Translate Shakespeare Quotes

Ay, truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness.

For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end.

Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)

Si vous traduisez Shakespeare, il faut traduire aussi librement que Shakespeare écrivait.

When I am playing with my cat, who knows whether she have more sport in dallying with me than I have in gaming with her?

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

God speed fair Helena! whither away? HELENA Call you me fair? that fair again unsay. Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair! Your eyes are lode-stars; and your tongue's sweet air More tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear, When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear. Sickness is catching: O, were favour so, Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go; My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye, My tongue should catch your tongue's sweet melody. Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated, The rest I'd give to be to you translated. O, teach me how you look, and with what art You sway the motion of Demetrius' heart. HERMIA I frown upon him, yet he loves me still. HELENA O that your frowns would teach my smiles such skill! HERMIA I give him curses, yet he gives me love. HELENA O that my prayers could such affection move! HERMIA The more I hate, the more he follows me. HELENA The more I love, the more he hateth me. HERMIA His folly, Helena, is no fault of mine. HELENA None, but your beauty: would that fault were mine!

That father may truly be said miserable that holdeth the affection of his children tied unto him by no other means than by the need they have of his help or want of his assistance,

have seen no other effects in rods but to make children’s minds more remiss or more maliciously headstrong.

If it lay in my power to make myself feared, I had rather make myself beloved.

Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated, The rest I'd give to be to you translated. O, teach me how you look, and with what art You sway the motion of Demetrius' heart.

Nothing doth sooner breed a distaste or satiety than plenty.

To die of age is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death,

He even obsessively contemplates the fact that he obsessively contemplates.

Happy is your grace, That can translate the stubbornness of fortune Into so quiet and so sweet a style

How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same.

Words should not be used merely because they are 'old' or obsolete. The words chosen, however remote they may be from colloquial speech or ephemeral suggestions, must be words that remain in literary use, especially in the use of verse, among educated people. (To such Beowulf was addressed, into whatever hands it may since have fallen.) They must need no gloss. The fact that a word was still used by Chaucer, or by Shakespeare, or even later, gives it no claim, if it has in our time perished from literary use.

Oh, I absolutely hate it when I hear some overexcited actor in a wig shout his “passionate” lines, splitting the audience’s eardrums in an effort to impress the unsophisticated watchers standing just in front of the stage who for the most part can only appreciate loud noises and pantomime shows.

The pre-Socratic aphorism—ethos is the daemon—can be translated as “character is fate.” In drama, character is action. Shakespeare, too capacious for any formula, leads me to a rival aphorism: Pathos also is the daemon, which could be rendered as “personality is our destiny.” In Shakespearean theatricalism, personality is suffering. Action, Wordsworth wrote, is momentary, while suffering is permanent, obscure, dark, and shares the nature of infinity.

I don’t think anyone, my publishers, my agent, or myself, expected the book to do anything like as well as it did. It was in the London Sunday Times best-seller list for 237 weeks, longer than any other book (apparently, the Bible and Shakespeare aren’t counted). It has been translated into something like forty languages and has sold about one copy for every 750 men, women, and children in the world. As Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft (a former post-doc of mine) remarked: I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex.

There’s matter in these sighs, these profound heaves. You must translate. 'Tis fit we understand them.

The fact is, we need prisons that are more like schools, and schools that are less like prisons. But for this to happen, the teachers also need freedom.

book by the Spanish friar Luis de Granada, Of Prayer and Meditation. Printed in Paris in 1582, the book opened with a letter by the translator, Richard Harris, lamenting the rise of Schism, Heresy, Infidelity, and Atheism in England. These evils were dark signs that the world was nearing its end, Harris argued, and that Satan was frantically struggling to make a last demonic triumph.

Michael had to clutch the end of the table to keep from rising. He could have had Shakespeare at his side to translate, and still not have been able to explain why Colin‟s remark infuriated him so.

I don’t think anyone, my publishers, my agent, or myself, expected the book to do anything like as well as it did. It was in the London Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks, longer than any other book (apparently, the Bible and Shakespeare aren’t counted). It has been translated into something like forty languages and has sold about one copy for every 750 men, women, and children in the world. As Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft (a former post- doc of mine) remarked: I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex.

But no verse, not Stanhope's, not Shakespeare's, not Dante's could rival the original, and this was the original, and the verse was but the best translation of a certain manner of its life. The glory of poetry could not outshine the clear glory of the certain fact, and not any poetry could hold as many meanings as the fact.

