[ Rimsky-Korsakov's "Procession of the Nobles" Plays ]
Now, taH means continue, or occur continuously.
Pagh means either or,
be' makes a verb negative, so Klingon Hamlet is actually saying:
to continue or to not continue.
and the only reason it's not something more obvious like "to live or not to live".
is because Christopher Plummer didn't like the way that translation sounded
so to continue or to not continue...
Well, that is A question.
And it's a question that's not a very...
And it's a question that's not a very... Klingon thing to ask
As I understand it, in Klingon It is always a good day to die.
Pondering the implications of one's mortality doesn't seem like something a Klingon would do,
neither would he be so conflicted about killing his uncle.
Hamlet has plenty of reason to be cautious. Even if Claudius killed his father,
Hamlet's vengeance would not only be an act of avunculicide,
but regicide, making Hamlet just as guilty of delegitimizing the crown as Claudius.
Klingon Hamlet probably wouldn't be so conflicted about avenging his father
considering how Klingons usually get promoted.
"Am I understanding that one of the duties of the first officer the Klingon vessel is to assassinate his captain?"
"Yes, sir."
I'm not saying there couldn't be Klingon Shakespeare,
I mean Klingon Othello, sure.
Klingon Coriolanus, perfect!
Klingon Titus Andronicus would be AMAZING.
But Klingon Hamlet?
Wimpy, little Hamlet?
Self-pity is not honorable. Nothing is worth doing if it's not honorable.
Every poor actor shoved under that makeup had to say honor fifty thousand times before leaving the set.
[ Repititions of "Honor" by various Klingons ]
[ Even more variations of "Honor" ]
Oh, God!
Poor Klingon Falstaff!
Well if we're going to figure out, how a Klingon would read Hamlet, we should probably first ask ourselves:
How would a human read hamlet?
Well damn, THAT is the question.
I mean it can be read as a riveting genre piece, a political drama,
a philosophical critique of humanism, proto-existentialism,
a reflection of contemporary tensions between Protestant-Catholic theology,
and of course, there's Freud's reading where he saw the play as
confirmation of his own pet theory about the Oedipus complex.
Those are just some of the ways that humans have read Hamlet,
so how would a Klingon read Hamlet?
A farce? A melodrama?
A lesson explaining exactly why revenge is a dish best served cold?
Well the book actually tells you!
According to the Klingon Language Institute, while humans often go for the to be or not to be soliloquy,
Klingons see that speech as a farce put on to throw off Claudius and Polonius, who are watching from offstage
Klingons prefer his speech at the end of Act Four,
when he decides to stop digging around and fully sets his mind to vengeance
What's more, humans see the main conflict as internal.
it's hamlet against his own hesitation.
But for the discerning Klingon viewer, it's not the conflict in himself as a problem.
It's the conflict between Khamlet and his culture.
Khamlet is a Klingon bound by a code of honor that the rest of his kingdom doesn't follow.
The book's introduction states that:
And that interpretation is...
Actually pretty well supported by the text
Hamlet calls Denmark a prison, and the plot is forwarded mostly by people spying on each other.
Claudius and Polonius watching Hamlet,
Gertrude and Claudius asking Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to watch Hamlet
and Hamlet watching everyone, but especially himself.
It's a constant stalemate creating attention resolved into murder
There's also an interesting tension between Hamlet and the Christian God.
His first soliloquy has him wish that the everlasting had not fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter.
Hamlets views suicide as a noble act as it was in, say, Rome
While Christian Denmark sees it as an act worthy of damnation.
At the end, Horatio offers to drink poison and die with Hamlet, since he is more antique Roman than Dane.
You could argue that Hamlet is, too.
The character is fascinated by Roman tragedies
and gets the idea for the mousetrap when he's moved by an actor reciting lines from the Aeneid.
You could easily argue that Hamlet has internalized the ideals of classical heroes,
and feels trapped by his more modern, more Christian environment.
Hamlet is a classical hero in a Christian world.
Likewise, Khamlet lives in a time and place where these more bloody, more antique, more... Klingon ideals
are being suppressed by new world order, that values patience and order more than honor.
So that's not a terrible reading of the play.
Native speakers of Klingon found a way to make the play work for them.
But there's a problem.
There are no native speakers of Klingon,
because Klingons are not real.
Klingons do not exist.
This is not a controversial statement.
Klingon culture was made by a handful of writers.
Qo'noS is a made-up planet.
There is no Klingon rights lobby.
If Iggy Azalea decided to don a fake forehead tomorrow,
no one would complain about the appropriation of Klingon culture.
Maybe that's already happened.
