The International Library Presents Shakespeare in Translation with Daniel Hahn and James Shapiro
4:00 pm PDT | 7:00 pm EDT
How does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare when every word is changed?
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.
This is a hybrid event. Olga Ravn will appear in person at the The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, NY (7:00 pm ET). A live remote viewing will be held at Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco (4:00 pm PT). You can also livestream this event worldwide. Registration(opens in a new tab) is required to attend in person in Brooklyn and for online access to the livestream. To attend the live remote viewing at Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, please RSVP to events@catranslation.org.
About The International Library
This event is part of The International Library, a collaboration between The Center for Fiction and the Center for the Art of Translation. Join us for a series of conversations across time, place, language, and culture, with live audiences in San Francisco and Brooklyn—and more locations to come. This series will guide readers to think critically about how stories are told and explore the inspiration, philosophy, and craft of international storytellers.
Daniel Hahn is a translator, writer, and editor. His translations include a wide range of fiction and nonfiction from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as well as many children’s books and plays. He is the author of Catching Fire: A Translation Diary, the editor of The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, and co-editor with Padma Viswanathan of the forthcoming Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories. He is currently translating an Angolan novel.