The untranslatable glimpses
What happens when Shakespeare's words refuse to cross languages
Why did Borges, who translated Kafka and Faulkner into Spanish, refuse to touch Shakespeare?
Daniel Hahn's If This Be Magic circles around this exact problem. Borges drew his line at "the glimpses of the moon" from Hamlet, saying "Perhaps the words can be translated. Certainly Shakespeare cannot be translated." That phrase means exactly what it means, and nothing else will do.
We're hearing the specific weight of "glimpses" against "moon", the way those sounds sit in our mouth, the centuries of other readers who've felt that exact combination of syllables.
Translation usually works because most language is functional. You can move "I love you" or "close the door" across any border. But Shakespeare writes in a different register entirely. His language doesn't just carry meaning, it is the meaning.
Hahn apparently explores how translators have tried anyway. Some lean into their own language's strengths, making Shakespeare sound like their greatest national poet. Others try to preserve the strangeness, keeping readers aware they're encountering something foreign. Both approaches fail and succeed simultaneously.
Honestly, I'm not sure this problem is solvable. Maybe that's the point.
There's a moment in Hamlet where the prince tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern he could be "bounded in a nutshell" and still count himself "a king of infinite space" if not for his bad dreams. Try explaining that to someone who's never read it. The words themselves are simple enough, but the meaning lives in the spaces between them, in the rhythm, in how "nutshell" and "infinite space" crash against each other.
This might be why we keep returning to Shakespeare in the original, even when the language feels archaic. We sense something would be lost in translation that can't be recovered. Not just the plot or the characters, but the specific way meaning happens in those lines.
Maybe every translation creates a new work entirely, something that shares DNA with the original but lives its own life.
That's probably what Hahn is getting at. Translation isn't about finding equivalents. It's about accepting that some things can't cross over, and doing it anyway.