[Iggy Azalea raps]
And let's face it, it might be more useful to have Hamlet translated into yiddish,
or Irish Gaelic, or Cherokee,
or any of the thousands of real endangered languages on the globe that real people speak and dream in,
that could use the support of being documented before there is no one left to speak them!
What's the point of translating a story for a culture that doesn't exist?
And what's more, a culture that can barely say "to be or not to be".
I mean, the phrase "to be or not to be" has a whole great weight for an English speaker
because "be" is a verb that encompasses everything that you... are.
There are mountains of philosophical texts devoted to understanding
this two letter phrase and all its conjugations.
"Being and Nothingness", "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", "Being There", "Being Alive".
So the question Hamlet poses isn't simply "should I kill myself?",
it's "should I persist with the totality of my existence?"
which, when phrased liked that, is much scarier!
If Klingon doesn't have the verb "to be", can it convey the weight of that phrase?
Actually... can any language?
Let's go back to Earth for a second.
Going by numbers of native speakers, English is the third largest language in the world.
The second largest, Spanish, has two verbs, "ser" and "estar",
that perform separate jobs, which in English are both perfomed by "to be".
"Ser" conveys essence, while "estar" conveys condition.
So if Spanish Polonius said,
then it means that Hamlet is acting crazy at the moment.
But if Spanish Polonius said,
then it means that Hamlet is inherently crazy. An important distinction to make
can be neatly translated as
but I wonder what a Spanish speaker loses without the added nuance of
English, the third largest language, has one form of "to be"; Spanish, the second largest, has two forms;
but the largest, Mandarin Chinese...
well, it's complicated.
The common translation for "to be" in Chinese is "shì",
but "shì" doesn't cover the same ground as "to be".
In English you can say,
But in Mandarin,
And actually those last two sentences don't even need the verb.
Meanwhile, "shì" has an overlap with, of all things, the word "yes".
In Mandarin is possible to say,
but it only translates to "yes or no", or
It has as much existential weight as saying
To transfer the head for the original phrase, the closest Chinese translation's gotten is
That... is... the question?
Losing things in translation is inevitable, and it goes both ways, of course.
I'm sure I would lose some of the original meaning if I were to read translations of "Don Quixote", or "Journey to the West",
but for non-English speaking audiences of Shakespeare, this is a very real barrier they need to overcome.
And for the millions that speak Italian, and Hindi, and Japanese,
and every other language in to which Shakespeare has been translated,
they struggled and somehow overcome it.
Like, Hamlet isn't hard enough for modern English speakers, right?
I mean, Horatio says that Hamlet's father wore his beaver up,
and anyone not familiar with Medieval armor terms is like,
...what?
To be... or not... to be.
So why translate it to Klingon?
Well... why did people watch Star Trek in the first place?
I'll tell you why: it's not because of the technology.
It's not a dream of a scientifically possible future, it's convenient writing.
Warp drive? An excuse to get from one planet to another within a week.
Tthe Holodeck? An excuse to reuse cheap sets and stock costumes.
The transporter? Too expensive to shoot a shuttlecraft landing every week,
so just do a crossfade with some stank on it.
The universal translator? Just a good reason not to have to make up alien languages like Klingon.
All of it, just a series of lofty semi-plausibilities to make room for the real story being told.
One that has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with people.
You know how every alien on Star Trek looks human?
That's because symbolically, they are human.
Every alien can be boiled down to a singular trait. Often a very human trait.
Logic, greed, tyranny, empathy, conformity, piety...
and violence.
And by meeting these embodiments of humanity, the captain, and by extension the audience,
is forced to consider problems from new perspectives.
By trying to view ourselves through the eyes of another.
And that's Star Trek's greatest legacy: by using coding and metaphor to give voice to the marginalized.
Every alien on the bridge, every coded other on the ship voiced a new perspective.
Spock, Data, Odo, Quark, Seven Of Nine,
and yes, Worf, their stories all revolve around fictional cultures that symbolically speak for real ones.
And by doing that, Star Trek teaches the lesson that by knowing others, we can know ourselves.
More familiarity with our own mythology might help us to relate to theirs.
So maybe that's how I can justify the Klingon Hamlet: as a way to see ourselves in a new light.
By understanding our own stories just a little better.
Because the play, after all, catch the conscience of... us.
Like all art, it's a way of explaining humanity to itself.
Oh, no, I know Hamlet. And what he might say with irony, I say with conviction:
"What a piece of work is man!"
"How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable!"
"In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!"
Surely, you don't see your species like that, do you?
There is the clip I should have used.
Let's just hope we get as good at understanding and appreciating real cultures
as we are at understanding and appreciating fictional ones.
Qapla'!
[Singing in Klingon]