LITERATURE PODCAST:
WRITERS IN CONVERSATION
Georgina Godwin in conversation with Sir Andrew Motion and
Alfredo Modenessi
This is a transcript of a podcast recorded and produced by Georgina
Godwin on behalf of British Council Literature in November 2015.
Sir Andrew Motion and Alfredo Michel Modenessi are part of a
delegation of UK writers and academics attending the Guadalajara
International Book Fair in Mexico in November and December 2015,
curated by the British Council as part of the UK Mexico Year of Cultural
Exchange.
Georgina: In 2016, it will be 400 years since the death of William
Shakespeare, and yet, in many ways, the man they call the Bard of
Stratford-upon-Avon has never been so internationally relevant.
Although he's Britain's foremost cultural export, he's a global icon,
inspiring performers, readers, and lovers of language everywhere.
Joining me to examine his legacy and influence, the Mexican
Shakespearean expert, Alfredo Michel Modenessi, who is professor of
Comparative Studies in English Literature Drama and Translation at the
National Autonomous University of Mexico. He's translated and adapted
over 40 plays, many of them by Shakespeare, including Henry IV Part 1
for the Globe Theatre, which was widely acclaimed as the best Spanish
language translation ever written. Alfredo's currently spending a
sabbatical year at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon,
preparing a book on the presence of Shakespeare in the Mexican
cinema.
And on the line from Baltimore, where he's the Homewood Professor of
the Arts at Johns Hopkin University, is the former British poet laureate,
Sir Andrew Motion. Andrew, in a way, you're Shakespeare's heir,
acknowledged as one of Britain's greatest living poets. So how does
your literary ancestor inform your own work?
Andrew: God, I wish what you just said was true. That would be a
fantastically hubristic thing to agree with. Let's leave that to one side.
While not being a Shakespeare expert of any description, Shakespeare
has probably been the most fundamental influence on me of all the
writers that I've read, of any writer that I've read, which is partly to say
that I read him very early in my writing life. I came to literature and such
things pretty late, in my mid- to late-ish teens.
And really through the English school system, we were required to do a
Shakespeare play at what we used to be called "O level," that's now
called GCSE levels. And we did that the year that I was involved in that,
which was 1966, Julius Caesar. It was very badly taught, and the magic
of that play didn't really exert itself on me.
Later on, when I began to do my English A levels, in those days, a time
blessedly uninterrupted by AS Levels, so we could look at texts longer
and in more detail than, perhaps, it's easy to do now. We studied Hamlet
and Troilus and Cressida, and in their very different ways, I found them
going into me like spears, with an absorbing power that entered my
heart. It's probably true to say that I'm more or less memorised the plays
at that age, and I feel that they're still in me.
So as I say, these are very formative experiences, very fundamental
experiences, very basic elements of literature laid down in me, on which,
in varying ways, I feel that I've built everything on that since.
Georgina: And for you, coming to Shakespeare, what language did you
come to him first in?
Alfredo: Oh, that's a very good question because, of course, it was
Spanish, my native language, and it was under rather interesting
circumstances because I was a teenager. And I thought I had English,
but no, I didn't have the English at the time.
And I didn't really have access to the texts, except for a couple of them,
where I was. Because I was living in my mother's country at a time when
I read most of his works, maybe 29, 30 plays, while I was waiting, really,
for my cousins to come back from school and then start doing
something.
But the circumstances were very special to me because my mother's
country is El Salvador, the tiny, tiny Central American country. I am
Mexican, of course, but she was born there, and so I visited frequently.
And as you probably know, that land, it has been in turmoil forever, and
it was the case at the time.
I'm talking about the 1970s, that many things happening in my part of
the world, everywhere in Latin America, particularly military dictatorships
were applying all kinds of terrible power on the population. And it
coincided very much with the coup d'etat in Chile when Allende was
killed.
