What?!
[Rimsky-Korsakov's "Procession of the Nobles" Plays]
So for the non-Trekkers out there,
the Klingons are a fictional alien race of turtle-browed edgelords from planet Deathmetal.
They eat live worms, drink fermented blood,
flirt by screaming and throwing heavy objects,
they're really into opera, honor, and getting hit.
And they have their own language!
[Captioner's note: I honestly don't know a lick of Klingon,
[ So, for the sake of not upsetting any Trekkies, these will go untranslated for the time being ]
Garak: Actually, I'm not sure Constable Odo HAS a mother.
And they also have...
A Klingon translation of Hamlet.
Published by the Klingon Language Institute in 1996.
It's written with the gimmick that
William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, is actually...
Of Qo'noS, the Klingon homeworld.
And any evidence to the contrary is simply,
clever Federation propaganda.
Ha-ha ha ha ha...
So the entire text of Hamlet isn't just translated into Klingon,
the plot and characters are also completely transposed into the richly-textured world of Klingon culture.
[yelling]
Blargh!
Shakespeare and Star Trek go way back, and it's not just the Klingons who've swiped him.
There's an old Ferengi saying about discretion being the better part of valor.
Or openly critiqued him.
I knew Brutus was going to kill Caesar in the first act!
But Caesar didn't figure it out until the knife was in his back.
Or just blabbed on about him.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate!
There's got to be a better clip I could use.
But this is easily the Trek franchise's biggest foray into Shakespearean turf.
Also its most complex.
So, um, why does this thing exist?
Well, to explain that, I have to delve deep into the rich backstory of the distant alien culture of...
Russia.
Back during the Cold War, the old Soviet Union's propaganda machine was fond of, um,
exaggerating Russian accomplishments,
claiming that things like the television and the radio were invented by Russians,
alongside things that they actually did invent, like the periodic table and the artificial satellite.
I guess all nations tell little white lies like that, like American invented freedom,
or England produced the greatest writer who ever lived, that sort of thing.
Anyway, Americans got wind of this propaganda and thought it was hilarious.
One American who thought this was hilarious was a television producer named Gene Roddenberry.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
I know this saying.
It was invented in Russia .
Now, in addition to having a comic relief fake Russian,
Star Trek the original series had a metaphorical stand-in for the USSR, the Klingons.
And they were not so nuanced back in those days.
Arrogant, violent, even tribbles hated them.
But at this point, they all still spoke English.
Saggy, old rust buckets, is designed like a garbage scow.
Half the quadrant knows it.
That's why they're learning to speak Klingonee!
And eventually, they all did.
As the franchise went from TV to film, the Klingons went with them.
They were redesigned from vaguely racist, dark-skinned Fu Manchus,
to the more familiar goateed dinosaur look,
and Star Trek: The Motion Picture featured the first words of Klingon ever spoken.
Devised by James Doohan--
yes, Scotty--
it was just a handful of simple, guttural mouth farts serving as basic orders.
Nothing fancy.
But there's nothing nerds love more than obsessing over minor details, so...
For Star Trek III: The undoing of Everything Meaningful in the Best Film We Ever Made,
Paramount hired a linguist who also happened to be the least Klingon-like person imaginable.
Mark Okrand got his PhD in linguistics
analyzing the grammar of an extinct Native American language once spoken in northern California,
so he's the real deal.
He took the nonsense that Scotty made up
and turned it into what's called a "conlang" or constructed language.
Something that arrived not by the natural evolution of speech, but by design.
So Klingon became a fully functioning language with vocabulary and grammar
and a dictionary, published in 1985 with full notes on syntax
and some helpful Klingon phrases like,
"Where's the bathroom?"
"The engine is overheating."
and "Surrender or die!"
It sold well enough that a large number of die-hard Trekkers
learned the language well enough to converse in it.
Bing's translator has a Klingon setting, Duolingo is working on a Klingon course,
there are YouTube tutorials.
Qapla' means, literally, success.
Uh, full disclosure, I did not learn Klingon.
Though I did learn enough Klingon to realize that I should not waste time learning Klingon.
Because it's really hard!
I mean, there are consonants that require phlegm, objects regularly go before subjects,
there's a complex noun-verb agreement system in place,
solely because Christopher Lloyd flubbed one of his lines!
But it's a real enough language, with plenty of interesting translations.
So you can actually say all sorts of stuff with it.
Naturally, the Klingons got even more popular within the fandom,
and so when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987,
it featured a Klingon officer on the bridge.
Worf's presence on the show let the writers build up Klingon culture from snarling autocrats
to snarling Viking Spartan Bushido Hell's Angels.
The Klingon empire still served as the Soviets to the Federation's USA,
but by 1991 there was no more Soviet Union.
Reflecting this new era of peace, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
depicted the final days of tensions between the Federation and the Empire.
And at long last, the Russian propaganda joke came full circle.
I offer a toast.
The undiscovered country.
