Hamilton auf deutsch

Friend Julian in Japan just sent me a link about this amazing theatrical phenomenon, the translation of Alexander Hamilton into German. 

The translators have been working on it for three years, in close cooperation with Lin-Manuel Miranda, and it's opening in October in Hamburg.

In July 2020, after I had seen the original on stage, I wrote the following review:

What I found so appealing about it was how comprehensive it was. It had originality, in the way it brought rap into the picture. And the way they gave black people a reason for investing in the founding, by performing it with a mostly-black cast. Brilliant idea. If I were black I suspect I'd be as luke-warm to cool about the founding as American Indians are about Columbus's "discovery." By bringing blacks in this way, Miranda gives them reason, now that they are in, for considering how American democracy might be viewed as a long-term project created by highly imperfect people and still only getting started. If that can happen, he's done the world a real favor, in my view.

It had great theater in the way it was staged. The circular turning stages were a brilliant invention; it had wonderful singers and dancers, i.e., it was a first-class production. And the script was the most exciting thing I've heard or read in ages in the way it laid out history of the time of the founding of American democracy. It had humor - George III was one of the funniest characters I think I've ever seen on stage. Thomas Jefferson was played as a joker, as well. The characters were really well-written: Hamilton as a very smart man brought low by a moment's weakness; Burr as a quintessential politician who could never take a strong stand on anything; Washington as an intimidating big Daddy. And the composition - just fabulous - the way the song "My Shot" was introduced early on and foreshadowed the climax, the maturing of the characters between the early years in the first act and the later years in the second.

In putting out my latest blog - which is not one of my best - too unfocused - I spent a lot of time reading about the chronology of the Revolutionary War and the progress from the First Continental Congress to the Second, so the names that came up of minor players in the history of the American revolution, like Rochambeau, who I don't remember hearing about before, were fresh on my mind and made it easier to follow the story. I'm currently fighting off the temptation to order books on the American Revolution and read my eyeballs out. The play did that for me, and that's one hell of an endorsement, in my mind. The value of art is always measured, I think, by the aftereffects on the viewer, especially if it leads to behavioral changes.

I am a total fan of Leslie Odom, who played Aaron Burr. Not surprised he won so many awards for the role. Lin-Manuel Miranda is not the best singer in the world, but not so bad, I thought, that his performance detracted from the quality of the show as a whole. And considering what he accomplished in writing it, it would have been a crime not to let him play the lead role

So glad somebody got it together to make it available for us plebeians who couldn't afford to fly to New York and pay $500 for a ticket back when it first became all the rage. Glad to see it is still worth going way out of your way to see it.

And yes, I agree, it's really helpful to have subtitles. The lines go by very fast, and it's very compact.

Wonderful experience.  Absolutely wonderful.

Now a pair of German writer/translators, Kevin Schroeder and Sera Finale, have come up with a German version, one that Miranda fully endorsed, following the motto, "as free as necessary, as close as possible."

I'm especially interested in the translation, because I have worked in my day as a translator and once thought nothing would be more romantic than being an interpreter at the U.N. One of many youthful fantasies that fell away once I got a whiff of the work involved.  I know the challenges and the different kinds of translation: glossing (essentially a word-for-word translation), literal (rendering it into the target language while keeping the tone and essence of the original), free (taking liberties with the actual vocabulary, but keeping the essence of the original) and cultural (basically a re-writing in which 'translating' means moving the context from something the person in the original language says to something the person in the target language might say if they found themselves in a similar situation.

The translators of Hamilton did a cultural translation, the most artistic creative kind, where they allow for the fact that German audiences may lack the background knowledge English-speaking audiences are likely to have. The translators sought to find references the German audience could relate to. In some cases the original English spins off the work of other English-language rappers. For example, in the German translation, instead of translating the original English text, they spun off the work of German rappers.

And there's more going on than cultural translation. Berlin and other German cities have become multi-cultural. I remember a time when, if you saw a black person speaking German, you could assume that they were a child of an American GI. That is no longer the case, and today there are about a million Afro-Germans living in Germany, about one German in 83. And apparently enough of them have the kind of talent it takes to put on a performance of Hamilton in German.

Have a listen to an interview with the translators. And don't miss the fact that there is somebody hoping to pull off a translation into Japanese, as well.

Even if you don't know German, sit back and listen the internal rhymes and the end rhymes and note how they made use of the fact that German, like English, is a "rhythm and stress" language. Syncopation works, for example, in the same way, and the target tempo is the same as the original tempo, pretty much. A brilliant translation job in my view.

Wish I could get to Hamburg!







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