Copying Mona Lisa with a paint roller – stylistic aspects of Shakespeare
translations in North Frisian
by Henk Wolf
Translating any of Shakespeare’s writings into Frisian is like an attempt to copy the
Mona Lisa with a paint roller. The artist trying to recreate the masterpiece may be a
person of great skills, yet the materials he has bound himself to work with do not
allow for the reproduction of the richness in detail.
Unlike the major European languages, Frisian has not undergone standardisation.
Frisian varieties are spoken in three different regions stretching from the present
Dano-German border down to the Ysselmeer in the Netherlands. The West Frisian
dialects in the Netherlands alone have seen some standardisation and do possess a
certain literary tradition. Not so East and North Frisian. There are no hard data as to
the number of speakers of North Frisian, but estimates tend to vary between 8,000
and 10,000 (see Walker 2001; 263). North Frisian comprises between two and fifteen
different dialects, depending on the way dialects are distinguished, and not all of
them are mutually intelligible. There have been no successful attempts towards the
development of a standard North Frisian language and literary production has been
too limited and single-sided for literary style conventions to be established. The very
small body of literary works is dominated by lyric poetry from the last two centuries
and a number of plays. No novels have been written in North Frisian, only a small
number of short stories and hardly any epic poetry.
The Frisian varieties share many properties with other European languages that
unlike state languages have not been exposed to the process of elaboration. Such
languages have no long-standing literary conventions and their written traditions
were interrupted with the formation of the national states. Many generations thus
grew up without a sense of style in the written registers of their mother tongues.
Occitan, Welsh, Low Saxon and Breton are some of the languages sharing those
features. For speakers of these languages, several registers that educated
Europeans are used to are defective or lacking altogether. West Frisian may serve to
illustrate this defectiveness. As Breuker (2001) describes, the vast majority of West
Frisian speakers use Frisian in an informal spoken context only. This is reflected in
their personal linguistic norms. The norms applied by the minority of people writing in
Frisian are alien to them. And this writing minority of Frisians itself is not usually
familiar with all the linguistic registers common to scholars. Very few Frisians are
therefore able to write texts in a poetic, archaic, formal or romantic register – but to
name a few.
The North Frisian author faces these problems and more. Whereas his West Frisian
colleague at least has two hundred years of playwriting and fiction writing that he can
study in order to develop some sense of style, the North Frisian author is entirely on
his own. Modern North Frisian only has informal, oral registers. Authors trying to use
North Frisian outside the daily domains will literally fall short of words. There are a
number of strategies one can apply in such cases. Speakers may try to use only
words from their oral vocabulary. They can also consult a dictionary to find a longforgotten word that might be of use. Or they can borrow a word or expression from
Low Saxon or German. But neither of these strategies will enable them to produce an
idiom that will appear normal, neutral and unmarked in the registers they are trying to
use. For the translator that means he will have major difficulties reproducing the style
and atmosphere he encounters in a literary text from a languge with an established
literary tradition.
Translating Shakespeare means making choices. Douwe Kalma in his West Frisian
translations chose to interpret Shakespeare’s language as elevated, pompous and
archaic. Those are registers that have not been used much in Frisian literature and
therefore it will come as no surprise that Kalma’s translations have frequently been
characterized as unnatural and even incomprehensible (see Dijkstra 1962; 97-99).
Still, Kalma had predecessors and dictionaries to help him recreate the style he
intended in Frisian. In contrast, translators who interpret Shakespearian English as
elevated, pompous and archaic, and who want to render that register in North
Frisian, would set themselves an impossible task. There is no such North Frisian.
I know of only one North Frisian translation of a play by William Shakespeare,
Hamlet, by Ingwer Nommensen (1985). Nommensen has also translated part of “As
you like it” (Sü as et jam gefålt). This title already is a clear illustration of the typical
problem any Frisian translator faces. The verb like has no neutral counterpart in
Frisian. The translator needs to choose between the half-forgotten word hååget and
gefålt, a nonce-borrowing from German that Frisian speakers use when nothing
better comes to mind. Both would invite criticism, because they do not sound neutral
in a literary register: hååget is a dictionary word, unknown to most speakers, gefålt is
recognised as “too informal” and “bad Frisian”. Nommensen’s choice for a register
closer to spoken language is a wise one, because this is the richest register in North
Frisian, but, as it turns out, it gets him into many difficulties. In the line All the world’s
a stage North Frisian has no neutral equivalent of the word stage. Birgit Kellner’s
(1991) dictionary suggests the German loan büüne and an uncommon composite
spaalteele, but Nommensen has opted for taaling, a word actually referring to a
wooden threshing-floor, the traditional setting for country feasts and performances in
pre-industrial North Frisia. It is for the reader or the audience to interpret it as such
and for late 20th century North Frisians everything but büüne is a lot less clear than
English stage is to an English speaker. This says very little about Nommensen’s
translation, which is as vivid as a North Frisian soliloquy could be, but it illustrates
how no North Frisian interpretation of Shakespeare will ever feel natural to the
audience, no matter what register the translator selects.
