"In the Original Klingon": The Klingon Hamlet Explained

Quick Answer: The Klingon Hamlet is a real, complete translation of Shakespeare's play into tlhIngan Hol, published by the Klingon Language Institute in 1996 and reissued by Pocket Books in 2000. It was inspired by a joke in Star Trek VI (1991), where Chancellor Gorkon claims you must read Shakespeare "in the original Klingon." Its most famous line is taH pagh taHbe', "to be or not to be," literally "continue or not continue."

Most jokes in Star Trek films stay jokes. This one became a 200-page book, a stage tradition and a small shelf of Klingon literature. The story says a lot about why Klingon is different from almost every other fictional language: it had a grammar solid enough that fans could translate a whole Shakespeare tragedy into it.

This article covers where the joke came from, how the translation was made, what the famous line means word by word, and what else has been published in Klingon since. Klingon words and grammar points here follow Marc Okrand's The Klingon Dictionary (TKD) and our attested vocabulary database. We quote only short, well-known lines, not long passages.

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The Line That Started It: Star Trek VI

In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon and his officers dine aboard the Enterprise. It is an awkward peace-talks dinner. Gorkon raises a toast and tells the humans that they have not truly experienced Shakespeare until they read him "in the original Klingon."

The joke works on two levels. It is a Klingon boast, claiming the greatest English playwright for the Empire. It is also a writer's wink, because the film's villain, General Chang, quotes Shakespeare almost every time he speaks. The film's own subtitle, "the undiscovered country," is itself a phrase from Hamlet's famous soliloquy, where it describes death.

The dinner scene also gives us taH pagh taHbe', the Klingon version of "to be or not to be." That short phrase was enough to make fans ask the obvious question: what would the rest of the play look like?

For the other Klingon lines in the film series, see Klingon language in Star Trek and our collection of famous Klingon quotes.

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The KLI Hamlet Project

The Klingon Language Institute (KLI) was founded in 1992 to support the study of Okrand's language. It published a journal, ran an annual gathering called the qep'a', and later created a certification programme for speakers. Translating Hamlet became one of its signature projects.

The key facts:

The translators played along with Gorkon's joke. The book is framed as a "restoration" of the Klingon original, and its introduction pretends that Shakespeare's English play is the translation. That framing is part of the fun, and it is exactly the tone of the film.

What made the project possible is that Klingon is not a set of film phrases. By the mid-1990s Okrand had published a full grammar in The Klingon Dictionary, plus hundreds of additional words. The translators could work the way any literary translator works: understand the English, then find a natural way to say it in the target language. Where Okrand's vocabulary had gaps, they worked around them with the existing words and grammar rather than simply inventing new roots.

That is also why the book is hard. A literary translation of Shakespeare into any language is dense. Doing it in a language whose word list is a few thousand words long forces a lot of creative paraphrase.

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taH pagh taHbe' — Word by Word

The best way to understand the book is to take its most famous line apart. Every piece of it is ordinary Klingon grammar from TKD.

So taH pagh taHbe' literally means "continue or not continue," or more naturally, "to go on, or not to go on."

Pronunciation: roughly TAKH pagh TAKH-beh'. The H is a rough sound at the back of the throat, like the ch in Scottish "loch." The gh is a voiced gargled sound. The final apostrophe is a glottal stop, a tiny catch in the throat.

Why taH and not "be"?

English "to be" does a lot of jobs: it can mean exist, it can link a subject to a description, it can form tenses. Klingon has no single verb that does all of that. In fact, Klingon has no verb "to be" at all in the English sense. Sentences like "I am a Klingon" are built with pronouns acting as verbs, as TKD explains.

So the translators had to choose what Hamlet actually means. In the soliloquy he is weighing whether to go on living. taH, "continue, endure, survive," captures that exactly. It is arguably a sharper translation than a literal "exist" would be, and it fits the Klingon focus on endurance.

Why no prefix?

Klingon verbs normally carry a prefix showing who acts on whom: jI- for "I," bI- for "you," and so on. taH has no prefix here. In TKD's system, a verb with no prefix means "he, she, it or they," with no object. So the line is impersonal: one continues, or one does not. That suits a philosophical question.

Why pagh and not qoj?

