Salon

Both the 442nd anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and the 390th anniversary of his death come sometime later this month. As with everything about the bard, the dates are unconfirmed and disputed. It is remarkable that a writer who has been dead for almost four centuries continues to exert greater influence over culture and literature than anyone alive today -- and Russian literature is no exception.

Shakespeare has often had a controversial reception in Russia. Leo Tolstoy considered his plays contrived and artificial, and wrote a critical essay bashing "King Lear." Two things turned out to be ironic, though. First, when Tolstoy tried to substantiate his claims using the play's translation by his friend Alexander Druzhinin, he found that the translator had already brushed up the text according to Tolstoy's aesthetics, so to proceed, Tolstoy had to retranslate some quotes. Second, at the very end of his life, Tolstoy copied Lear's behavior and left his home and family for the unknown.

The best Russian translations of Shakespeare's plays appeared in the 20th century. Especially important was the work of Mikhail Lozinsky, who painstakingly tried to conserve every detail of Shakespeare's imagery and style, and of Boris Pasternak, who used more colloquial, energetic language, and often found himself at odds with scholars (Pasternak claimed that he, as a poet, knew better what Shakespeare had meant). Indeed, it's impossible to envision Grigory Kozintsev's famous 1963 film using Lozinsky's text of "Hamlet" instead of Pasternak's -- it is not a film based on "Hamlet," it is a film based on Pasternak's translation of "Hamlet."

By now there are dozens of Russian "Hamlets." One of the more unusual ones was done by poet Andrei Chernov several years ago. Chernov virtually rewrote the play, claiming that his version finally showed the drama's hidden agenda. In Chernov's version, the faithful Horatio is cast as the archvillain; it was staged in 2002 by Moscow's Stanislavsky Theater with comic actor Valery Garkalin as the unlikely Hamlet.

I have dwelled on translation here because Shakespeare's works are essentially a phenomenon of language. To a large degree, his plays and poems have formed the English language as it exists today, and he is the most quotable English-language author for a reason. Russian translators know quite well that when you find a Shakespeare quote in a book, looking it up in existing Russian translations often doesn't help; the meaning will be subtly different, just enough to render it useless for the translator's purpose. The quest to understand and interpret Shakespeare continues.