Daniel Hahn on 'If this be Magic - The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation'

H (0:07): What does it take to carry Shakespeare across languages? Not just his plots and his characters but the very heartbeat of his verse. Today I am speaking with Daniel Hahn, one of the most celebrated literary translators working today. With several works to his credit, he has translated fiction, non fiction, children's books and plays from across Europe, Africa and The Americas. He is the recipient of Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Blue Peter Book Award and the 2023 Out of Way Award for the promotion of International Literature.

In 2020, he was appointed an OBE for his services to literature. Daniel's new book, If This Be Magic, The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation, is part love letter, part close reading and part globetrotting investigation, One that took him from Budapest theatre seats to Zoom calls with translators working in everything from Swahili to Bangla. It's a book that asks: When you change everything, can you still keep everything? Published in April 2026, If This Be Magic, The Unlikely Art of Shakespearean Translation by Daniel Hahn, is a non fiction book exploring how Shakespeare's plays are translated, adapted and reimagined for global audiences. It investigates the challenges of translating Shakespearean language, wordplay and poetry across different cultures and languages.

H (1:37): So it's almost three years ago I read your Catching a Fire: A Translation Diary, which of course would be my top most recommendation if anyone asks me about what translation really entails. So, from Catching Fire to Shakespeare, what does this book add to the discourse on translation, art of translation?

Daniel Hahn (1:57): Well, thank you first of all for the question and for reading Catching Fire and saying nice things about it. The book about Shakespeare is similar to Catching Fire in one sense, that I don't think it's full of what you might call sort of additions to the discourse in the sense that I don't think I it's full of, like, original ideas about translation. But I think both of them are attempts to maybe bring new people into the conversation about translation. So both of them are ways of doing the thing that I'm interested in, is figuring out how to talk about translation to people who might not be experts. Neither of the books is written for an expert audience, neither is written for an academic audience.

I tried very hard to not make assumptions about what my audience, you know, my readers will know. And so in that sense, the books are similar. The Shakespeare book is also about Shakespeare as well as about translation. But I think it's partly about a way of talking, you know, with genuine enthusiasm to people who may not have spent much time on those subjects or may not might not think those subjects are for them rather than adding a new thing. Like, I I haven't got a new theory.

I'm not selling a new strategy for anything or a theory about anything, but I'm trying to share these things that are important to me a little bit more widely. That's all.

H(3:28): Unlike the books that you translate, where you communicate with living With some of these translators, in fact, most of them, you have mentioned in the book that you had extensive communication. What was the experience like?

Daniel Hahn (3:44): Oh, it was amazing. I mean, decided really early that I wanted the book to be about the, like, the practicalities of translating Shakespeare. And so it was obvious to me really early that in order to do that well, and and in order to enjoy it the most, I would need to track down some people who had translated Shakespeare or were translating Shakespeare and actually talk to them. And so I had quite extensive interviews, sometimes multiple interviews with I think 13 or 14 translators working with Shakespeare and in languages Hungarian, Danish, Swahili, Terro, Maori, Bungalow, a mix of languages from a number of different places. And a lot of the insights in the book are things that came from those conversations.

But also I think that those people I got to interview, and often what would happen is I would have a one hour or an hour and a half meeting with them, sometimes two meetings on Zoom or in person, but then I sent them 10,000 emails with follow-up questions and another thing, oh, I just noticed this neutralization, can you explain what's happened? They were incredibly patient, all of them. But I think one of the things that also became clear to me sort of at the very end, like literally when I had my first finished copies and was sending my finished copies to these people I'd interviewed, was that they, you know, contributed to the book and they were, you know, they were incredibly helpful and so on. But also the book became a sort of I sent a copy to the Danish translator and said, this is basically a 400 page fan letter to you. You know, it is like writing a very long fan letter about how clever these people are.

 And that sort of generosity with me allowed me to see that a little bit. But it's, yeah, it's about these individuals who are doing this amazing work in a way much more than it's about anything abstract.

H(5:42): Now I was just wondering, normally translators, literary translators get paid by the words, right, the number of words that they translate mostly. So how many number of hours it must have taken for you to complete this book? It's amazingly detailed.

