Oregon Shakespeare Festival Translating Shakespeare to Modern English

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Asian American Playwrights Assist Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Translating The Bard

You’ve heard about this tempest? Oregon Shakespeare Festival is commissioning 36 playwrights and pairing them with dramaturgs to translate 39 plays attributed to Shakespeare into contemporary modern English between now and December 31, 2018. By seeking out a diverse set of playwrights (more than half writers of color and more than half women), OSF hopes to bring fresh voices and perspectives to the rigorous work of translation. Each playwright is being asked to put the same pressure and rigor of language as Shakespeare did on his, keeping in mind meter, rhythm, metaphor, image, rhyme, rhetoric and emotional content. OSF’s hope is to have 39 unique side-by-side companion translations of Shakespeare’s plays that are both performable and extremely useful reference texts for both classrooms and productions.

Asian American artists are squarely in the middle of this effort, including

Christopher Chen
Desdemona Chiang
Lloyd Suh
Shishir Kurup
Aditi Brennan Kapil
Naomi Iizuka
Hansol Jung
Dipika Guha

https://www.osfashland.org/en/experience-osf/upcoming/play-on.aspx

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