And it became very significant practice then, after that, to read these
plays every morning. They started meaning quite differently than what I
expected first. First, I was just trying to find out what the big deal was,
and I was not concerned whether I was reading the original or not. This
was the Shakespeare I was encountering.
Nowadays, of course, those are translations that I very much criticise
and I have contributed to replace here and there, both in Mexico and in
Spain. But at the time, they were my source to connect with this
fantastic dramatist. But something that people sometimes, nowadays in
particular, I find are shy to acknowledge a proper word, but it was very
appropriate to me at the time. I found him relevant to the things that
were happening to me, to us.
And then, again, the place where I was, was not a very good place for
that because the house where I was living, my aunt was married to the
head of a major branch of the El Salvadorian army. So I was in the
middle of my own tendencies for liberal and even leftist ideas, and coexisting every day with ultra-right wing people. That was my frame when
I came across Shakespeare. And ever since, of course, I've always seen
Shakespeare as relevant and certainly as politically relevant to kinds the
realities that I know first-hand.
Georgina: Andrew, of course, growing up here in Britain, your political
situation was entirely different from Alfredo. But Shakespeare was still
relevant to you, those themes, those big themes, love and war, are just
as telling here and now, aren't they?
Andrew: Oh, sure. And I share the slight anxiety about using the word
relevant and making it sound as though the notion of relevance is a
governing thing in literature. Literature, certainly it's relevant, but it's also
free of relevances and approached in different ways as well.
But yes, it's absolutely true that we find all kinds of parallels between the
circumstances that Shakespeare describes and lives that we recognise
as being part of our own existence and lives which recur through history.
It seems to me that one way of thinking about this, which frees us out
from being really to do with relevance – or rather the conscripting,
controlling idea of relevance – is to remember Keats' remark about
Shakespeare leading a life of allegory and his works doing comments on
it.
That's always seemed to me very suggestive because what it alerts us
to thinking about is the way in which Shakespeare writes about
archetypes and allows us to think about archetypal situations by the
brilliantly, crystalline, dramatized, actualised presentation of particular
scenes. And so actually just to think about war, which you touched on,
and to think about Henry IV Part I which you were mentioning.
I've got in front of me that wonderful opening speech by the king from
the first part of Henry IV, where he talks about:
Those opposèd eyes,
Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven,
All of one nature, of one substance bred,
Did lately meet in the intestine shock
And furious close of civil butchery
It’s the most fantastic description of what civil war is like – when the
world is full of civil wars of one kind or another, as we're speaking –
because it so wonderfully makes vivid to us the eternality of civil war,
"the intestine shock."
Georgina: Alfredo, you were talking about coming to Shakespeare, first,
in bad translation, and of course, he's writing Jacobean English. So as a
translator, when you put his words into Spanish, are you writing in that
old style? Or are you using contemporary language?
Alfredo: First of all, I would try not to use the word "bad," with regard to
translation, ever. There are translations that work better than other
translations. There are some that are made with greater responsibility or
not and so on. Translation has a pretty bad reputation, anyway, as it is.
Those translations were, perhaps, not appropriate in many senses. For
example, they really cannot be acted very well. They cannot be
performed because, to simplify, a passage that may be 20 beats in
Shakespeare is sometimes translated into 14-plus syllables in those
translations in Spanish. So you have to take care of that.
Georgina: Do you keep it in iambic pentameter?
Alfredo: Well, that depends, again. For example, my work for a Spanish
publisher, that has recently issued the entire body of Shakespeare's
theatre in Spain, followed a very rigorous method established by the
general editor and main translator of the collection, whereby we had to
do the plays line by line. And whenever we came across fixed forms,
such as a sonnet, for example, we had to produce a sonnet in Spanish.
And not only a sonnet in Spanish, say, vaguely or anything of the sort,
but a very vague proper sort in Spanish.
