Book review: "The Klingon Hamlet"
Book Review:
"The Klingon Hamlet
The restored Klingon version, prepared by the Klingon Language Institute"
Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader
In "Star Trek VI - The undiscovered county" Klingon Chancellor Gowron says
"You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon."
Essentially, this book, an illustration of just how far the devotees of some science fiction genres are prepared to go to bring the worlds of their favourite stories to life, has been written to give the reader the opportunity to do just that.
The forewords and appendices depict the belief of the Klingon Empire at the time of "Star Trek" that "Wil'yam Shex'pir" was a Klingon author and playwright, who lived at the time which on Earth we will call the 23rd Century who wrote all the works we ascribe to "William Shakespeare."
The Klingons are supposedly convinced that Shakespeare was one of their own and all the massive corpus of six hundred years of books, films, theatrical criticism, and scholarly analysis between the time of Queen Elizabeth the First and the 23rd Century are the product of an enormous campaign of forgery organised by Section 31 as the greatest act of cultural appropriation on the history of the galaxy.
It is not, of course, suggested that those of us who live centuries before the stardate when Klingons of future eras will think those works had been written on Kronos, and who have nevertheless had the opportunity to read them ourselves here and now on Earth, seen them performed, and probably been encouraged to act scenes from these plays ourselves while we were at school, have to believe any of this qofdak dap.
We merely have to suspend disbelief sufficiently to contemplate the idea that the Klingons of the future will believe it.
The main body of the book allows the reader to compare the Terran and Klingon works side by side on opposite pages: on every even page on the left hand side is a page from the script of "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark" by William Shakespeare and every odd numbered page opposite on the right hand side is the corresponding page of the script of "Qi'onoS ta'puq, Hamlet lotlut," the Klingon play about Hamlet, son of the King of Kronos.
I suspect only the most fanatical Star Trek nerds will be able to read this the whole way through but it is an impressive effort in a rather terrifying way. And some of the lines both in the Preface, Foreword and Introduction at the beginning of the book, and in the appendices at the end which explain the differences between the two texts, are actually quite amusing.
Anyone with such an extreme interest in the Klingon Empire from Star Trek that they would like to see a good one-line joke from a Star Trek film actually developed all the way into a real 219 page book can obtain it from Amazon by clicking on the link below:
Hamlet is not the only Shakespeare work which is available in the "Original Klingon."
You can also get the Klingon version of "Much do about nothing," See link to Amazon page.
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