China and the West

[Shakespeare, William]. Hamuleite. Tian Han yi. [ID D13674]. Es ist die erste vollständige chinesische Übersetzung aus dem englischen Original von Shakespeare.
Er schreibt : "Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's most stirring and moving tragedies. Today we have a lot of young people of the Hamlet type. What will they think about their society after reading this great tragedy ?"
Li Ruru : Tian was motivated to translate Hamlet by the greatness of the play's reputation and by his strong personal empathy with the protagonist which enabled Tian to use the work of translation to vent his own emotions, although he admitted a few years later that he had made mistakes in his translation because he had been 'too young and too ambitious' to deal with such a profound piece of English literature. Spoken drama was thus dominated for a significant period by Western models of realistic and naturalistic theater. Tian Han used his translation of Hamlet as a reaction against this trend. Yet this translation was important both as marking the first publication of an entire Shakespeare in Chinese and as a personal landmark for Tian in entering Shakespeare's world, or rather the world of theater. Shakespeare made him a playwright and a poet, and Shakespeare's influence is evident in aspects of the characters, plots and language of Tian's own plays.