feeling listless

Words As someone who is often misquoted I can well understand how Arthur Conan Doyle might feel if he was alive. At no point in any of his writings did Sherlock Holmes say, "Elementary, my dear Watson," and yet it's trotted out as a key phrase from the series. Attache magazine describes the secret of this mis-information and debunks a few others:

"So the next time a friend tries to impress you by quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet 'Alas! Poor Yorick! I knew him well!' remind him that the line is actually 'Alas! Poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.' And if your child tells you she learned about Paul Revere shouting, 'The British are coming!' you might point out to her teacher that the colonists were still British and that Revere’s warning was more likely 'The regulars are coming!'

Does this actually matter? Yes. While some of the quotes mentioned are pretty trivial, what happens if the initial source is gone and all we have left is hearsay? For example, some of Shakespeare is from the memory of a scribe not from the wit of the bard -- we'll never know the actual truth of his writing. Even since then there have been many attempts to make his work accessable via 'translations' and 're-writes'. These are from people advocating that we should lose the source altogether, as long as the sense remains. I once had to undertake a translation of 'To Be or not to Be' for an acting class. The result...

HAMLET enters stage left and looks upwards. Thunder raws, and there is the sound of rain. HAMLET pulls is coat off and throws it to the floor, before throwing his arms defiantly in the air as the rain gets heavier.

HAMLET:Is life really worth living now? You might as well just let the worst happen. Is there any point in fighting against it, when you know you can't win. After all isn't death just the deepest sleep imaginable - the kind of sleep which calms all pain and ends all sadness? One of those sleeps which you could literally die for.

He puts his arms down and into his pockets and begins to shift the flat of his show against the stage.

HAMLET:But what kind of dreams would there be. Death dreams. After a life full insults, unwanted love, injustice and the bureaucracy, the kind of debts which can only be paid with the cut of a dagger. Aren't we just putting up with a life like that because we're afraid of not knowing what happens after death.

He reaches down and picks up his coat. He brushes the dirt from it and pulls it back on.

HAMLET:Still its better the devil you know than the one you don't. So I'm a coward for living, but at least I can be.

... is generally awful (although nice staging). The sense is there, but the poetry is gone, replaced by phoney melodrama and wierd phraseology. Don't know about you, but I prefer the original.

For once 'The Economist' agrees with me as it considers a new glossary of Elizabethan and Jacobian language translation:

"More insidious are the places that seem safe. When Hamlet asks Ophelia if she is 'honest', and two lines later if she is 'fair', do we feel the sexual sting? The word 'sex' and its derivatives were not used in our sense then. Shades of meaning in honesty, affection, fancy, sense or blood, did the business. Lucky foreigners, it is said, who can render the connotations' and sweep away the inauthentic air of archaism."

Better to translate as you go along, not to discard the original. No matter how good your poster print of the 'Mona Lisa' might be, you don't want to throw the original in a skip. But I've a feeling those mis-heard quoates and stories will continue anyway. As Rose McGowan says in 'Scream' -- 'You hear the Richard Gere gerbil story enough times you end up believing it!' ... although she didn't quite say it like that did she? [Shakespeare piece via ArtsJournal]