Daniel Hahn (5:57): Yeah, I'm not going to calculate how many hours it took, because it will make me very unhappy. But it was also, I mean, I have to say, the writing was quite quick. Write quite quickly. The research took a long time. But the research was also so much fun.

 I mean, if you all know as someone who's interested in translation that the pleasure of, like, going to Budapest, seeing a production of Shakespeare in the Hungarian, Twelfth Night in Hungarian in that case, and then having lunch with the translator and talking about all of the things that were challenging and how he made clever solutions. Like, it's a lot of hours and I spent a lot of time, you know, pouring over editions and trying to work out what was happening in this Gujarati line and what was happening in this, you know, Italian line. But it was so much fun. So I don't I don't object to the fact that it was a lot of hours.

H(6:55): Now when it comes to translating Shakespeare beyond the plot, now what are the specific smallest units of writing you believe a translator must preserve to keep Shakespeare as Shakespeare?

Daniel Hahn (7:09): I mean, I think that's that that question, in a sense, is is the most important question about, like, what or it's almost what is literary translation, that question, isn't it? Because I think that when you're translating a writer like Shakespeare who who, you know, I argue is a very good writer, which is not an unusual argument, one of the things that I think is important about the way he writes is that it's not things are not accidental. Like if a line is slightly longer or slightly shorter or has a lot of consonants or is only a half line or the rhythm is interrupted somehow, these things have an effect. And so really when you're translating Shakespeare or any other, you know, writer who is whether the writing is very kinetic, you want to keep everything. And so in order to keep him as Shakespeare, you want to keep all of these the the the properties of this writing, which has a number of challenges, one of which is that, of course, every language is different and you can't do the same things with with different languages.

And the other difficulty is you, of course, have to notice everything. And so one of the examples I give in the book is a moment in Hamlet where Shakespeare sort of reverses the stress at the beginning of a line in order to give a kind of moment of sudden impact to the actor who's gonna speak the line and therefore to the audience who's going to listen. And the Danish translator has to figure out how am I going to make Hamlet Hamlet's line have that sort of jolt at the beginning. But before they do that, they have to notice it. They have to be of all of these 25,000 words in this play and all of the 37, 38 plays, they need to also notice that the word that the line, angels and ministers of grace defend us begins with a hard syllable rather than a soft a hard stress rather than a soft dress.

So the the slightly flippant answer, is everything. You need to give everything in order to keep Shakespeare as Shakespeare. But as all translators are doing all the time, keeping everything also means changing everything.

H (9:25): All languages won't work in the same way as we know. So when a translator moves into a syllable time language like French or Mandarin, is it possible to replicate the same repulsive energy or must they invent an entirely new engine?

Daniel Hahn (9:43): You have to do something, and you can't do the same things in French as you do in English because French doesn't work sort of the way we think about English stress with iams and troches and whatever. That that you you can't I mean, French doesn't naturally work like that. It's, as you say, it's a syllable timed language rather than a stressed timed language. And so what you have to do as a translator is you have to figure out what is the effect of this thing, which might be regularity, it might be breaking with regularity, and it's you know, you're you're trying to work out what is happening in the verse. And then you use whatever tools you have at your disposal to replicate that.

One of the reasons that Shakespeare might use regular ambic pentameter for a few lines is so that you then notice when there is a jolt and it becomes irregular. You know, you make a pattern in order to break the pattern. And what I talked to a French translator, for example, Jean Michel Dupuis, we met a couple of times, and he talked about the things that he could do because he could make the language simpler, he could make the words shorter, he could make a shorter line When Macbeth's witches are talking and they have a completely different meter in English, he couldn't replicate the meter, he could make the lines shorter. So they all have seven syllable lines where everything else is in longer lines. So you think about what the function of the verse is to create a structure from which you deviate, and you then use what you happen to have to hand.

In English, happens to be iamb's, you know, pairs of syllables that go or trochets that go. But in French you do something different, but you build something that does the same things even if you're not using the same materials or the same tools.

