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The Linguist 53,5

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Vol/53 No/5 2014 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER The Linguist 25 FEATURES Festival highlights Spottiswoode shows his gratitude for the steady flow of support from SGC by holding a lecture at the Neuss theatre at the start of every festival season. It has become a cultural event. This year, he bounced on stage 15 minutes late because his watch was on London time and he thought he still had an hour to go. Speaking entirely in English to an almost exclusively German audience, he transported his listeners to Shakespeare's world, where theatres drew 'crowds' (not audiences) and were suspected of fomenting unrest; where plays were routinely censored and actors regarded as disreputable. At the end of a charismatic 90-minute performance, he waved goodbye to the audience, who saluted him with thunderous applause. Another recurring feature of the festival is Propeller – an all-male Shakespeare company with a unique take on the bard's work. "We want to rediscover Shakespeare simply by doing the plays as we believe they should be done, with great clarity, speed and full of as much imagination as possible," says Director Edward Hall in the festival programme. And they don't disappoint: their English-language production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is electrifying, with shimmering stage-lighting and haunting background music. The actors provide the music, whether singing Titania to sleep in the fairy wood or entertaining the audience during the interval, when they stroll through the theatre grounds, singing and playing instruments. The predominantly German audience is mesmerised and performances are sold out year after year. Translating Shakespeare The German love of Shakespeare originated with Christoph Martin Wieland, an 18th- century Enlightenment writer, who produced the first translations and whose name has adorned a prize for outstanding German literary translation since 1979. However, Wieland had only a rudimentary knowledge of English and wrote in prose. His eight- volume opus, published by 1766, was superseded by the Schlegel-Tieck translations, regarded as the standard German versions of Shakespeare's plays. Published between 1833 and 1844, these consist of translations by the writer Ludwig Tieck alongside revised versions of translations by the Romantic writer and philosopher August Wilhelm Schlegel. These days, attention is focused on Frank Günther, poised to become the only German translator of all 37 of Shakespeare's plays; so far, he has completed 34. Himself a winner of the Christoph Martin Wieland Prize, Günther studied German and English before working as a theatre director and embarking on his 40-year translation task. So how does he go about it? Instead of working his way from front to back, Günther dots in and out of the text, seeking a poetic rhythm that functions linguistically and dovetails with the original. He discusses a A Midsummer Night's Dream as an example: "The language here takes place on several different levels: the fairies and elves in the wood, the lovers and the tradesmen." When the fairies sing Titania to sleep, he preserved the rhyming couplets of the original in a compact, modern yet accessible style: Schuppenschlangen, schlängelt euch, Stachelschwein, laß dich nicht sehn Blindschleich, Molch und Lurch, entfleuch! Flieht die Königin der Feen. You spotted snakes with double tongue, Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen, Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong, Come not near our fairy queen. Wieland, in his early translation, chose a more literal adaptation, resulting in a flatter rhythm: Ihr zweygezüngten bunten Schlangen, Ihr dornenvollen Igel, hin! Ihr Nattern, die um Blumen hangen Nah't nicht unsrer Königin! Yet some things cannot be improved upon, admits Günther. For example, Hamlet's famous observation that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. "This can only be rendered as es ist was faul im Staate Dänemark, as Schlegel did. There is just no other way." Meanwhile, in Neuss, Wiertz is bracing himself for next year, when The Globe Theater celebrates its silver jubilee. "We will have a first-rate programme, as always, but we haven't quite made up our mind how best to commemorate 25 years of Shakespeare in Neuss." He pauses for a second. "Let's just say it will be a festival of friends." ELECTRIFYING SHOW Propeller's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Neuss Shakespeare Festival 2014 The predominantly German audience is mesmerised and shows are sold out © CHRISTOPH KREY

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