Hamlet Translations: Prisms of Cultural Encounters across the Globe

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This interdisciplinary collection discusses how Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been translated into different languages and cultures at various historical moments and for different purposes: performance, reading, artistic experimentation, language-learning, nation-building and personal identity-formation. There are many Hamlets, and rather than straightforward replicas of the original (indeed, which one?) they are texts that carry traces of their own time and place. The volume is international in scope, offering perspectives on Hamlet translations into Icelandic, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Welsh, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Greek, Spanish, Hungarian, Finnish and Slovak. It also examines recent Hamlet performances in diverse geographical and cultural contexts, such as Romania, Lithuania and China, a Shona-language production from the UK and a non-verbal performance from the US. The volume covers a lengthy time span, beginning with a reference to the medieval Nordic cultural context in which the play’s story originated, and ending with a twenty-first-century theatre company’s Hamlet with no words at all.

Marta Minier is Associate Professor of Theatre and Media Drama at the University of South Wales. Lily Kahn is Professor in Hebrew and Jewish Languages at UCL.