H(11:40): The next one is a very interesting one. In chapter three, you highlight the moment Romeo and Juliet first speak and accidentally it forms a perfect sonar. So how does a translator handle a moment where the form of the poetry is the primary way the audience understands the character's connection? This is fascinatingly detailed, actually. I loved it.

Daniel Hahn (12:04): For people who are going to be frightened of the book, this gives you an idea of what it's like. Because it is really detailed, and I hope it's not forbidding, but it's really it really is about how like the mechanics of language. And so as you say, there's a moment, the first conversation that Romeo and Juliet have. So Romeo has been talking about some other girl whom we're never going to meet, Rosalyn, like she's not significant, but he then we then have him and Juliet in a room together. And as you say, the first conversation they have happens to form I'd say happens to, I'll come back to that, happens to form a perfect sonnet.

 So they have one extended metaphor that they build on what each other says. They have lines that rhyme with each other's lines. And so their first 14 lines are 14 lines of verse forming a perfect, completely regular sonnet. And the important thing for a translator is not only to notice that, but also to make this assumption that we do about a lot of the writers that we're translating, that this is not an accident. So in fact, it isn't just happening to happen.

This is a very deliberate thing. And there is a message to us in this chaotic Verona that Romeo and Juliet are supposed to be together. The moment they come together, they just form. They they are completely, you know, absolutely the set, completely in sync somehow. And this is important for how the audience experiences that moment as well.

It's not that the audience is sitting there going, wait a second, I think this is a summit. But the audience have a sense of it being like a, you know, like a machine perfectly clicking together. And everything slots together with a really satisfying click, and you know that these people are supposed to be together. You don't know, you know, you don't sit there and go, wait a second, so lines thirteen and fourteen rhymed, and lines one and three and two and four rhymed, but you do hear them and go, something about this tells me that they are supposed to be together. Which means that for a translator, the fact that it is a summit is not at all an irrelevant part.

 It's not just a cosmetic thing. It is an it is integral to the moment. And so, as a translator, it might be that you can't do a sonnet, but you want to do something. You want the lines they speak to kind of slot perfectly together. But actually, think, again, think about the kind of assumptions we make about the writers we translate if we believe that they are really good writers like Shakespeare.

Form is never just an accident or ever just a thing that is separate from the content or the plot or the character. If Shakespeare has a couple of characters speaking in dialogue in alternating lines of verse, and then one of them suddenly has half a line that is completed by the other character, or there is half a line that is never completed and left kind of hanging, that's also a meaningful thing because it's a thing that has an effect on the way the audience hears this slight this slight kind of syncopated moment. So form is incredibly important, but it's only incredibly important because it's not a separate thing from all of the other things that you're translating.

H (15:16): What the writer wants to communicate. Yes. You know, it's a wonderful choice to take Shakespeare. One thing is he is universally known almost. And the other part is there is lot of literature which has already been written about, lot of criticism, you know, lot of stuff written about him. Probably the modern translators of people who are doing it now, you mentioned about translator noticing these shifts and these nuances, probably this literature will help the new translators so they can handle the experiment.

Daniel Hahn (15:50): Yeah, totally. And there's a little thing about this in the book because they, you know, when I talk to translators working today, they translate mostly from contemporary editions which have footnotes and have introductions and there is critical material and whatever. And so they can benefit from research and they can benefit from also from the internet. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that, you know, information that exists and work that other people have done that they can build on. I was always amazed looking at, because I do look at some of the old translations, you know, like a 1930s translation from Brazil, where I would kind of read it and go, but how did the translator know this?

Like, how did he know this is what the word meant? He didn't have Google. This is not this is an old world that was no longer in dictionaries. And so one one Brazilian translator in particular who I was attached to, I I did keep wondering, like I had some issues with his translation, but I did keep thinking, it is amazing that you knew what this reference was and have no idea how he knew.

H (16:54): This question follows the earlier question. You mentioned that in languages like Japanese, rhyming can feel overemphatic or unnatural. So how do translators like Kawaii use the absence of rhyme to signal a shift in a character's mental state?

