Friday 2 July 2010

'Delighted Beauty' project


I am just back from a thoroughly enjoyable conference on 'The Author-Translator in the European Literary Tradition' in Swansea (lovely beaches btw). More on that anon. Tonight's post is about a really pleasing project launched by a colleague at Swansea, collecting translations into any language of a couplet from Shakespeare's Othello. The couplet is 'If virtue no delighted beauty lack/Your son-in-law is far more fair than black' from Act 1, scene 3. There's a lot packed into this one little couplet, and one could see how it might pose all sorts of problems to a translator. Dr Tom Cheesman is looking for published/performed translations into any language. More about the project here and some intriguing suggestions of what one could do with the material here. This project seems like lots of fun and well worth supporting. If you have a copy of Othello on your shelves in any language other than English, why not support the project by looking up the couplet and sending it in? Translations directly to Dr Cheesman please.

No comments: