Solved! How I Got Mel Brooks In My Shakespeare

Ok, this story is too fascinating not to share.

You’re probably sick of me hyping my Shakespeare is Universal campaign, which features a t-shirt depicting “To be or not to be” translated into languages from around the world.

This morning, Twitter follower @JulietWilliams3 wrote to me, “Your Japanese says ‘Mel Brooks running away’, is that what you meant?”

For a moment I thought she was kidding.  Then my stomach turned as I realized that she was in fact correct, or at least as far as the Mel Brooks went.  Yikes.   I flew back to my original document, and that sequence of Japanese characters was not there. What the heck?  The version that I’ve been using was produced by my graphic designer who did admit to having re-generated much of text.  So now I’m left with the choices of a) a bug in the translation engine, b) designer made a copy-and-paste error of some sort (maybe he was in IMDB?) or c) designer did that on purpose.

I immediately write back to him – a former coworker I haven’t spoken with in 3 years.  I don’t expect a response.

I then turn to Reddit and see that they have a translations  group specifically for this purpose.  So I post up my image and ask for validations of the translation.  Someone who does not know the story tells me that the Japanese reads, “Mel Gibson’s Great Escape.”

And then it all falls into place with this post from swarmtactic:

Yes, Mel Brooks’s “To Be Or Not To Be” was rebranded to be “Mel Brooks’s Great Escape” in the Japanese market, and that is what it says here (I’m guessing silverforest just had a typo with “Mel Gibson”) 

I can confirm silverforest’s translation is accurate. In your graphic designer’s defense, www.alc.co.jp[1] , which is a popular online japanese translation dictionary, lists the Mel Brooks movie as the first entry for the phrase “To be or not to be”, god knows why.

I confirmed this myself – type “to be or not to be” into that engine and you get back the characters which, out of context, would simply tell you “Mel Brooks’ Great Escape.”  (Making this even more confusing?  The Mel Brooks movie The Producers has a song called Run Away! So at first I thought this was a Producers reference!)

So it appears that the engine I was using at the time had a pointer into this service and parroted back whatever it was given.  Amazing that we found that!

I’ve got edited artwork in with the t-shirt people, so this and a couple of other errors will be fixed before the shirts are printed.  Plus I took the opportunity to add Chinese and German ( I learned last night that I forgot German!) so now there’s even more language.  Please, if you haven’t already, consider supporting the movement and showing the world how much you believe in the power of Shakespeare.

Kinderbard

I think that Daeshin Kim would be fun to hang out with.  We have a lot in common.  We both think that it’s never too young to expose our children to Shakespeare. We both think that music is a key component in doing that.  I sing lullabies, never met a pun I didn’t like, and post stories of my geeklets wisdom here on the blog.

And then Daeshin goes off and produces Kinderbard, and we’re in different leagues.  Clearly a labor of love for him and his family, Daeshin and his 5yr old daughter Sherman wrote and produced a collection of nursery rhymes – including Sherman singing them! – that they call “A Horse With Wings” (Imogen, from Cymbeline).  Each rhyme is sung from the perspective of a Shakespeare character, and attempts the dual task of teaching a lesson (or dealing with an issue) while providing some context about the character doing the singing.

Example?  Juliet’s song, “It’s just a name.”  If you know the story of Romeo and Juliet you’ll immediately recognize the idea behind Juliet’s “What’s in a name?” speech.  Here, sung by Sherman, it’s a song about dealing with teasing when your perhaps your own name is on the more unusual side.

Or maybe Cordelia’s “I don’t know what to say” song, encouraging shy children to speak up for themselves.

Of course there are the silly ones, too.  Two Gentlemen of Verona‘s contribution is the “Smelly Dog” song, and let me just tell you now, the dog doesn’t smell because it needs a bath, it smells because of what somebody’s been feeding it.  If you get what I mean.

And then there’s Falstaff’s dirty laundry song, where he comes face to face with something so disgusting I’m not going to blog about it (but it will no doubt have younger children in stitches).

Honestly there’s not a great deal of Shakespeare in this.  The coverage is impressive, with contributions from 16 different plays (not just “the big ones”).  Where possible they sneak in direct references (Yorick sings about giving piggyback rides, and As You Like It’s Jaques pretty much sings a simplified version of his entire ages of man speech), and there is some artwork with original quotes.  But I don’t think that a child is going to come away from any of the songs with any long term understanding of Shakespeare.  Although I’ve often said that at the youngest age, the most important thing is recognition of character and maybe plot.  So if the kids who work through Kinderbard learn about Ariel and Yorick and Cordelia and remember those names?  It’s a good start!

Disclaimer – Daeshin and I have discussed this, and he’s clear that his goal is “a songbook that happens to have Shakespeare as its source”, and that he is not primarily attempting to teach Shakespeare.  So I don’t feel as if I’m throwing him under the bus by going here.  This is, after all, a Shakespeare blog so I have to take the logical angle.  If I saw this on a shelf I’d want to know how much Shakespeare my kids are going to get out of it.

My kids are too old for the collection now, but I’d like to think that if it had existed when mine were still young enough that I was popping nursery rhyme CDs into the car stereo when we drove around town?  That I would have picked it up.  If nothing else Kinderbard shows what can happen when you’ve got the kid of passion for a project that Daeshin has demonstrated.

