PC Translations

I’ve recently been watching the Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows, and have really enjoyed it.  It is something I would highly recommend to anyone who enjoys a good comedy, Shakespeare, or good TV.  I’ve written more about it at another of the blogs I keep here at blog.com, poetically challenged, and also at my main blog.  If you would like to hear more about what I think might be the best television series I’ve ever seen, you might like to read one of those.

When I visited the little local library near my parents’ place when I was home recently, I came across a DVD I’d been wanting to watch for some time, the Merchant Ivory film Shakespeare Wallah. It was every bit as good as I had hoped it would be.

I’ve been writing some more extensive thoughts about the film at my new blog. Rather than reposting it all here, I will link you to those articles:

Star-Crossed Lovers
With the Bible in One Hand, and Shakespeare in the Other
Mute Testimonials
When Art is Overtaken By Popular Culture

The themes of postcolonialism and the interaction between traditional art and popular culture are nicely represented in the interplay between Shakespeare and Bollywood in the film.  It was a very enjoyable movie, and I think it will stay in my mind for a very long time.

Tonight in my Shakespeare class, I was showing clips of The Banquet to my students, discussing it in conjuction with other versions of Hamlet. I referred to it at one point as a “translation” rather than an interpretation of the play. A student raised the question of what is the difference.

Finally, we let the language decide it for us. A translation, we decided, has to do with a change in form or across forms. An interpretation, we thought, might have more to do with a change within a form.

I’m not sure that we are necessarily right on that, and I will do more study on it when I’ve got the time. But I found it a good question, and a very enjoyable discussion on points that are obviously rather important to me.

I was writing at my other blog about enjoying Shakespeare’s Richard II more this year than in previous years when I have taught the play.

As I mentioned there, probably a good part of the reason I enjoyed the play this year was thinking back to when I watched the production of the play that has Fiona Shaw in the lead role. In most other productions of the show, such as the BBC version with Derek Jacobi playing Richard, the differences between Bolingbroke and Richard are emphasized. Richard is played fair haired and a little girly, and Bolingbroke is played as a manly, dark-haired and dark-skinned sort. With Shaw cast in the king’s role, the trick becomes not making the masculine-feminine constrast stand out so much. So Richard and Bolingbroke are both made a bit androgynous in this production, and there is a remarkable resemblance between the two. It raises a layer of the text that seems otherwise somewhat invisible.

I’ve watched 3 versions of Richard II on film, including this one, the BBC version with Jacobi, and Matt Osian’s rather odd modernized version. Shaw, for me, makes the play really fun to watch on film. The others are much less my thing.