Daniel Hahn (17:12): So it relates a little bit to what I said about pentameter that you you are sometimes creating a pattern in order to break it. Right? And so rhyme has lots of effects. Rhyme does lots of different things when you are using it. But one of the effects it has is to set up a pattern that then you notice when the rhyming stops.

 And so the translator you mentioned, Chotirukawa, a Japanese translator, because Japanese rhymes very rarely, and therefore it feels very kind of heavy handed, he said, he had been translating Shakespeare's plays without rhyme, simply. He thought that it would be really obtrusive in a way that it's not in English, and so why would you make why would you, like, add that that kind of uncomfortable thing? But he then got to a moment in Midsummer Night's Dream where the four lovers are on stage and they're having an argument, and the scene had been rhyming. And suddenly, it stops rhyming and it then doesn't go back to being rhyming until the last couplet. There are, you know, 100 and something lines with that rhyme.

And he realized that the stopping of rhyme is really important there because it had been sort of playful and jokey, and then it sort of moves into a minor key when one of the characters thinks, actually, everyone is just being very cruel to me. And so it's very difficult to create the effect of not rhyming if you have been not rhyming the whole time. So at this point, he kind of went back, reinstated the went back to his first translation, his translation of Hamlet, and reinstated the rhymes so that he could then have the effect of breaking from the rhymes. I think he said that he had he still kept much less rhyme than in English because it is so much more conspicuous in Japanese. I think that's what he said to me.

So it's not like every time there's rhyme in English there's one in Japanese. The balance is different. But he needed to use some of it not only to create effect in itself, you know, two things, two words being associated together that you're supposed to associate, but also so that he could do things like create the effect of rhyme rhyme rhyme rhyme, not rhyme. And so you can hear that change in temperature in the scene.

H(19:26): And the other one is interesting. Do you highlight how words like thou and you versus you, thou versus you, we don't use thou anymore, can change the entire temperature of the scene. So in modern translations, how do you handle

Daniel Hahn (19:41): It's interesting because thou and you so for people who don't know, the word thou is not just an old way of saying you. Thou is how you say you in the singular, informal, affectionate, intimate you know, or looking down on form. And there are lots of languages that do that today. In English, we have kind of narrowed to a single you. And I would address you as you, whether you were my best friend or the president.

 And if you're one person or many people, or if you're a child or if you're an elder, I would always use the word you in some form in English. In Shakespeare's day, they didn't. But also in lots of other languages, they don't. And so in one sense, we have a if you were translating into modern English, you would have a problem because we because you would narrow that distinct you'd the distinction because, again, there's a reason why a character will address someone as thou rather than you or vice versa. If you're translating into French, if you're translating into Hindi, if you're translating into a language which retains aspects of Hindi, as I understand it, has two distinct pronouns, up up

H(20:50): Yeah, even Telugu, yeah.

Daniel Hahn (20:52): You can simply replace all or roughly speaking, replace all of the thales with one and all of the years with another. Modern English, as far as I can tell, is relatively unusual actually in being stuck with the one undifferentiated one. And lots of languages, most translators I talked to said, oh actually this is quite easy. I'm sure this is, I mean I don't know any Hindi, but my guess is that it would be true that if you are completely if you are a Hindi speaker for whom that distinction is really clear between the two second person forms, then you of you don't even have to think about it. If someone addresses someone else in one form, you automatically, without thinking, know that this person is being respectful or disrespectful or intimate or whatever.

 In a way, there's an English audience now will hear thou and you, and, like, even if we know that thou means one thing. It's not sort of you have to kind of think about it a bit more. So a lot of the translations are because they're doing something in the language which is immediately familiar to you today. They yeah. There's something that is a little bit closer to the the translation is a little bit closer to an audience than an than a a kind of contemporary English could be.

H (22:12): Just read in Hindi you have tu, tum and aap. Aap is very respectful and the tu is intimate kind of friends and stuff. Use tu.

Daniel Hahn (22:22): I think somewhere in the book there is I have an example using those two pronouns. The Hindi pronoun.

