Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Entertainment | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

To text or not to text

How does Shakespeare sound in SMS lingo?

KING LEAR OR TITANIA? The Bard gets into SMS mood

2B?NT2B?=??? That's not a garbled algebra equation. It's the first line of Hamlet's most-quoted soliloquy. As a special New Year gift to students, a mobile telephone company in England is going to convert seven English classics into text messages. So, the opening line of Milton's Paradise Lost will go: "Devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war." And the concluding line of Jane Eyre will read: "MadwyfSetsFyr2Haus." By April next, the company promises to put the complete works of Shakespeare into SMS format.

This is an act of blasphemy for two classes of people: those who believe classics can't exist anywhere except between gilded covers and those who say it kills the very soul of literature. As one critic says: "What you lose with text messaging in literature is what makes literature what it is — the imagery, the irony, the nuance."

Importance of brevity

But John Sutherland, professor of modern English literature at University College London, who helped devise the texts, says: "Whilst some may argue that Dickens is really too big a morsel to be swallowed by text, the `Great Inimitable' himself began as a shorthand writer and he would, I suspect, have approved of the brevity if nothing else."

Not all are convinced by this argument. Playwright Mahesh Dattani, who does not have an issue with "classics being dumbed down for people with a challenged attention span" per se, would still ask why we need to substitute "late" with "l8" and "your" with "ur". He would say it reflects the inability to connect with the power of language to help you experience life and culture.

"That is the purpose of literature. That is what great stories did to you whether we heard them from our grandmothers or whether we read them by ourselves in solitude. They evoked a sense of wonder and made time stand still for us as we experienced the richness of the material. This whole exercise will only impoverish the mobile generation even further. Can anyone be more deprived than the one who is unable to connect with life," he asks.

But there are others who wonder if we in India really have anything to be surprised or alarmed about.

Asks Vanamala Viswanatha, a Professor of English in Bangalore University: "Haven't we English teachers in India routinely taught our Shakespeare and Milton through plot summaries and select quotes? Haven't generations of our students managed to pass their exams with flying colours entirely nourished on a diet of MCC guides and local versions of the York or Cliff Notes? Without our `Shakespeare Made Easy' or `Dickens for Secondary Schools' kind of attempts, where would we be?"

She argues that these "made easy" modes also have to be placed in specific socio-economic contexts in India. "With the democratisation of higher education, our universities have opened their doors to first-generation learners, most of whom come from rural areas.

A majority of students, even those who are pursuing their M.A. in English, are not in a position to understand the prescribed texts or write competently in English."

This sure is a circumstance quite contrary to the happening urban India where mobile phones are deemed necessary accessories. But it does point to the many contexts — ranging from that of the attention span-challenged yuppies that Dattani talks about and that of first generation learners who make up a large part of Vanamala's students — where literature needs to climb down from its "high culture" pedestal.

Vanamala argues that anything that creates a sense of access for students is welcome. "As it is, we have been making use of the visual medium — VCD/DVDs, film versions, theatre productions — to have a go at classics. Doing these texts for mobile users is just another avatar of the same phenomenon. Translations are known to extend the `afterlife' of texts. Long live Shakespeare, Long live Jane Austen!"

In fact, there have been many attempts to keep Shakespeare and Austen alive among the young, some of which might seem blasphemous to purists. The website Chill with Will, for instance, uses MTV-style images to make Shakespeare accessible to high school students.

What makes textification of classics different from such efforts is that it's not really meant to be a spoof, though, quite ironically, Hamlet's solemn soliloquy as an algebra equation might just begin to sound like one. But the textification of classics raises other interesting questions about the very nature of language.

In a discussion on the subject on the Web, one writer points out: "It's really interesting that SMS, like ancient Hebrew, leaves out vowels. So maybe, in some respects, we are coming full circle... "

Language as codes

Yet another talks of how all languages are codes and the special language of SMS is only an extension of the same logic. He responds to the translation of "To be or not to be" into SMS lingo: "If you had quoted a less famous line, I would never have been able to read it. Which is, perhaps the point of code. That's interesting. I hardly ever think of language as a code and code as a way of keeping the uninitiated out!"

That, somewhat, makes the business of language and access a cycle of codification and decodification. The original Shakespeare, a hard-to-crack code, is decodified into SMS format for one set of readers. And this decodified format turns out to be hard-to-crack code for yet another set of users. But through it all, Shakespeare and Austen seem to live on!

BAGESHREE S.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail