ONE OF THE BEST. Review on Hamlet - William Shakespeare

It really is only when I read and examine across languages that I realise what a challenging and thankless job translation is, specifically the older texts and more so when there is a considerable cultural distance in between the languages. Shakespeare's diction is so profoundly poetic and idiomatic that it could possibly be thought untranslatable, even when it is actually rendered into modern English idiom, it loses its antique beauty when tampered with, like these monuments reconstructed from history that appear like originals but in fact are certainly not.

And so reading Shakespeare in Urdu was often going to be a fascinating expertise. I commend Firaq Gorakhpuri's consummate skill in recreating Hamlet in an idiom that recalls the dying days on the classical dialect mixed in with sufficient modernist invention to help keep it coherent, but without having employing as well a lot of calques and resorting to direct borrowings that would have grated on my nerves, as now happens in the post-bastardisation days of Urdu, a consequence in the widespread Romanisation in the language. I also like that the translator didn't depart from the prose-poetry type of the original.

All in all, this translation of Hamlet may perhaps go down as a finest instance of tips on how to translate classical English literature, and not just Shakespeare, in a language that is rapidly losing translations in the classics of other cultures.