Paperback/Kindle eBook
Twelfth Night: A Verse Translation
ISBN: 0-9752743-0-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-9752743-0-9
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"Students will benefit much more by reading these [translations] than by secretly buying and following those well-known study guides. Richmond has performed a service for English-speaking students everywhere."
—Boak Ferris, California State University, Long Beach
It came by sea,
a love that sings
both high and low.
This complete, line-by-line Twelfth Night translation makes the language of Shakespeare's play contemporary while preserving the metrical rhythm, complexity, and poetic qualities of the original.
The aim is to capture both sound and sense of Shakespeare's romantic comedy without the need for glosses or notes—to use contemporary language without simplifying or modernizing the play in any other way.
Readers experience this hilarious tale of mistaken identity and frustrated love with the challenge, comprehension, and delight of audiences 400 years ago—the way Shakespeare intended.
Appendix: How Iambic Pentameter Works. 160 pages.
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Twelfth Night Translation Excerpt
From Act 1 Scene 1
DUKE ORSINO (Duke of Illyria)
If music is the food of love, play on.
Fill me with such excess, that gorged on it,
My craving turns to sickness, and thus dies.
That song again! Its cadence fell away.
O, it came past my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing in, giving fragrance!
[pause for music]
Enough. No more.
It’s not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! So keen and ravenous,
That, even though your vast capacity
Lets in as much as seas, what enters there
Despite its value and the height it gains
Will sink into low price and worthlessness,
In but a minute! So rich in forms is love
That it alone incites such fantasy.
"At what point does a stage of a language become so different from the modern one as to make translation necessary? Mr. Richmond is brave enough to assert that, for Shakespeare, that time has come. The French have Moliere, the Russians have Chekhov—and now, we can truly say that we have our Shakespeare.” —John McWhorter, Manhattan Institute