OPHELIA: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty? HAMLET: Ay, truly. For the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.

In high school, we barely brushed against Ogden Nash, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, or any of the other so-unserious writers who delight everyone they touch. This was, after all, a very expensive and important school. Instead, I was force-fed a few of Shakespeare's Greatest Hits, although the English needed translation, the broad comedy and wrenching drama were lost, and none of the magnificently dirty jokes were ever explained. (Incidentally, Romeo and Juliet, fully appreciated, might be banned in some U.S. states.) This was the Concordance again, and little more. So we'd read all the lines aloud, resign ourselves to a ponderous struggle, and soon give up the plot completely.

Tacite se moquait des Germains qui tentaient d'arrêter un torrent avec leur boucliers ; ce n'est pourtant pas plus naïf que de croire à l'émigration planétaire, ou de croire à l'installation, avec des moyens purement humains, d'une société humaine définitivement satisfaite et parfaitement inoffensive, et continuant indéfiniment à progresser. Tout cela prouve que l'homme, s'il est forcément devenu moins naïf pour certaines choses, n'a pourtant rien appris quant à l'essentiel, pour dire le moins ; la seule chose dont l'homme livré à lui-même soit capable, c'est de "faire les péchés les plus anciens de la manière la plus nouvelle", comme dirait Shakespeare. Et le monde étant ce qu'il est, ce n'est sans doute pas commettre un truisme que d'ajouter qu'il vaut mieux aller naïvement au Ciel que d'aller intelligemment en enfer.

You're up early," I said. "I always rise early. The morning is the best time for me to work." I glanced at the books. "What are you going, Greek?" Henry set the cup back into its saucer. "A translation of Paradise Lost." "Into what language?" "Latin," he said solemly. "Hmm," I said. "Why?" "I am interested to see what I will wind up with. Milton to my way of thinking is our greatest English poet, greater than Shakespeare, but I think in some ways it was unfortunate that he chose to write in English — of course, he wrote a not inconsiderable amount of poetry in Latin, but that was early, in his student days; what I'm referring to is the later work. In Paradise Lost he pushes English to its very limits but I think no language without noun cases could possible support the structural order he attempts to impose. He laid his cigarette back into the ashtray.

Finally: the authors Estelle refers to at various points in this story. In order of appearance, they are: Astrid Lindgren (page 248), J. M. Barrie (page 248), Charles Dickens (page 258), Joyce Carol Oates (page 258), Kahlil Gibran (page 259), William Shakespeare (page 281), Leo Tolstoy (page 304), and Bodil Malmsten (pages 305 and 313). If any of them has been misquoted, the fault is mine alone, or possibly my translator’s, but certainly not Estelle’s.

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism. The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them. In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void. Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.

Sir Francis Bacon, believed by some to be the real author of the Shakespeare material as well as the person who masterminded and oversaw production of the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. Bacon was in charge of forty-five scholars who translated and collated the KJV, making him the forty-sixth. For a coded clue as to Bacon’s contributions, see Psalms 46—count forty-six letters from the beginning to get the word “shake” and forty-six words from the end to get the word “spear.” The number forty-six was Bacon’s cypher.

The suspicion has arisen that the portrait’s deformities were, as the anonymous tailor suggested, intentional—that it is a joke portrait depicting a fool as the author. Two left arms signal left-handed writing, which in ancient tradition is associated with deception. “Writing with the left hand is to make some secret circumvention, to cunny-catch, deceive, or defame,” wrote Artemidorus in the second century AD. (His work was translated into English in 1606, and widely read and quoted.) Are the two left arms meant to suggest that the figure is a deceiver—a fake?

was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

eyes are lode-stars; and your tongue’s sweet air More tuneable than lark to shepherd’s ear, When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear. Sickness is catching: O, were favour so, Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go; My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye, My tongue should catch your tongue’s sweet melody. Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated, The rest I’d give to be to you translated. O, teach me how you look, and with what art You sway the motion of Demetrius’ heart. Hermia I frown upon him, yet he loves me still. Helena O that your frowns would teach my smiles such skill! Hermia I give him curses, yet he gives me love. Helena O that my prayers could such affection move! Hermia

