SHLONSKY'S HEBREW HAMLET By

SHAKESPEARE'S Hamlet is famous throughout the world, and is widely held to be among the finest plays ever written. Abraham Shlonsky is well known as an excellent translator, and his works have won numerous literary awards. He has successfully translated poetry, drama, novels, short stories, histories, and biographies; by authors as diverse as Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Brecht, Shaw, and Shakespeare. It has been a fascinating experience to follow such an outstanding ar-tist in his translation of Hamlet from Shakespearean English into Shlonskyan Hebrew. Other translations exist, but the superiority of Shlonsky's is indisputable. Perfect translation is, in all likelihood, impossible. An Italian expres-sion compares translators to traitors, and a Hebrew expression, though less harsh, is still revealing: "A translation is like a woman, " it says, "either faithful or beautiful, but never both." Translation is a creative art, and requires a creative artist, especially when poetry and poetic drama are involved. In translation, it may be relatively easy to find an equivalent for a particular word on a single denotative level, but it is absolutely agonizing to attempt to account for the other denotative and connotative aspects that may be associated with that same word. Recent criticism has stressed the importance of ambiguity in literature. But the importance of ambiguity in Hamlet has been recognized for centuries. Empson (1930) writes about seven types of am