H: You argue that while modern English audiences might struggle with the 400 year old vocabulary, Ukrainian or Korean audience might hear the play with more freshness. So does translation actually make Shakespeare more accessible than the original?

Daniel Hahn (22:47): It often is more accessible than Shakespeare than 400 year old Shakespeare is to us today, Partly because you're trying, I mean, if a translator isn't using anachronistic language, they're usually not making like 400 year old language. So they are doing things that are a bit more sort of directly into the language they use today, which is to say the language their audience will use today. So an example I use, I think, in the book, and there's a kind of famous one, obvious one, Juliet stands on the balcony and says, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? And the word wherefore means why. She's not saying where are you, she's saying why are you Romeo rather than some other name she goes on to.

 Wherefore is not a word that most of us use in English today. And even if you know what it means because you've seen Romeo and Juliet before or you've studied or whatever, it's not a completely automatic thing. You know, you see her saying, wherefore art thou Romeo? You have to do a little bit of there's a little bit of cognitive work. Right?

If, you're seeing Romeo and Juliet in, Tamil or in French or in Polish or whatever, probably what you're getting is the word why. In French, you hear, are you Romeo? In Shakespeare, in in Spanish Shakespeare, you hear, are you Romeo? You get whatever is the most direct way of saying why that is what the audience are getting. And so on the one hand, an audience in Warsaw might be getting something that is much more directly accessible than it is to an audience in London, say.

 But actually, what they're getting is also much closer to the experience of seeing Shakespeare in Shakespeare's day, where his audience I mean, Shakespeare does sometimes use archaic language for his period, but most of his writing is is comprehensible to the people who are watching Julius Caesar in The Globe in 1599.

H (24:46): You know Shakespeare's puns. When a pun is literally untranslatable, which happens most of the times, do you prefer a substitution or compensation? So finding a new joke versus placing a joke somewhere else in the scene.

Daniel Hahn (25:02): So most of the lids I talked to found something they could do. And it's usually something they can do in in the moment. Because, actually because these are dramatic texts, these are things that are telling a story on a stage, there's usually a reason why it's now. You want to you're you're we're being told something about a character. So there's an example which I have in the book about, a moment in Richard the second where he does this very elaborate wordplay.

And the point isn't really to make the audience laugh. The point is for the audience to understand what kind of person we're dealing with and what kind of situation he's in. Like, you might laugh a little bit because it's clever, but really the point is we're supposed it it instructs us about the person. So giving, like, a different character a joke in that scene doesn't have that effect at all. But I I think effect is often the words that you want an audience to laugh or you want an audience to understand something, you want an audience to make a connection, And you can usually do something even if it's not the same the same thing as Shakespeare's doing.

Sometimes the word play is just is just play. Sometimes you can tell that it's just people having fun and showing off, and then it doesn't matter if it's in the first line or the third line or whatever. And there are some nice examples in the book of places where, you know, a translator kind of goes, I couldn't do that. You know, there's a sort of dirty joke here, but I could do this kind of bawdy thing and three lines later, and it's the same character, the same speech, and it feels natural, inherent in that language.

H(26:36): So after looking at dozens of versions of this play, do you think the ideal translation exists? Or to put it another way, which of these conversations with these translators you enjoyed most?

Daniel Hahn (26:51): So it's it that's the second in a funny way, the second question is harder than the first because I love talking to translators and understanding their work, but often, I would look at translations I can't read. So I was looking at translations because the the book jumps around between 49 languages and I don't know most of them, I mean, overwhelmingly. And so I loved talking to, you know, Adam Nagaszty was a great Hungarian translator and we had lunch a couple of times and had a lot to email, he was very generous, incredibly clever and entertaining. I think I probably love his translations from what he explained to me about them, but I would need to learn Hungarian to a very high standard to be able to judge.

H(27:28): Yeah, I should have phrased it properly. I should have asked you about the approach of the translator, not the, you know.

Daniel Hahn (27:34): So maybe that is a slightly easier one. But I think, again, part of the enjoyment of the book is seeing the range, right? So I talk to people who were very concerned about this thing rather than that thing, people who were actually quite emboldened and people who are more cautious. But going back to the the first part of the question about the ideal translation, I think in one sense, of course, the ideal translation doesn't exist because the ideal poem doesn't exist in the ideal play or novel. Like, this is not that's not how art works.