For this volume, Antje Arfsten and Ingo Laabs have for the first time ever translated
four of Shakespeare’s sonnets into North Frisian. Arfsten uses Fering, the dialect
from the island of Föhr. Laabs uses a mainland dialect called Mooring. These two
dialects have the largest numbers of speakers.
In Laabs’s translations we notice some remarkable stylistic effect. As sonnets have to
obey strict formal rules, the poet is obliged to use some trickery as far words and
syntax are concerned. A good example is found in sonnet 18:
Duch, lök, dan eewie samer schal ai swine,
schal ai ferlätje de, din bloosmen krül,
e düüs schal puche ai, hi köö de wine,
dan dåtheer dacht wåårt ap din liiflik bil.
The line e düüs schal puche ai (“Death shall not brag”) is syntactically incorrect, but
necessary to retain the metre. The negation ai cannot normally appear at the end of
a sentence, but through German North Frisians are acquainted with poets
manipulating word order in unnatural ways when poems are subject to strict forms.
Therefore, such stylistic contortions in Frisian do not stick out as much as they would
in free verse or prose. And Laabs is very skilful. He uses the same syntactic trick
twice in the same stanza (also in schal ai ferlätje de), thus making it look like an
intentionally used stylistic peculiarity rather than a last resort to uphold the formal
rules of the sonnet.
Arfsten’s interpretation is less literary than Laabs’s. She is far less loyal to the iambic
metre, uses fewer of the tricks Laabs uses and makes an effort to stay close to the
most natural oral registers of North Frisian. She does so quite well, but in the few
cases where the sonnet forces her to use unnatural language, the contrast to the rest
of the sonnet makes her lines stick out as unnatural, more so than in Laabs’s more
literary rendering. An example can be found in the following lines of sonnet 130:
Min nöös hee leewer mä stiremweeder tu dun
üüs mä a öösem, wat ütj hör mös entswant.
These lines read “My nose would rather have to do with perfume than with the breath
that escapes her mouth”, in which especially the choice of the predicate hee ... tu dun
sounds a little clumsy and definitely less poetic than Shakespeare’s in some
perfumes is there more delight. Any translator of sonnets will at some time have to
resort to such less than elegant phrasings. They easily catch the reader’s eye in
Arfsten’s spoken style, but unlike Laabs’s sonnets, Arfsten’s translations actually
stand a chance of being read by a lover to his darling – and be immediately
understood.
I began this introduction by comparing Frisian as a literary language to a paint roller
as a device for painting a portrait. Being myself a writer and translator of literary
works into West Frisian, I am speaking from experience. It is not easy to come up
with an attractive, natural literary text in any of the Frisian varieties. Arfsten and
Laabs have taken up the particularly demanding challenge of recreating some of
Shakespeare’s sonnets in North Frisian. Considering the restrictions imposed on
them by the language they chose to work in, the results of their efforts are
impressive.
References
Breuker, Pieter (2001), ‘West Frisian in language contact’. In: Munske (2001), p. 121128.
Dijkstra, Klaas (1962), Oersettingen yn it Frysk (ca. 1800-1960). PhD Universiteit van
Amsterdam. Drachten: Laverman.
Kellner, Birgit (1991), Deutsch-friesische Wörterliste. Kiel: Nordfriesische
Wörterbuchstelle.
Munske, Horst Haider (2001, ed.), Handbuch des Friesischen/Handbook of Frisian
Studies. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Nommensen, Ingwer (1985), ‘En fiirngstün Hamlet’. Nordfriesland Jahrgang 74, Nr.
19.
Walker, Alastair (2001), ‘Extent and position of North Frisian’. In: Munske (2001), p.
263-284.
(in: Pfister, M. & J. Gutsch (2009), William Shakespeare's Sonnets for the First Time
Globally Reprinted. Dozwil: SIGNAThUR. p. 243-246.)