Woe to the inhabitants on Earth

To make up for the rambling potpourri bowl of nonsense I posted earlier today I've decided to post another article:

2B? NT2B?=???.

A company offering mobile phones to students has hired Professor John Sutherland, professor emeritus of English Literature at University College London, to offer subscribers text message summaries and quotes from literary classics. The hope is that messages in the truncated shorthand of mobile phones will help make great literature more accessible.

"We are confident that our version of 'text' books will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy," the company, Dot Mobile, said in a press release.

They have to write out plays, books, and poems in a new language to help kids learn to read our language?

Accessible? What ever happened to putting the book in the kids hand and having them read it? That wasn't accessible enough?

Now, on the whole, I am not against this idea of re-translating something like Shakespeare into the new hip language fad. If Shakespeare is anything, he is adaptable. But the problem I really have is the fact that other people will be doing the translating. If you really want to make people appreciate and identify with great classics, they need to understand them for what they are. I'm a great one for explicating Shakespeare speeches into very simplified paragraphs. Much like my description of Lady Macbeth's famous speech: "This is great news, and you could get a promotion. Except you're too nice" But I can do that because I know that when she says "yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way" that's what she means. I translated it myself and have a better understanding of the text. And thus more hunger to find out what she'll say next.

If the text is explicated for you however, and worse into a shortened form, how would anyone grasp the true magic of these words. The writers who wrote the classics chose certain words to make the reader feel a certain effect. Just knowing that both lovers die at the end of Romeo and Juliet is not enough. We knew they died when we read the prologue...it's why they died, how they died, and who they left behind that resonates with us all.

Especially to a teenage student. What's another dead boy and girl in a sea of dead boys and girls?

I wish instead of trying to make things hip and cool they could let the timeless stories lie. Stop crying about how high-minded it is. Stop intimidating each new reader by assuming we need a translation to understand it. If they are written well and written true, then the audience will get it. If the story and the language reflects something inside us, we don't need translation, we just need time.

Can we stop dumbing stuff down and have a little faith? If a poor guy from Stratford can learn all about mankind and write about it...don't you think a school kid from Milwaukee can read it?