You know, you kind of think that this is as good as I can imagine it being, but nothing, you know, no piece of art is going to be able to do everything because everything is too complicated. But yes, I think the ideal translation is like the perfect sonnet is a useful thing to it's useful to pretend that it exists. Right? It's useful for us to have it as not looking at a Shakespeare play and going, you know, I guess I'll do the best I can, but looking at a Shakespeare play and going, my aim is to do everything. My aim is at every moment to maintain exactly the same kinetic energy and effect and shape and assonance.

And of course, it's impossible, but you do something different instead. You, you know, replace something with something else. I think I think as an aspirational thing, the ideal translation exists. But aspirational things are also not actually concrete things.

H (29:09): Now for the people full disclosure, I am one of them. For the people who haven't read much of Shakespeare, how should they approach the book? I loved it, by the way.

Daniel Hahn (29:18): I mean, I would love people who who don't know a lot of Shakespeare to read the book, actually. And I tried as I said before, I tried to make it I tried not to make assumptions about what people know, and I tried to explain whatever it is you do need to know along the way. So if we throw around thing terms like iambic pentameter, there is a thing that will say, know, iambic pentameter, let me just tell you briefly in a couple of lines what that is. I'm not assuming that anyone's going to know when they start what a, you know, koreanbic opening to an iambic line is. There isn't very much of that of joke.

In the rare occasions where I have something technical, I I explain it, I think. And so my assumption about about the readers I mean, I don't think anyone who has never heard of Shakespeare is going to pick up this book. And, you know, the, one of the two English language editions has his face on the cover, so, you know, that's how it is. But I don't assume that people are going to know all the plays or know them very well or be able to quote them. I assume that if I say Romeo and Juliet to a reader, they will have a sense of what that is.

I Might have seen a movie, might have seen it or studied it at school. They probably will know it's like a it's a love story and, everyone dies at the end. They don't need to be able to quote, you know, a thousand lines of it. They might know which one Hamlet is. Again, there's a movie.

They might have seen it or studied it, they might remember to be or not to be. But Hamlet, like people, you might recognize to be or not to be, that is the question, from somewhere, or you might have a sense of some, like an image of an actor holding a skull at the moment, like, so I don't this is not for scholars. It is not for experts, though I hope they will enjoy it too. It's for people who I kind of in a way, what I would love people to get from this book is people coming to the book knowing a little bit about Shakespeare, but maybe not completely, like, getting what the fuss is about. And then when I do some of the really nerdy stuff, going, actually, look how clever this line is.

Look at the effect of changing the stress from the second syllable to the first syllable, which is like not how we normally consume plays or or anything. That some people might read it and go, actually, I have some understanding now of one of the ways in which Shakespeare is not just, like, old and famous, also, like, the level of cleverness and craft that's happening. And variety. So, like, there's a chapter about this also sounds very nerdy. There's a chapter about monosyllables.

 And I think you don't know much about Shakespeare. You will be completely forgiven for assuming that he uses lots of big, long, complicated poetic words. And actually a lot of which is which he sometimes does, like people sometimes do. But a lot of the time he creates his effect with very basic, very simple words, with very short monosyllabic words, which everybody would understand, any English speaker would understand today. So there's a line I refer to, a speech I refer to in the book, where King Lear has come on stage with his daughter who has died.

And one of the lines he has is, Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all? Apart from the word thou, which is, as we talked about, a way of saying you, everything else like, those that's not difficult words. You don't need to be like a a professor of English to know the words, why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life? And you, there's no breath at all. It's incredibly it's it's incredibly powerful, but I also think it's not what people expect if they don't know much Shakespeare.

 That sometimes it is very simple and very stark and very direct and monosyllabic and very straightforward words. So, yeah, I hope the book started as as using Shakespeare to write about translation, but it became kind of using close translator reading as a way of saying something about Shakespeare. So I hope people will come to the book without too much fear and assuming that it doesn't really matter if we know stuff might be sold a little bit.