The future.
Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1
You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.
And so...
Jesus Christ
Yeah, it's tough to recite poetry in a language that's designed to be ugly.
[Klingon]
When I said Klingon was tough to learn, I wasn't kidding.
One thing: it's very agglutinative compared to English.
That is, Klingon words are made up of a lot of smaller affixes that mean something on their own.
So in English,
You can have sentences like this with lots of small words.
But then there are longer words like:
antidisestablishmentarianism,
which are annoying, but understandable if you break down each syllable into units of inherent meaning.
English does that for complex concepts.
Now imagine a language that does that for every sentence.
Oh, they exist.
Lots of Native American languages do this,
and so do Turkish and Hungarian to an extent.
So it's not a completely, um, alien idea,
and the effect of that is that complex concepts can be conveyed in a single word.
So where English-speaking Hamlet says the thirteen word phrase,
"I have of late but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth,"
Klingon-speaking Hamlet says,
and it works because every syllable in that word conveys a different meaning that makes one whole meaning.
And part of me thought, you know, that could be fun.
Why not translate all of Shakespeare into fakey languages?
Um, A Midsummer Night's Dream in Elvish.
Richard III in Dothraki.
Macbeth in Dovahzul.
Um, Romeo and Juliet in Newspeak.
Sex crime.
Double plus ungood.
And, of course, King Lear in Parseltongue.
[ Angry Hissing ]
But those are just single sentences.
For plenty of simpler conlangs, you can just plug in everything word for word and get, say,
the Gallifreyan symbol for "the time is out of joint."
But we're talking about an entire play here.
And an entire play not only in a fictional language,
but written using the gimmick that it's set in a fictional culture.
Now, the world of Hamlet isn't just confined to the castle Elsinor in Denmark.
Characters go to France and Germany and England and Norway.
So, simple enough, just search replace Denmark with Qo'nos,
France with Romulus, Germany with Vulcan, Norway with the House of Duras, and England with Earth.
But it gets harder.
Hamlet is steeped in Christian theology about the afterlife and purgatory and divine justice,
which can be hard to convey to some human cultures, let alone alien ones.
Klingons don't have gods, because, well
Our gods are dead.
Ancient Klingon warriors slew them a millennia ago.
They were more trouble than they were worth.
A Klingon can't say, "I'm off to pray," but he can say "I'm off to do calisthenics."
"God be wi' ye" becomes "May you meet Kahless!"
and "May flights of angels sing thee to they rest" becomes
"May the ships of the black fleet escort you to rest."
Also, remember that Shakespeare was a classics nerd, and so's Hamlet.
He makes numerous references to Greco-Roman myths.
He compares his father to Claudius by likening the former to the titan Hyperion,
and the latter to a horny little satyr.
Hamlet name drops Niobe, the Nemean Lion, Priam, and Hecuba,
and a whole volume's worth of classical mythology references.
All good, but Western mythology has been told and curated for over three thousand years.
Klingon mythology goes back less than fifty.
So mining from the Klingon's limited mythology,
the Nemean Lion becomes the demon Fek'lhr,
the front of Jove becomes the hair of Gorkon,
old Hamlet to Claudius isn't Hyperion to a satyr, but the sun to a tribble.
But the biggest metaphorical clutter
comes from the Klingon's seemingly only warrior-hero, Kahless the Unforgettable.
Kahless ends up standing in for Hercules, Augustus Caesar, Alexander the Great,
God, Jesus, and...a pelican.
Cause there's this old superstition that pelicans were said to feed their young with their own blood.
Medieval Europe was weird.
Also, um, Klingons aren't the type to...
pick flowers.
[screaming]
That is how the Klingon lures a mate.
So when Ophelia goes mad at the end of Act IV and gives out flowers to Gertrude, Claudius, and Laertes,
she doesn't give out rosemary, fennel, columbines, and violets,
she gives out tea, deodorant, gunpowder, and topaline.
Topaline, according to the Star Trek wiki,
is a mineral critical to the function of 23rd century life support systems.
There's another barrier.
Just basic vocabulary.
The average adult English speaker uses between 20 and 30,000 words.
The ENTIRE Klingon language only has about 3,000.
And because of how Klingon developed, a lot of those words aren't useful.
Klingon has words for "phaser" and "tractor beam" and "warp core" and "dilithium crystal,"
but none for "anxiety" or "tall" or "bodkin" or "nunnery."
The translators managed to get around that, sort of, by making some, uh, creative metaphors.
"Your ears that are so fortified against our story" becomes
"You seem to have made a forcefield for your ears"
"swift as quicksilver" becomes "like the admiral's Bird of Prey"
"pigeon-livered" becomes "the bile of a Betazoid"
"slings and arrows" become "torpedoes and phasers"
And Polonius is not called a "fishmonger," but a "Ferengi."
And probably the biggest omission of all:
Klingon has no verb for "to be."
We have a problem here!
[music]