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November 22nd, 2008

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Ambassador to the Bard

Martin Hilský rounds off his Shakespeare mission

By Victor Velek
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
December 12th, 2007 issue

Photo copyright Agentura Schok

In "The Best of Shakespeare," program translator Martin Hilský (seated, left) joins actors Martin Hofmann and Zuzana Kajnarová to discuss a love scene written by the Bard. enlarge

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

The Hilský File

Born April 8, 1943, in Prague
Graduated Charles University, Prague
Foremost translator of Shakespeare's works into Czech — he has translated all of the sonnets and 36 out of 38 plays
Professor of English language and literature at Charles University
Honorary member of the Order of the British Empire
Favorite Shakespeare play: King Lear

In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a newborn baby from a far-away country is abandoned on Bohemia’s sea coast.

Fortunately, providence sends a caring shepherd to save the baby girl, and she goes on to lead a reconciliation between the king of Bohemia, Polixenes, and his former friend Leontes, the overlord of Sicily, 16 years later.

Shakespeare’s story of jealousy and time’s healing powers set in faerie Bohemia closes with a happy ending.

Some 400 years after the play’s birth, another Shakespearean happy ending is on the horizon in real-life Bohemia.

A stone’s throw from Prague Castle, the ancient seat of the real-life Polixenes, English studies professor and translator Martin Hilský, 64, recently met with The Prague Post to talk about his mission — to translate all 38 plays of Shakespeare by the end of 2008.

So far, Hilský has translated 36 Shakespeare dramas, including one never rendered into Czech before, The Two Noble Kinsmen. But he still has two to go before he’s done. He is currently immersed in No. 37, and plans to crown his mission by translating King John.

Although Czech translations of Shakespeare dramas date as far back as the 18th century and there are numerous modern local renditions of the Bard’s most famous plays, Shakespeare’s entire works have never been translated into Czech by a single person.

Now, Hilský is in the final stretch.

“I was already 40 when I translated my first Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he says, remembering how it all began in the early 1980s.

But Hilský wasn’t always enamored with the idea. He hesitated when he was first approached by theater director Karel Kříž with the first assignment.

“I didn’t want to translate something which had been translated, not once or twice but several times before,” Hilský says. “I wanted to discover new territories, texts undiscovered for the Czech reader before. First, I said no.”

In the end, however, he started to work on the play and discovered — to his own surprise — that his translation differed from previous ones in interpretation of characters, situations and in the overall atmosphere.

As the first project led to further projects, Hilský found himself fully absorbed in the colorful world of the Elizabethan bard.

“Gradually, it captivated me,” Hilský says. “Over the last 15 years or so, I have been deeply dedicated to Shakespeare translations. It has turned into a huge commitment.”

Characters speak

Today, when Shakespeare’s characters start speaking Czech onstage, they usually do so through the words of Hilský, or through his younger rival Jiří Josek, a translator of 17 Shakespeare’s plays. The number of productions of Shakespeare dramas in Hilský’s repertoire has climbed to more than 100.

Although Hilský has no monopoly on Shakespeare translations, his position among other modern translators is unique, according to Kateřina Kolářová, a theater critic with the daily Mladá fronta Dnes.

“Hilský’s translations are chosen by directors of various poetics and generations; they are, in a way, universal,” she says.

For many Czechs, Hilský is the ambassador to Shakespeare, Kolářová adds.

Every period needs its own interpretation of Shakespeare, and Hilský’s interpretation of the Bard’s writings perhaps fits our era best, Kolářová suggests.

“[Hilský’s translations] use clear and modern language while not stripping Shakespeare of his distinct poetics.”

Pavel Drábek, a Shakespeare scholar from Masaryk University, Brno, goes one step further about Hilský’s talents.

“He has created the aura of a celebrity around himself,” Drábek says. “Many people, who have never read Shakespeare or even seen one, recognize him and associate his name with Shakespeare.”

Every culture has its own high-profile Shakespeare translator, Drábek says.

Germans had Schlegel and Tieck, Russians had Pasternak and Czechs have Hilský.

