The title of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Tamil in the recently concluded Chennai Book Fair invariably brought to a Tamil reader’s mind a scene from the Sivaji Ganesan-starrer Rajapart Rangathurai. “To be or not to be” will be followed by the Tamil lines, Vaazhvathaa Saavathaa. K. Kamalakannan, the translator of the work, however, opted for Iruppatha Irappathaa and it seems to give a natural flow to the dialogues that follow in Tamil.
“The challenge in translating Shakespeare is reading the psyche of his characters and the language used by him to delve into their mind,” said Mr. Kamalakannan, who has translated Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, besides Hamlet, for Tamizhini, a publisher.
