My reasons for translating Shakespeare

• Autor(a) principal: Heliodora, Barbara
• Data de Publicação: 1999
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Ilha do Desterro
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/article/view/8188

Being now in the finishing stages of my fifteenth translation of a play by William Shakespeare it is somewhat embarrassing that for the first time I should be asking myself in all seriousness why I do it at all. Loving the plays, of course, is not it, since I loved them for many years without translating them, and many people love them without ever getting the urge to translate them into another language. On the other hand, I must say that I never, at any moment, made the awesome decision to become by definition a translator of Shakespeare’s plays, and so it will have to be admitted that a whole set of circumstances must have contributed to what in fact took place—and, I am sure, also weighed considerably as to the type of translation that I have been trying to make all these years.