1 Normand Chaurette’s remarkable Comment tuer Shakespeare is an elusive and provocative book. It contains fiction, history, theory, translation, literary analysis, memoir, confession, and more, and it is this multiplicity that constitutes its richness. Taken together the chapters are a representation of the playwright/translator’s love affair with an inexhaustible Shakespeare and the adventure of translating his work. Like all love affairs, it is passionate, volatile, and not untroubled. In Chaurette’s account, the painful and exhilarating experience of translating Shakespeare is a journey of selfdiscovery and a paradoxical process of killing and creating.

2 The book is a masterpiece of indirection. Each chapter is titled “A Translation of [a work by Shakespeare].” But only some chapters are actually about Chaurette’s experience of translating (or not) the work in question. “A Translation of Macbeth” is a work of fiction in which professional translator Bantcho Bantchevsky, assailed by the hordes of his fevered depression and imagination, and overwhelmed by the love and criminality at the heart of the Macbeth’s crime, commits suicide at a production of Verdi’s Macbeth. “A Translation of Twelfth Night” recounts the story of Delia Bacon as a spurned Olivia. Only “A Translation of the First Twelve Sonnets” actually contains full translations.

3 Chaurette’s relationship to Shakespeare is immediate, intimate, personal, and varied. Different plays present different points of entry, among them the context, the characters, the words, the dramatic structure, and the accumulating history of translation and interpretation. There is no formula. After completing more than ten translations of Shakespeare (the number depends on issues of definition, publication and performance), Chaurette still approaches each new translation afresh.

4 Initially Chaurette viewed translation as an individual undertaking at the center of which was the translating “I.” Of this early period he writes, “[. . .]I would read Shakespeare for myself, the way a musician plays his scales, sometimes seriously, sometimes out of obligation” (85; all translations mine). His account of an aborted struggle to translate Othello in 1988 dramatizes his obsession with an Iago who eludes all his attempts at characterization. Chaurette came to Shakespeare through music before he came to the texts, and nowhere is this more evident than in his re-thinking of Iago with whose intractable darkness in Shakespeare he wrestles. Where the character is idealistic in Verdi, he is underhanded in Shakespeare (29). Part of Chaurette’s challenge in translating Othello is to make his way back from Verdi to Shakespeare without being overwhelmed by a character who could become too onesided: “More than once I felt that by his mockeries he sabotaged my work. That he sabotaged himself” (42). Chaurette tries to take refuge in Cassio, in Desdemona, but “Iago was my father, my friend, my brother and my lover. I just wanted [. . .] a bit of latitude. I found that he had too many arms, too many legs” (49), and ultimately, he lets him go. Richard III too, though different, proved similarly elusive and overwhelming, as he found himself “translating” not the words of Shakespeare’s play but those the character spoke to him in his imagination (61). Six months of struggle produced two lines. But with his resentment of Richard emerged other voices of resentment, the voices of the queens, and the process whereby Chaurette created his magnificent play Les Reines.

5 If Chaurette’s translating in the first section was carried out alone, his translating in the second was carried out in relation to mise-en-scène. For the first time, in 1991, he was asked professionally to translate a play by Shakespeare, and his first translation of As You Like It was experimental and playful: “I decided to translate the play word-for-word, keeping as close as possible to the original vocabulary” (86). This included retaining recurring English words and, where possible, the music of Shakespeare’s language. Thus, for example, “Full of tears, full of laughs” was translated into “Foule de rires, foule de larmes.” The result was a ludic translation, consistent with a mise-en-scène that emphasized physically the absurdity that reigned in the Forest of Arden. Two years later, when asked by director Alice Ronfard to re-translate the play, he scrutinized each word, each phrase focusing not only on their sound, but also on their sense. The book is dedicated to Alice, his “very very Rosalind,” who pushed him to the honesty and transparency necessary to the task (104).

6 There followed, of course, many other translations, only a few of which, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, are discussed in the book in detail. “On est rarement seul quand on traduit Shakespeare” (80). The translator, it becomes clear, is part of a community—of other translators of course, but also, over time, of the tens of thousands of university professors, researchers, and specialists passionate about history, psychology, mythology, astrology, and psychoanalysis who have left us their knowledge of the Shakespeare canon. Not to mention composers, directors, actors, and scenographers (80, 81).

7 It is the final chapter, called “A Translation of The Winter’s Tale” (which to my knowledge he has never translated), that offers the most personal overview of the author’s relationship to Shakespeare. In it Chaurette admits that for a long time he thought that Shakespeare’s love scenes were conventional, forced, and poorly written in comparison with scenes of unimaginable violence like Cornwall’s attack on the eyes of Gloucester. However, it was in translating King Lear that he came to realize that, in spite of his fascination with the human cruelty, humiliation, and suffering in the plays, he wanted to translate, to kill, and to resuscitate Shakespeare precisely because it was in the love scenes that his own and Shakespeare’s zones of discomfort most overlapped (203). Killing Shakespeare is the flip side of being killed by Shakespeare: “Et moi, me suis-je si souvent demandé, comment Shakespeare m’avait-il tué? By what play, what scene did he flay me to the point of sucking me, with so much vigor into his project?” (206). Where did a play make demands on Chaurette’s own artistic integrity? What is the process whereby it becomes necessary to wrestle a work by Shakespeare to the ground in order to make it live? And to allow oneself to live? Comment tuer Shakespeare, which reveals new gems on each rereading, offers fascinating insight into the works of Shakespeare, Chaurette’s creative process, and the challenges of theatrical translation.