Shakespeare Shortchanged In Japan

[Mulboyne]

[floatr][/floatr]The Age: The Bard's brief encounter in Japan
...The Bard confounds translators everywhere...Professor Edward Seidensticker, an American sometimes described as the best translator of Japanese who has ever lived, reflects on the impossibility of the task in The East, a Tokyo magazine. For example, the line at the end of Hamlet: Good night, sweet Prince, and flights of angels see thee to thy rest. "It is an utterly simple line and I think it is a very, very beautiful line," Professor Seidensticker says. "It contains 15 syllables in English. I have looked at all the main translations into Japanese and they all contain at least three times that number of syllables." Alas, Japan has probably never seen a complete rendering of a Shakespeare play because of the time problem. And this is what the director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Tokyo, Norio Deguchi, says is the world's second biggest market for Shakespeare after Britain...more...