Daniel Hahn

Award-winning translator, writer and editor Daniel Hahn looks at the way the magic of Shakespeare has been conveyed to a global audience through the medium of translation.

Hahn says Shakespeare’s writing provides many conundrums for translators trying to bring it to life for millions of readers and theatre-goers from Bogota to Borneo. How does Romeo and Juliet’s story unfold if you can’t form a sonnet or a rhyme? How can you form wordplay around the letter ‘I’ if its sound and meaning are not shared by other languages? Hahn says that to tackle these and millions of other issues, translators must cut and add beats, maintain rhymes, adapt names and locations and preserve meaning while not prioritising it.

Hahn has almost 90 books to his name and is a winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award. His great-grandfather produced one of Brazil’s early Shakespeare translations. He is author of The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland and The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. Among his many translations are Pelé’s biography and A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa, winner of the International Dublin Literary Award.