Impetus
The impetus for the project came from a line from the motion picture Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in which the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon stated:
| “ | You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon. | ” |
The phrase "the undiscovered country" comes from Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 1, line 79, in his famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy. The speech explicitly describes said country as "after death" (line 78), whereas Chancellor Gorkon interprets it as "the future".
The play was translated over several years by Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader of the Klingon Shakespeare Restoration Project, with feedback and editorial assistance from Mark Shoulson, d'Armond Speers, and Will Martin.
Shakespeare in the "original Klingon" is an echo in the novel of Vladimir Nabokov's eponymous hero Pnin, who taught his American college class that Shakespeare was much more moving "in the original Russian."
Read more about this topic: The Klingon Hamlet
Famous quotes containing the word impetus:
“While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce. But let the white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)