Images below - scenes from a performance of Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night', in Sikh/Punjabi costume, at the Stratford Festival, Ontario, Canada.
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Oye! Shakespeare in Punjabi
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For Surjit Singh Hans, a well known Punjabi litterateur and retired professor of history, reading Shakespeare in English was not very easy. So he translated the Bard's plays into Punjabi.
The love for his mother tongue drove Surjit to take up the tedious task, which perhaps no Punjabi writer had even thought of.
"It gives me extreme pleasure to translate Shakespeare in Punjabi. It is something that the coming generations will cherish forever," he quipped, sitting in his library containing collection of rare books of history.
It took 79-year-old Surjit Singh more than 16 years to translate 31 plays (done so far) of Shakespeare into Punjabi which are already in print, while six are still in the pipeline.
Hans says he wants to complete the translation of all Shakespeare plays in his lifetime.
When asked as to what inspired him to translate the huge Shakespeare work into Punjabi, Surjit Singh Hans said, "I studied English, taught English, but never loved the language."
[For story on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night being performed in Sikh/Punjabi costume at the 2006 Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Ontario, Canada, click on http://sikhchic.com/article-detail.php?id=4&cat=12 ]
November 26, 2009
Conversation about this article
1: Gurinder Singh Johal (Amritsar, Punjab), November 28, 2009, 9:34 AM.
Translation work is so difficult to do becouse it requires in-depth knowledge of two languages. Certainly, it's a great job you've done, Surjit ji. People in Punjab need to get back to their old habits of reading!