This year’s Shakespeare Day Celebration is sponsored in part by Shakespeare Is Universal: Shakespeare truly is for everyone, and nothing demonstrates that sentiment better than his most famous quote of all, translated here into languages from around the world.   In celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, show that you believe his works are just as relevant, powerful and important as they’ve ever been!

Another #ShakespeareDay Is Done

*phew!*

So, how was your day?

This year I succeeded in publishing a new record *28* stories.  And you know what?  I’m pretty sure that a silly picture I tweeted in the middle of the day got more traffic than all of those stories combined.  But that’s ok.  Tweets are temporary, posts are forever.

Here’s a quick recap of the day’s action, since so many posts will have scrolled into the archives before most people get to see them:

  1. My Shakespeare, Rise!
  2. Cover Songs and Sampling
  3. Playing Against Type
  4. Deconstructing Shakespeare
  5. Theme Song Shakespeare : And The Rest!
  6. The Master
  7. A Game! Novel Perspective
  8. Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music
  9. A New Sonnets to Music Collection
  10. WIN One of the Beautiful Shakespeare Signature Series, Free!
  11. Review : Undiscovered Country by Lin Enger
  12. Synetic Shakespeare
  13. “Shakespeare” by Jaden Smith
  14. Romeo & Juliet Trailer
  15. Drive-by Earl of Oxford Jokes
  16. Review : Shakespeare Shaken
  17. Review : So Long, Shakespeare
  18. Willie “Shakespeare” Joel’s Greatest Hits
  19. Kinderbard
  20. Dreaming in Shakespeare (A Continuing Series)
  21. Tales from Shakespeare : Illustrated
  22. Why Are Some Plays Better Recognized Than Others?
  23. Pen Us A Play You’re The Stratford Man
  24. Review : The Wednesday Wars
  25. Rocky Shakespeare III
  26. What Shakespeare Means To Me
  27. Is Shakespeare Universal? Show Your Support!
  28. Why Should I?
This year I’m trying something a little different. I’m running a fundraiser that I’m calling “Shakespeare is Universal.”  In the style of Kickstarter, this company Teespring produces a much higher quality product at a lower price than any other outlet I’ve yet found.  The trick is that you need to get a minimum number of people to sign up for the campaign (i.e. reserve a shirt) by a certain time.  By working in bulk quantities the prices stay low, without sacrificing the quality. 
I am hoping that loyal readers who have enjoyed the blog and everything I’ve done for the cause of Shakespeare over the years will do me the honor of joining the campaign.  There’s three good reasons I’d really like to see this latest effort of mine succeed. First, there’s the obvious practical reason that if I have money I can spend it on more cool Shakespeare things. I don’t believe in lying about that or trying to hide it.
Second, I think it’s a nice shirt.  I made this image awhile ago by taking “To be or not to be” and translating it into as many languages as I could find, and had a graphic designer friend help me with the layout.  When you look at the patterns and realize how you can tell what it says even when you can’t speak the language you begin to see Shakespeare as this Rosetta Stone that enables communication between people all around the world. I think that’s a very cool idea.  When we talk about “Shakespeare for everyone” that doesn’t just mean English speakers.
Lastly there’s a reason of personal importance to me.  If the campaign succeeds, that will mean that there’s at least a hundred people out there who’ll be wearing shirts that identify them as fellow Shakespeare geeks.  One day I will bump into somebody in the wild who is wearing one of them, and that will be an amazing milestone for me, because my bond with that person will be deep and it will be instant, yet again confirming that power that Shakespeare brings out in all of us.

Why Should I?

I promised to speak more about this after I did a video conference with Bardfilm’s students.  It’s a topic that we cover frequently, but it’s important to revisit it from time to time so that we’re all on the same page.

Why should you read Shakespeare?  (* Let’s not argue “read” versus “see”, that’s not what this is about.  I mean why should people expose themselves to Shakespeare.  Moving on..)

When you are in school someone will tell you to read Shakespeare.  If you’re unlucky enough not to get a better answer you may spot a trap — he’s famous because we all study him, but we all study him because he’s famous.  You make us read him because he’s important. Why is he important? He must be, everybody reads him.  Those aren’t answers.

You may go into theatre, in which case you will likely seek out Shakespeare on your own on the path to perfecting your craft.

Or you may go the scholarly route and choose to study the body of his works down to the last punctuation point, coming at it from history or spectral analysis or statistics or any possible angle.  And that’s fine too. Over the years I’ve met many people from programmers to physicists who have brought Shakespeare with them into their profession.

I’m not talking about any of those people.  I’m talking about that other 99% of the world who, once they leave the academic world of being told what to read and why to read it, will have to decide whether to voluntarily expose themselves to more of Mr. Shakespeare.

Why should they?  Take that literally.  Assume that you’ve just been introduced to someone at a party, and you make a Shakespeare reference.  The person says, “Oh, I’ve never read Hamlet.”

“Oh, you have to!” you say.

“Why should I?” says she.

What’s your answer?

I know what we *feel*.  I want to communicate that, logically. I want to find the vocabulary to have this discussion, because I think there are a hundred chances a day to have it if only we knew how to do it.

This year’s Shakespeare Day Celebration is sponsored in part by Shakespeare Is Universal: Shakespeare truly is for everyone, and nothing demonstrates that sentiment better than his most famous quote of all, translated here into languages from around the world. In celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday, show that you believe his works are just as relevant, powerful and important as they’ve ever been!