jIH Sov ghaH, Horatio!

That’s “I knew him, Horatio!” It’s what Hamlet says in Act 5, Scene 1, in the graveyard, when he and Horatio interrupt the gravediggers preparing Ophelia’s final resting place. The line comes right after he holds up the skull of his father’s jester and says, “Alas, poor Yorick.” Of course, in Klingonese, that line would be “toH, mIpHa’ Yorick.” And a whole bunch of actors will be learning to say those lines in the guttural, throaty dialect of thespians native to Kronos, the Klingon home world, when Sacramento City College does a staged reading of the Klingon Hamlet next fall. We can hope for bumpy foreheads and a great bat’etlh fight, but we’ll settle for plenty of growling and howling. After all, as General Chang was fond of saying, “Shakespeare is so much better in the original Klingon.”