Which means to say, using hendecasyllable, or measures, are
somewhat different from the way you scan verse in English, but very
basically using the same meter that the poets of early modern England
found and then Shakespeare occupied for his blank verse and for his
sonnets and so on to produce perfectly rhymed sonnets as translations
of what we found. Now, Spanish being language that is naturally more
expansive, so to speak, than English, you find that pretty difficult.
Now with regard to the other part of your question, I think one of the
problems when dealing with translation is thinking that there has to be
something terribly definitive about it. And it doesn't need to, because you
see, the advantage with translating is that you can always translate
again.
The original work is always different from the translation. And that
sameness is not really what one is aiming at, but rather making that
wonderful piece of literature that one finds work in your own language
for the purposes of, say, this particular production or that, or this
particular publication with these criteria or that criteria.
I have translated twice Love's Labour's Lost, which is a devil for play,
really, to translate. I've done it twice, and if you put them side by side,
you will recognise that they come from the same translator. Because
one is done in one way, and the other's done in a total different manner.
So what happens is you're always using language that is live. In that
sense, I wouldn't necessarily distinguish between language that is
contemporary or not because it's always contemporary. I find that
translators who seek to imitate all the usage or archaic forms of
language are never really in command of what they're doing, anyway.
When Andrew was quoting that fabulous speech, I had the pleasure of
translating it precisely for the production at The Globe, which by the
way, is not really near whatever you said. I think it's a good translation.
I'm not going to say anything different about what I did.
But what I remember is that part where, indeed, Shakespeare reminds
us that there must, never again, be blood shedding between brothers,
and so on and so forth. And that taps in so perfectly with what I was
saying before. And at the same time, I agree 100% with what he was
saying because it transcends the specifics of political situations, the
immediate circumstances under which we are working and reaches way
in to how it affects you, also personally in interpersonal relationships.
One of the things that was very important to me, when I came across
Shakespeare as a teenager was that I was, in a way, living some of the
things that were there vicariously, in the sense that I was in total conflict
with my own kin, my family. And so it was not only the politics of the
country or the war that was going on and continues to go on there. But it
simply finding myself in a situation, where I could respond to these
things and find light about it in some of the strangest places, even in
comedies, at times.
Georgina: So Andrew, I wonder if it almost transcends language, if
these themes run so deeply that, perhaps, we don't even need to know,
if we don't understand the language, what it means.
Andrew: Well, that's a very interesting question, and I think it's true that
poetry, in general, whoever it's written by, if it's any good, does depend
a great deal for what we reckon to be its meaning, simply on the sound
that it makes, rather than purely on the dictionary definition, as to words
when we see them written down on a page.
I've always been devoutly of the opinion that poetry – dramatic poetry,
lyric poetry, narrative poetry – is, in some absolutely essential way, an
acoustic form. It's a breath form. And Shakespeare does manage to
reveal that in the most astonishing way.
It's pretty much the case that everybody going to see a Shakespeare
play, to hear a Shakespeare play, is going to come across passages
that are knotty passages, but they're full of words that are no longer in
current use. Passages where the grammar is convoluted, either
because it's a complicated though or because something has gone
wrong in their translation of the original text, whatever the reason.
But despite those difficulties, there's not going to be anybody sitting in
the theatre who thinks, "I don't get that." The appeal, in other words, is
extraordinarily visceral. And one of the reasons for that, I think, has to
do with what you just very interestingly been talking about, which is to
do with formal matters, in other words, to do with the ways in which this
business of sound that I've been talking about just there is organised.
Yes, the default setting of the plays is by iambic pentameter. But as
we've been reminded, Shakespeare doesn't exactly play fast and loose
with that idea. But he modulates that sound – that short-long, short-long,
short-long, etc. – in all kinds of subtle ways.
In fact, just go back to this page that I've got in front of me here from
Henry IV Part I. At the top of the page, I see:
“Nor more shall trenching war channel her fields,
Nor bruise her flow’rets with the armed hoofs…”
Well, that channel reverses that iambic foot in the middle of that first line
that I read there.