Poetic license

Born into the cultured family of an architect and an expert on Japanese literature and drama, Hilský was a bookish child. There were many English books in the family’s library, and from early childhood he indulged himself with the classics of English-language literature: Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll and James Fenimore Cooper.

But he also read French and Russian classics and, thanks to his mother’s job, Japanese and Chinese poetry.

“Japanese and Chinese poetry struck me with their amazing condensation of meaning and poetic epitomes,” Hilský says, adding that this experience was very helpful when he was translating Shakespeare’s sonnets.

A passionate reader, literature was the obvious choice when the young Hilský was deciding on what to study at university. He chose English and Spanish. In the mid-1960s, an era of political liberalization of Czechoslovakia’s communist regime, he graduated and started an academic career at Charles University.

Shortly after Soviet tanks invaded in 1968, Hilský left for Oxford to spend a year there as a junior research fellow. There, his perspective changed completely, as he met students from all over the world.

“For me, as well as for other people in communist Czechoslovakia, pluralism meant petty deviations within one official world view,” Hilský says. “At Oxford, I had breakfast chats with a supporter of the fascist regime in Portugal and at the same moment with an Italian communist.”

Hilský eventually opted to return home. He wanted to be a professor of English in his native country and write for the Czech audience, rather than one of thousands of professors of English in the United States or Britain.

Three weeks after he returned to Czechoslovakia in late 1969, however, the new pro-Soviet government closed the borders for the next two decades. Merit gave way to communist party membership and intellectual thinking stagnated.

During the dark times, Hilský found a peaceful haven in translations. He taught at the university and worked for Odeon publishing house.

But while he was able to escape into his work, things were changing for the worse, around him. The English studies department at Charles University ceased to exist as an independent body and was incorporated under the department of Germanic studies. The university became a target of the secret police and curricula subject to political pressures.

Heightened control over people’s political beliefs turned even apolitical Shakespeare works into a pool of suspicious anti-communist ideas.

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, for example, there are ladies mocking Russians, Hilský says. When the play was staged shortly after the invasion, the Russian characters were replaced by Persians to avoid any undesirable reactions from the audience and to keep the Soviet escutcheon clean, he says with a smile.

For Hilský, this shows that Shakespeare plays — as well as other works of art — aren’t fossils of a long-perished era but living, open stories taking on new meanings.

Spellbound by Shakespeare

There’s no doubt Shakespeare is a pre-eminent global cultural icon. His works are staged across the globe, with more Shakespeare now viewed in other languages than his native English, Hilský says.

The Shakespeare repute may be partly explained by the British Empire’s long political dominance on the global scene and the current status of English as the global lingua franca, but it could have never reached such heights without the inner qualities of the Bard’s writings, Hilský says.

“I don’t know of any other author achieving such language mastery,” he says.

There is no English play either before or after Shakespeare that could be compared with his best tragedies — Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Othello, according to Hilský.

Shakespeare’s stories don’t even need a stage, since the emotions, actions and characters reside in the words themselves. The theater is in the language, Hilský says.

The language is enormously diverse, full of metaphors and puns, and it is a language stretching from rough bawdy jokes to subtle poetic beauty.

“The language span is amazing,” Hilský says.

Translating Shakespeare is a great challenge that requires lots of additional reading, since there’s a 400-year gap between the language of his day and that of the modern reader, Hilský suggests. Not only has the meaning of many Elizabethan idioms been lost, but allusions to the reality of the time are often unintelligible today.

Thus, paradoxically, Shakespeare is more comprehensible in translations than in the original. Hardly any English speaker realizes that, when Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost mentions a broken shin, he is actually talking about a failed love endeavor, Hilský says.

“The translator has the unique privilege to put obscure meanings back to text,” he continues. “This charges translation with a wide creative freedom.”

While there is only one Shakespeare for the English-speaking audience, Czechs, Germans and other nations have multiple Bards.

After all, Hilský says with a smile, the English think they boast the original, authentic Shakespeare, but the truth is that all the admired plays are reconstructions. Only a handful of Shakespeare’s actual writings exist.

“Paradoxically enough, the cornerstone of the Western culture is characteristic of the lack of authenticity,” notes the man who makes Shakespeare speak Czech.

Victor Velek can be reached at vvelek@praguepost.com

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