Dryden was a highly prolific literary figure, a professional writer who was at the centre of all the greatest debates of his time: the end of the Commonwealth, the return of the monarch, the political and religious upheavals of the 1680s, and the specifically literary questions of neoclassicism opposed to more modern trends. He was Poet Laureate from 1668, but lost this position in 1688 on the overthrow of James II. Dryden had become Catholic in 1685, and his allegorical poem The Hind and the Panther (1687) discusses the complex issues of religion and politics in an attempt to reconcile bitterly opposed factions. This contains a well-known line which anticipates Wordsworth more than a century later: 'By education most have been misled … / And thus the child imposes on the man'. The poem shows an awareness of change as one grows older, and the impossibility of holding one view for a lifetime: My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires, My manhood, long misled by wandering fires, Followed false lights… After 1688, Dryden returned to the theatre, which had given him many of his early successes in tragedy, tragi-comedy, and comedy, as well as with adaptations of Shakespeare. ...... Dryden was an innovator, leading the move from heroic couplets to blank verse in drama, and at the centre of the intellectual debates of the Augustan age. He experimented with verse forms throughout his writing life until Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), which brings together critical, translated, and original works, in a fitting conclusion to a varied career.

1595, Richard Field, fellow-alumnus of the King Edward grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon, printed The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by that grave learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chaeronea: translated out of Greeke into French by James Amiot, abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, one of the Kings privie counsell, and great Amner of France, and out of French into English, by Thomas North. This was the book that got Shakespeare thinking seriously about politics: monarchy versus republicanism versus empire; the choices we make and their tragic consequences; the conflict between public duty and private desire. He absorbed classical thought, but was not enslaved to it. Shakespeare was a thinker who always made it new, adapted his source materials, and put his own spin on them. In the case of Plutarch, he feminized the very masculine Roman world. Brutus and Caesar are seen through the prism of their wives, Portia and Calpurnia; Coriolanus through his mother, Volumnia; Mark Antony through his lover, Cleopatra. Roman women were traditionally silent, confined to the domestic sphere. Cleopatra is the very antithesis of such a woman, while Volumnia is given the full force of that supreme Ciceronian skill, a persuasive rhetorical voice.40 Timon of Athens is alone and unhappy precisely because his obsession with money has cut him off from the love of, and for, women (the only females in Timon’s strange play are two prostitutes). Paradoxically, the very masculinity of Plutarch’s version of ancient history stimulated Shakespeare into demonstrating that women are more than the equal of men. Where most thinkers among his contemporaries took the traditional view of female inferiority, he again and again wrote comedies in which the girls are smarter than the boys—Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Rosalind in As You Like It, Portia in The Merchant of Venice—and tragedies in which women exercise forceful authority for good or ill (Tamora, Cleopatra, Volumnia, and Cymbeline’s Queen in his imagined antiquity, but also Queen Margaret in his rendition of the Wars of the Roses).41

You're up early," I said. "I always rise early. The morning is the best time for me to work." I glanced at the books. "What are you going, Greek?" Henry set the cup back into its saucer. "A translation of Paradise Lost." "Into what language?" "Latin," he said solemnly. "Hmm," I said. "Why?" "I am interested to see what I will wind up with. Milton to my way of thinking is our greatest English poet, greater than Shakespeare, but I think in some ways it was unfortunate that he chose to write in English — of course, he wrote a not inconsiderable amount of poetry in Latin, but that was early, in his student days; what I'm referring to is the later work. In Paradise Lost he pushes English to its very limits but I think no language without noun cases could possible support the structural order he attempts to impose. He laid his cigarette back into the ashtray.

But it is said that certain memorable lines or phrases cannot be expressed in any other language. Yet it should also be said that while at times we must lose, at others we gain, and the good translator will take advantage of the text, improving upon the weaker lines of the original, while doing his best with the best. More important, it is forgotten that translation provides an opportunity for languages to interact upon each other, for one tongue to alter and enrich the possibilities of expression in another. In the past some translated works have changed both literary language and tradition: notably the Petrarchan sonnet, Luther's Bible, Judith Gautier's haiku. Milton went as naturally to the King James Version for vocabulary as Shakespeare turned to Holinshed for plots; when Rimbaud's Illuminationswere translated into English, the tradition of our literature was expanded to the extent that diction and subject never before found in English were presented to us. In a word, the quality of a work in translation is dependent on the translator's skills. His forgery is not necessarily better or worse than the original or than other works in his own language; it is only necessarily different—and here the difference, if new and striking, may extend the verbal and thematic borders of his own literature. And as a corollary to his work the new poem may also be seen as an essay into literary criticism, a reading, a creative explication de texte.