In other words, there's all kinds of variations being played on the default
setting of the line, so that it hovers, as our English speech
characteristically does, around the idea of that sound. Which, for
complicated reasons, it should, perhaps, not quite what we're talking
about today, we find very easy to understand. We find them in the
English max very natural, but at the same time very exciting and varied.
Georgina: Alfredo, I wonder how you deal with the differences between
how conceptions of time are expressed in different languages, in terms
of tenses. Are those directly translatable?
Alfredo: Well, they can be a problem, even within your own language.
For example, that's why we're saying when you work for both, say, as in
my case, my native country, Mexico, and Spain, where the language
that I naturally speak originates, you still find enormous differences.
Spaniards use Spanish tenses in a way that we don't and vice versa.
And then Argentinians, as well, they sometimes simply do not use
certain tenses, certain forms.
And so that modifies your understanding of time, space, and so on. And
then, of course, you have to confront what English with its own tenses
and interpret a lot. Then, again, all translation is, to a certain extent,
interpretation, and you have to be the first performer before the
performers proper. You perform for the performers, for the director, and
for the other members of a creative crew in a play. You perform the play
for them.
I'd rather think of a translator as a creative performer/writer than
someone who's trying to copy or reproduce something. Rather it's
someone who needs to channel what the text gives to that new form, to
that other language, so that it can reach the ones who have to perform
it. There are so many difficulties. But I think that both the difficulty and
the pleasure in doing Shakespeare is capturing the meaning. I think that
can only come if you provide in your language that quality of sound in
rhythm that Shakespeare can give you.
For example the method we followed in the new collection in Spain,
published by Espasa, is so right in following first the rhythms, the beats,
the sounds, and getting close to that so that the rest follows. And,
indeed, I think that helps a lot. The music, so to speak, speaks for itself.
Georgina: Andrew, I want to change slightly. We talked at the beginning
about Shakespeare being Britain's biggest cultural export. Is he still a
useful, soft power tool for this country?
Andrew: Yeah. That's not language that I would normally use, and
that's not an idea that I normally have to engage me very much. But I
think that it's probably true that our sense of ourselves as a country...It's
slightly odd to be saying this, since I've just stopped living in England.
But our sense of ourselves as a country does depend very much on our
poetic inheritance. At least, I hope it does.
And of course, the founding father, the father of us all is Shakespeare.
So we think of ourselves as the country of Shakespeare, in the same
way that we think of ourselves as living in a country which has a
beautiful landscape. Of course, the irony is that England, as a whole,
these days anyway, is rather suspicious of its poets, and they might
have some justification for feeling slightly marginalised by the stream of
culture, in terms of sales and the attention paid to them and so on.
But that doesn't stop the Brits apparently feeling that at least there are
some good poets knocking around and the best of them is him.
Georgina: Alfredo, many countries, of course, feel as much right to
Shakespeare as Britain does. He belongs to the world now, really.
Alfredo: Well, yeah. I don't know if there's a proper right to that or
something. But there's been an appropriation. That, for sure, has been
going on for such a long time in Spain, practically since the end of the
18th century. At least the first Spanish translation recorded, which really
comes from a French adaptation, one of Ducis' adaptations in the 18th
century, is dated some time in the 1780s.
But in Latin America, translations and productions of Shakespeare
appears early as the 1810s, 1818, for example, in Argentina, I think, or
certainly by 1821 is playing both in the northern and the southern parts
of our sub-continent. And ever since, there has been no stopping
Shakespearean productions and translations, as well, and all kinds of
things.
Because we're talking about all sorts of manifestations, not only in
literature in the form of plays deriving from Shakespeare – there's been
a volume just published in Mexico that contains nine plays, but only nine
of an enormous amount of them by dramatists from Mexico, Colombia,
Venezuela, Argentina – but also, poetry that derives from it.
And then, again, even things in the visual arts or film has happened
recently, also, with an Argentinian director called Matheus Piñero, who
has a whole series of films already on-going and planned on the basis of
the Comedies, or Mexican films. Mexico, the country has done the most
films made, based on Shakespeare.
