Wondered when someone would rewrite Shakespeare...wait, reinterpret or is that translate?

[shadowkat]

Sometimes I think the internet is all about socializing for lazy souls like myself who are too tired from the work day to lug our asses across town and meetup with people in a bar. ie. Socialization for the socially lazy.

Reading flist's outraged comments about Orson Scott Card's absurd decision to write novelizations of Shakespearean plays, has made me feel, oddly, validated for never having been able to make it past the first fifty pages of Ender's Game or anything else this guy has written.

In case you missed it, Card has apparently done novelizations or English Language translations of Romeo and Juliet, the Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet, so far. (I guess they weren't in English to begin with? No wait, they weren't in modern American English and dated, so he has to UPDATE them.) I don't know about you, but I personally can't wait for him to try his hand at Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, and Midsummer Night's Dream.

*Note to the people reading this who are still in school and are looking for a way to get out of reading Shakespeare's plays: These are not meant to be substitutions for reading the play, or even Cliff Notes versions for that matter. In short, if you read Card's version instead and try to pass that test on Hamlet in your English Lit Class or on the Standardized Tests? You'll most likely flunk your test and your teacher will either laugh at you or rip you a new one. Go rent either Zefreilli's or Kenneth Brannagh's Hamlet's instead, you'll thank me later. (Or...you could read for extra credit Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but I'm warning you it makes no sense until you've actually read Shakespeare's Hamlet - irritating 16th Century language intact. You'll miss all the good jokes. Actually, I think there's version starring David Tennant lurking out there somewhere - of Hamlet not Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. For Taming? Easy, there's a movie version with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. (For extra credit? Rent Who's Afraid of Virigina Woolf. Or the Moonlighting episode with Cybil Shepard and Bruce Willis, it's hardly accurate, but a lot closer than well, Card's version, not to mention more entertaining.)

Hmmm, I'm guessing Card ran out of original ideas, and decided, you know what? I'll read the Shakespearean plays and reinterpret them (badly) for a right-wing somewhat intellectually deficient audience, because I can and well, the classics should be made more digestible for a modern day and somewhat conservative palate. We need our superstitionsbeliefs and opinions facts reaffirmed after all. Not questioned. Because that would be bad. Actually according to the interview Card's been directing and reinterpreting the plays for years for theater, and decided to make money of it:

I’ve been directing plays for many years, but beginning with my production of Romeo and Juliet last year, I have begun the serious work of adapting the English-language versions of Shakespeare’s plays for a modern audience. When you see Shakespeare in French, it is generally translated into language that the audience can understand ; in English, however, the language is not translated, so modern audiences have to struggle with understanding the language of 1600.

Hmmm, I could be wrong about this, but last time I checked the French don't translate Moliere for modern audiences, just English into French. Or more appropriately, Marguerite de Navarre and the Farce writers of the Renaissance. It's just Americans who feel this funky need to get translations for well, their own native language. Particularly old Medieval and Renaissance English because it is sooo hard to understand. Honestly, next you'll be translating Chaucer.

[And thus we learn once again, in case we forgot or didn't know already, the real reason most authors do not want their properties to fall into the public domain until at least 70 years after their death. They figure by that time, no one who knew them alive will be able read the insane translations, interpretations and rip-offs of their work.]

Comments

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Don't forget sexist. ;-)

Before you feel too much pity, go read the Good Reads link - it's under "Hamelt" above, I think. That has a disturbing number of people who really like the book and/or mark it as something they want to read.

I think and I may be wrong, but it feels like he subscribes to a Heiminwayesque view of men and women, the view of "machoism" and the romantic ideal of the "macho" man or male role, which simply is not true. I see this in a lot of male sci-writers.

[ponygirl2000.livejournal.com]

Oh, my pity is purely for the hypothetical person that seems so freaked out by his own nature that he's become warped and hateful. For the actual current version of himself Card is presenting, I hope he's shunned by publishers and fans alike. Like a lot of people I'd read Ender's Game as a kid and had fond memories of it but never followed his work, to have him pop up a few years back as a virulently homophobic fundamentalist Mormon with a blog was a bit of a surprise.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I think Ender's Game is one of those books that works better if you are kid and blissfully unaware of the subtext.
(Like CS Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia
and the Anne McCaffrey novels - which I loved and had fond memories of.)

Although there are writers out there, *cough*TSEliot*cough*, Flannery O'Connor, and Virgina Woolf
who ...wrote great works, but were racist or anti-semitic. (shrugs).
So the beliefs of the writer don't always taint their works.

Also...it's possible for writers to change. They can be start out one way and be quite different later. No personality is set in stone, after all.

So, when I picked up Ender's Game three or four years ago - it's more than possible that I read more into it than was there, because what I knew of the writer tainted the read. Sort of like trying to watch a Mel Gibson film, I suspect.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

virulently homophobic fundamentalist Mormon

What is it with the Mormons and homophobia? Granted I've scanned their bible and my knowledge of their religion is somewhat sketchy...but I don't remember the Mormons being THIS intolerant?