H (33:49): No. One thing that really fascinated me about the writing in the book is that, see, I keep a close watch on the craft of translation when I am reading as far as I could. The most challenging part in any translation, feel, when there are more languages creep in other than the source and destination languages polyphonic, I think it's called. So the way you handled these many languages and made it readable is something really nice.

Daniel Hahn(34:19): Thank you. That's nice of you to say. It was one of the fun bits, but it also was a thing that depended on a lot of expertise that I didn't have myself. If you I don't know if you looked at the acknowledgments page at the back, but there's a long list of people, many of whom you have interviewed, in fact, of translators you've had on the podcast before, who who helped me with stuff, answering my questions, sitting down and reading with me, adding their voice to the audiobook. There are lots of different ways in which people, you know, contributed.

H (34:49): It would be great to have an audio format.

Daniel Hahn (34:51): So I recorded the audiobook, so it's in my voice.

H(34:54): Oh, wonderful.

Daniel Hahn (34:55): But with 22 or 23, I think, other people recording different languages, some of whom were friends of mine. So Antonia Lloyd Jones, whom we have interviewed. Antonia helped me with the Polish, but she also recorded the Polish bits for the audiobook. But the audiobook, as you can imagine, because there are 49 languages in the book, the audiobook has to jump around between voices because I could learn how to say two or three words in India or Kannada or Gujarati, but I don't speak any of them. And so we need to get someone, like, I don't speak any South Asian language.

I don't speak the Eastern European language or or North America. So, yes, it was it was one of the pleasures was jumping around between languages and and getting other people's expertise. But I also think that's how it becomes, I hope, comprehensible to a reader because I needed to get Mui Pupoksakol to explain the Thai to me because I don't know Thai, and then I can explain the Thai to a readership. So I make no assumptions because I don't know any of this stuff either. So when Murray says, these are the things you need to look at, this is what is typical in Thai, and this is not typical in Thai, I then completely plagiarize the things she said, and that goes into my explanation because I wouldn't know what to look for.

I wouldn't know how to spot which is the repeated syllable or how do the clusters of vowels work together or whatever it is. And so I do think genuinely that the fact that I was usually on terrain in which I am with which I'm completely unfamiliar probably made it easier to explain it in a quite straightforward way to other people who have never had to work out how Georgian works or whatever it is. Because I also don't know Georgian. And so I had to have a friend pointing things to me and underlining and sending me voice notes with pronunciation and so on. And it was a huge team effort, this one.

H (36:55): Great. Now you are traveling across the world talking to various readers and talking to readers. How has been the experience?

Daniel Hahn (37:03): It's been really nice so far. I mean, I've done I'm only a bit of the way through. The book hasn't been out for very long. It came out from The UK a few weeks ago and in The US not even about two weeks ago. So I've done the first few events in The UK.

I've done a few events here in North America where I am in Canada and here in The US. I spoke at a bookstore in Boston two nights ago. I'm going to be in New York. I'm getting a train to New York just in a few minutes to do an event there. And it's been great.

 Because the book is very new, most people come having not read it and come to discover it and then buy it. And I think and I've already had a couple of people who have already read the book and have questions, but that's a slightly different conversation. So I think that because I'm gonna be doing I'm doing a couple of events in New York this week, then I'm back home briefly, but then Australia and New Zealand, and then lots of events around The UK the rest of the year. And I do think the conversation slightly changes when the book is a few months old, and I'm talking to people who've read it and have questions. Much more like, you know, doing an interview as we're doing now, you know, kind of thing where there is a kind of there has been some thought in advance.

At the moment, it's much more explaining what the book is to people and people responding and asking questions. But it's yeah. It's fun. And I mean, I love this part. I love talking about it.

H (38:21): Thank you very much, Denis. Despite your busy schedule, you know, traveling across the countries, you gave me time to talk about it. And I wish you the I wish you a great success for your future ventures and this book too. And I'm hopeful that you will come to India and talk about the book too with us.

Daniel Hahn (38:38): I would really love you. I would one day this will happen, and I will see you in person at last.