If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation Author: Daniel HahnISBN-13: 978-1805301622Publisher: Canongate Guideline Price: £25; 406pp“Now is the winter of our discontent/ Made glorious summer by this sun of York”.Hearing these lines, spoken by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in Shakespeare’s Richard III, creates an immediate riddle in the listener’s mind: was that sun or son? In the original English, the ambiguity is clear and deliberate. How then to replicate the effect in Romanian or Swahili? “Several translators I spoke to volunteered this as their first example of a place where loss is simply inevitable. I have not yet found any other language where son and sun are such a perfect match”, says Daniel Hahn in his charming and comprehensive examination of the many challenges the plays of William Shakespeare present to a translator.For those of us who regularly read literature in translation, it is instructive to be guided through the process, and confront the realisation that not a single word of the original remains in what we read. But, as one translator reassuringly told Hahn, “We engage in a peculiar alchemy of turning gold into gold”. However, a pertinent question remains: has the non-English speaker reading King Lear in their own language read Shakespeare?Shakespeare deployed all the possibilities of language, using puns, double meanings, and equivocation, as well as rhyme, rhythm and stresses (and even then he liked to trip up his stresses like a jazz drummer playing off-beats). Add the fact that Shakespeare’s language is now archaic, and you begin to realise the multitude of challenges that await the diligent translator. They must be the most attentive and closest of readers, ensuring they comprehend every aspect of the original text. Then, they must prioritise those aspects of the work that can’t be lost. Meaning may be the most prominent of these – “Recreating meaning is often the easy bit” – but meaning alone will not convey the rich complexity and inventiveness of Shakespeare’s writing.Hahn introduces us to a multitude of translators from around the world and meticulously guides us through their work to explain the “equivalence” (a word he admits having to deploy repeatedly) of their results to the original. For anyone interested in the process of translation, this is a valuable guide to the mutability of language and the individual perception we all bring to a text.Declan O’Driscoll is a freelance reviewer