Hello everybody,

Just a quick administrative note since I was asked, the winners of our Shakespeare Signature Series giveaway have been chosen and emails have been sent.  Thanks to everyone for playing, and I hope you all had an outstanding Shakespeare Day!

– Duane, your Shakespeare Geek

Ok, this story is too fascinating not to share.

You’re probably sick of me hyping my Shakespeare is Universal campaign, which features a t-shirt depicting “To be or not to be” translated into languages from around the world.

This morning, Twitter follower @JulietWilliams3 wrote to me, “Your Japanese says ‘Mel Brooks running away’, is that what you meant?”

For a moment I thought she was kidding.  Then my stomach turned as I realized that she was in fact correct, or at least as far as the Mel Brooks went.  Yikes.   I flew back to my original document, and that sequence of Japanese characters was not there. What the heck?  The version that I’ve been using was produced by my graphic designer who did admit to having re-generated much of text.  So now I’m left with the choices of a) a bug in the translation engine, b) designer made a copy-and-paste error of some sort (maybe he was in IMDB?) or c) designer did that on purpose.

I immediately write back to him – a former coworker I haven’t spoken with in 3 years.  I don’t expect a response.

I then turn to Reddit and see that they have a translations  group specifically for this purpose.  So I post up my image and ask for validations of the translation.  Someone who does not know the story tells me that the Japanese reads, “Mel Gibson’s Great Escape.”

And then it all falls into place with this post from swarmtactic:

Yes, Mel Brooks’s “To Be Or Not To Be” was rebranded to be “Mel Brooks’s Great Escape” in the Japanese market, and that is what it says here (I’m guessing silverforest just had a typo with “Mel Gibson”) 

I can confirm silverforest’s translation is accurate. In your graphic designer’s defense, www.alc.co.jp[1] , which is a popular online japanese translation dictionary, lists the Mel Brooks movie as the first entry for the phrase “To be or not to be”, god knows why.

I confirmed this myself – type “to be or not to be” into that engine and you get back the characters which, out of context, would simply tell you “Mel Brooks’ Great Escape.”  (Making this even more confusing?  The Mel Brooks movie The Producers has a song called Run Away! So at first I thought this was a Producers reference!)

So it appears that the engine I was using at the time had a pointer into this service and parroted back whatever it was given.  Amazing that we found that!

I’ve got edited artwork in with the t-shirt people, so this and a couple of other errors will be fixed before the shirts are printed.  Plus I took the opportunity to add Chinese and German ( I learned last night that I forgot German!) so now there’s even more language.  Please, if you haven’t already, consider supporting the movement and showing the world how much you believe in the power of Shakespeare.

I promised to speak more about this after I did a video conference with Bardfilm’s students.  It’s a topic that we cover frequently, but it’s important to revisit it from time to time so that we’re all on the same page.

Why should you read Shakespeare?  (* Let’s not argue “read” versus “see”, that’s not what this is about.  I mean why should people expose themselves to Shakespeare.  Moving on..)

When you are in school someone will tell you to read Shakespeare.  If you’re unlucky enough not to get a better answer you may spot a trap — he’s famous because we all study him, but we all study him because he’s famous.  You make us read him because he’s important. Why is he important? He must be, everybody reads him.  Those aren’t answers.

You may go into theatre, in which case you will likely seek out Shakespeare on your own on the path to perfecting your craft.

Or you may go the scholarly route and choose to study the body of his works down to the last punctuation point, coming at it from history or spectral analysis or statistics or any possible angle.  And that’s fine too. Over the years I’ve met many people from programmers to physicists who have brought Shakespeare with them into their profession.

I’m not talking about any of those people.  I’m talking about that other 99% of the world who, once they leave the academic world of being told what to read and why to read it, will have to decide whether to voluntarily expose themselves to more of Mr. Shakespeare.

Why should they?  Take that literally.  Assume that you’ve just been introduced to someone at a party, and you make a Shakespeare reference.  The person says, “Oh, I’ve never read Hamlet.”

“Oh, you have to!” you say.

“Why should I?” says she.

What’s your answer?

I know what we *feel*.  I want to communicate that, logically. I want to find the vocabulary to have this discussion, because I think there are a hundred chances a day to have it if only we knew how to do it.

This year’s Shakespeare Day Celebration is sponsored in part by Shakespeare Is Universal: Shakespeare truly is for everyone, and nothing demonstrates that sentiment better than his most famous quote of all, translated here into languages from around the world. In celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, show that you believe his works are just as relevant, powerful and important as they’ve ever been!

I once wrote, “All Shakespeare is cover songs.”  That post is sadly overlooked, I really which it had gotten more traffic.

My analogy has grown, however, and I’d like to bring it back up for discussion.

When you perform Shakespeare (and by that I mean using the text, not writing your own adaptation), you have no choice but to interpret it through your own creative vision.  Shakespeare had his, you have yours.  This is the essence of a cover song.  You both start with the same instructions (recipe?) but then within those constraints you can go in whatever direction you can imagine.

Adaptation is different. Adaptation is more akin to sampling, where you look at an original and think, “I like a piece of this. I will use a piece of this to make my creation more powerful.”  Sometimes you take the underlying beat of the entire song and just put a shallow new layer on top of it (the Vanilla Ice / Queen controversy comes to mind).  Sometimes, though, you find a piece of one original work that comes and boosts your own work, producing an entirely new thing.  Consider Primitive Radio Gods’  Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand, which everybody knows for the B.B. King sample.

In the second case everybody said, “Wow, that’s a great song!”  In the first everybody said, “Dude, you completely ripped that off.”  Big difference.  You have to bring enough of your own stuff to the party, and you have to acknowledge the contributions from the original, or you’re going to get busted trying to ride somebody else’s coattails.

Covers and samples are entirely different things with different points to make.  It drives me nuts when people make lists that combine the two, putting She’s the Man next to Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing.  Please stop.  Each can be artwork in its own way, but they are two very different things.