Join us for a conversation with translator, writer, and editor Daniel Hahn on his new book, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation.
Through playful and illuminating exploration, Hahn reveals how the world’s most famous playwright is continually reinvented across languages, cultures, and centuries. How does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare—even when every word is changed? Hahn invites us into the strange, exacting, and often joyful work of translation that makes the Bard readable from Bogotá to Borneo.
With wit and clarity, Hahn unpacks the countless decisions—linguistic, musical, cultural, and philosophical—that shape each new version of Shakespeare. Drawing on conversations with translators, writers, and actors around the world (as well as his own decades of experience), he also reveals how translation is both an act of fidelity and creative transformation. At once nerdy, funny, and deeply human, If This Be Magic offers fresh insight into Shakespeare’s global life and into what language itself can, and cannot, do. Renowned Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro will join Hahn in conversation.