets naming the first
translators, editions, and, in many cases, the preferred individual
sonnets during the early years, and describing the contexts in which
they appeared. In some cases (Cimbrian, North Frisian, Maltese), first
translations of the sonnets into a language have been commissioned
for this very volume. In others, the history and extent of translation
activity is far-reaching and complex. We learn, for example, that Karl
Lachmanns 1820 edition was the first of more than sixty German
translations of the entire sonnet sequence, or that an edition of
Shakespeares works published in China in 1978 sold more than
a million copies almost overnight (planned economies can work
differently). We are also told of translation achievements that must
necessarily go unmatched in the English-speaking world, as when a
single person (e.g. the distinguished Korean scholar Kim Jae-nam)
single-handedly translated the entire Shakespeare corpus.
Typically, first translations of the sonnets (for example into French,
German, or Polish) coincided with the Romantic interrogation of
the self and burgeoning interest in personality, psychology, and
biography in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Europe. The exploration
of the spaces and idioms of human intimacy, and the fashioning
of a voice whose modernity and authenticity extend the linguistic
and metaphysical boundaries of individual sensibility, thus coincided
throughout Europe with the reception and development of the novel
from Samuel Richardson to George Sand. At the same time, the
early European reception of Shakespeare often took place against a
background of political oppression and national struggle. Writing an
interiority that speaks with the voice and authority of genius thus
supported the construction of new political identities, and translation
was further explored as a means to demonstrating the range and
temperament of threatened national or regional vernaculars. The
almost universal popularity of Sonnet 66 in translation (Tird with

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all these, for restful death I cry not necessarily a desert-island

favourite in the English-speaking world) can be explained against this
political background. According to the volumes editors the sonnet
was singled out again and again as a kind of samizdat text which,
protected by Shakespeares cultural prestige, permitted critics and
artists to ventilate . . . their dismay and disgust in the face of various
oppressive regimes.
Furthermore, bodying forth the idiom of the inward self in love,
translators have almost inevitably taken sides in the debates on sexual
politics that have continued to inform Sonnets commentary (and
gossip) in the twentieth century and beyond. More or less inventive
linguistic interventions have recognized or suppressed the gender of
the sonnets fair male addressee, and have thereby reflected degrees
of homophobia or liberality in a culture or state. In a fascinating
response to what she calls the hermaphroditic nature of the cycle,
Jlia Paraizs essay on Hungarian translations reveals how the language
itself permits an androgynous transformation of the sonnets (of
which, according to Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, there are only
twenty whose pronouns and forms of address suggest a male, and
seven which suggest a female addressee). In Finno-Ugric languages,
she tells us, pronouns are often elided. The Hungarian third person
pronoun does not distinguish between he and she, so that, without
necessarily sacrificing accuracy, a translator can unsex the poems,
allowing them to refer to a universal condition regardless of gender
or to create sexual ambiguities that can be clarified by contextualized
interpretation. Again and again in this book we encounter examples of
the way not only poetic traditions and cultural norms but also structural
idiosyncrasies of the target idiom itself can affect the account of loss
and gain in translation.
This balance is especially difficult to quantify when a translation
falls into the category of what Roman Jakobson termed intersemiotic
translation or transmutation. Jacobson famously wrote of three ways
of translating a verbal sign: it may be translated into other signs of
the same language, into another language, or into another, nonverbal
system of symbols. Examples of all three kinds of translation may
be studied in the present volume, and Renate Fischers essay on
Shakespeares Sonnet 130 in Two Sign Languages concentrates, as
the title suggests, on the third. The chapter describes two translations
of Sonnet 130 into American and German sign language respectively,
both added as films on the accompanying DVD. The vivacity,
complexity and magic of sign languages is played out in sophisticated
sign discourse in the signing space in front of the signers upper

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body, using complex imagery which cannot be rendered adequately by

words alone, in which meaning is designed specifically to be visually
perceived. The chapter leaves us in no doubt that the translations
are able lovingly and in detail to incorporate the originals mode of
signification, not as reproduction but as its own kind of intentio (Walter
Benjamin). Benjamin could not have foreseen how the paradigmatic
shift to signing as a constitutive principle would bring real body
parts as signifiers to his concept of incorporation. This volta may
suggest how useful Shakespeares Sonnets Global ought to be, not only
to anybody who wishes to explore the continuing life of the Sonnets
worldwide, but to translation theorists and teachers who wish to test
the application and efficacy of an exploding lexicon of terms generated
by recent studies in world literature, such as distant reading, world
literary space, phenomenology of scale, cartographical commitment
or translation gain.
Iain Galbraith
Wiesbaden
DOI: 10.3366/tal.2013.0120

West-East Divan. The Poems, with Notes and Essays: Goethes Intercultural
Dialogues. Divan translated, with Introduction and Commentary Poems,
by Martin Bidney. Notes and Essays translated by Martin Bidney and
Peter Anton von Arnim. Pp. liii + 474. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 2011. Pb. $30.95.

In the third paragraph of his introduction, Martin Bidney makes two

blunt assertions, both entirely unsupported by example or argument.
The first, while it has Drydens authority behind it, comes over as self-
aggrandizing here: One has to be a poet to translate poetry. The
second assertion is that John Whaleys translation of Goethes Divan
lacks ease and humor, and the rhythm is often hobbled by metric
errors. One of the most immediately striking differences between
Bidneys versions and Whaleys is that Whaley nearly always (not in
every instance, but with remarkable consistency) reproduces Goethes
feminine rhymes a notoriously difficult achievement in English, as
opposed to a highly inflected language like German whereas Bidney
rarely even attempts to do so. Thus in the opening poem of the Divan,
Hegire, Whaley replicates Goethes feminine endings in every line,
while Bidney manages this in only four out of forty-two. The same
goes for Four Gifts of Grace (Vier Gnaden) all Bidneys lines
are catalectic, whereas Whaley reproduces exactly Goethes alternating

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