So yes, it's a worldwide explosion, and you can find it on my continent,
as everywhere else. Asia, for example. It's just amazing. I would
recommend, if anybody's interested to find out more about this, to try a
website, set by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the MIT,
which is called GlobalShakespeares.org. It collects tapes from
productions from all over the world: Brazilian, Chinese, Japanese,
Indian, Mexican, and so on and so forth, also from Europe, so that you
can the great variety and the enormous amount of creativity that this
wonderful playwright is capable of inspiring.
Georgina: Andrew, you launched the Poetry Archive a few years ago,
and now, in celebration of Shakespeare, there's to be a new collection of
sonnets.
Andrew: Yes, that's right. Of course, this has really emanated from you,
the British Council, and not from us, where you're a servant in this
respect. But following on to what we were all saying a minute ago about
poetry and sound, the archive exists to bring together recordings by
poets of their own works or poets reading their own works.
The earliest in the very late 1880s, Tennyson and Browning. And we
have them there, so there's a historic dimension to the site. And it
comes up to poems being written right now. And you're just surrounded
by editorial material of one kind or another, which we hope will not get in
the way of the poems or the readings, but on the contrary help to
liberate them and make them accessible, in an intelligent way, to
anybody who listens.
And very interestingly, the audience of this website is now significantly
large. We have something like 250,000 people using it every month, and
every month they listen to something like 2 million pages of poetry,
which rather bears out what we were all saying. I think about the visceral
appeal that these things can make at the acoustic level.
Just quickly, in collaboration with the British Council and with
Bloomsbury, the publishers working to make available recordings of
some of the sonnets that have been written in response to
Shakespeare's sonnets, as part of the celebrations that you've been
organising.
Georgina: And finally, just back to you, Alfredo. We were talking there
about obviously the global appeal, and it appears, now, that it's crossgenerational too. And in Spanish writing, are we still seeing his
influence?
Alfredo: Oh, yes, very much so, perhaps more than ever. Now, there
has been, to me, a radical change from the ways that we understood
approaching Shakespeare and doing Shakespeare, say, back in 19th
century. And certainly between the first half of the 20th century to later
decades in the 20th century and now in the 21st.
And all of that, I think, is connected to changes in politics to the
development of our continent, but also to a greater impulse from new
generations, with regard to our connection to the English-speaking
world, which used to be very different. Nowadays, it's far more common
to find that people relate to English in easier ways and simply more
closely and so on. And so there's a different dynamic, so to speak, and I
hope it's changing and will continue to change.
Because there was a point, and I think this was worldwide, where
Shakespeare had just grown too distant, too big, put too much on a
pedestal, where, of course, you can put him and no doubt he deserves
to be. But at the same time, this created some sort of gap that needs to
be bridged, in the sense that, of course, it's not just for contemplating.
It's something you can contemplate, but you have to really relate to and
connect to. And so translations have grown.
I just want to mention, for example, in the case of the sonnets, there was
a very interesting publication some years ago, maybe 10 years ago,
coming from Germany, where there was a full, wonderful collection of
sonnets in a myriad of languages. I personally had the pleasure of
contributing readings of some of these sonnets in Spanish, but you
could find them in Spanish and German and French and all European
languages and certain Asian languages.
So there, you can also find that there's been a change, in that there's far
more experimentation and will to relate. Once again, some may not work
as well as others and so forth, but the impulse is there. And then, again,
as I was saying, too, you can always translate and translate and
translate. And that keeps...as many theorists of translation have said it,
it's one major energy that keeps literature alive, even outside its origin.
Georgina: Absolutely. No, he is not a Shakespeare, not a dead relic,
but something that's been reinvented and absolutely kept current and
alive. Gentlemen, both, thank you very much in deed.
Alfredo: Thank you.
Andrew: My pleasure.