Klingon has more than one word for "or." TKD distinguishes:

Hamlet's question is exclusive: you either go on or you don't. pagh is the correct choice, and because taH and taHbe' are each tiny sentences, the sentence-joining form is needed. Five syllables, and the line already teaches verb suffixes, null prefixes and conjunction choice.

Try it yourself (constructed examples)

These are our own sentences, built from attested words with TKD grammar, not quotations from the book:

paq is book, laD is read, -laH is "can," and -be' is "not." The prefix vI- means "I do it to it."

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Why a Klingon Hamlet Matters

It is easy to treat The Klingon Hamlet as a novelty. Linguists and fans tend to see it as more than that, for three reasons.

It proved the grammar works. A language you can only use for battle cries is a phrasebook. A language you can translate a full tragedy into is a language. The Hamlet project stress-tested Okrand's system across thousands of lines of dialogue, soliloquy and wordplay.

It created a literary register. Before Hamlet, most Klingon text was short: film dialogue, examples in the dictionary, greetings. After it, learners had long-form prose and verse to study. That made reading, not just phrase-memorising, a real way to learn.

It gave the community a shared project. The KLI's later work, from translation projects to certification, grew out of the same idea: treat Klingon as a living language with its own texts.

If you are wondering whether Klingon really counts as a language, this book is one of the strongest pieces of evidence. We make the full case in Is Klingon a real language?.

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Other Classics in Klingon

Hamlet was the first major translation, but not the last. The KLI followed it with several more.

The Much Ado title is a nice example of adaptation. pagh here means "nothing" (the same spelling as "or," a different word), -mo' means "because of," tIn is the verb "be big" and mIS is "confusion." Klingon puts the verb before its subject, so tIn mIS is a full sentence: "the confusion is big." The title reads roughly "because of nothing, the confusion is great." It is not a word-for-word rendering of the English title. It is a Klingon way of saying the same thing.

paq'batlh is not a translation

One book often gets confused with these: paq'batlh (2011). It is not a translated classic but an original Klingon epic about Kahless, published in Klingon and English with Marc Okrand's involvement, and later staged as the opera 'u'. If you see it described as a Hamlet translation, that is a mix-up. We cover it with the opera in our guide to Klingon songs and opera.

There has also been a long-running Klingon Bible translation effort, and fans have produced many shorter pieces: poems, short stories and song lyrics.

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How to Read The Klingon Hamlet Yourself

The book is not a beginner text. Here is a realistic path to it.

1. Get the sounds right. Klingon spelling is precise: q and Q are different letters, and so are h and H. Start with Klingon for beginners and the pronunciation sections in the Klingon course.

2. Learn the verb prefixes and the common suffixes. Most of the grammar in taH pagh taHbe' is in the suffixes. You need -be', -'a', -laH, -nIS, the question words, and the full prefix table before long texts make sense.

3. Build a few hundred words. The Klingon dictionary guide and flashcards are the fastest route. Literary Klingon uses the same core vocabulary, just more cleverly.

4. Read in parallel. The book prints the English on the facing page. Read a Klingon line, try to parse it, then check the English. Do not expect a word-for-word match. The translators often paraphrased.

5. Ask for help with a stubborn line. Our AI tutor works from an attested Klingon vocabulary database and can break down a sentence you are stuck on, suffix by suffix.

A good first target is the soliloquy's opening, since you already know it word by word from this article.

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Klingon Literature Today

Klingon writing has not stopped with the KLI's printed books. Speakers write and share poetry, translate songs, and perform short scenes at the qep'a'. Star Trek itself returned to spoken Klingon in Discovery, which used long subtitled Klingon scenes, and later series (see Klingon in Discovery, Picard and Strange New Worlds).

The through-line from a single dinner-table joke in 1991 to a real literature is Marc Okrand's decision, years earlier, to build a real grammar instead of a set of sounds. Read more about him in our Marc Okrand profile.

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People Also Ask

Is there really a Klingon translation of Hamlet? Yes. The Klingon Language Institute published The Klingon Hamlet in 1996 and Pocket Books reissued it in 2000, with the English on facing pages.

What does taH pagh taHbe' mean? It is "to be or not to be." taH means continue or endure, pagh means or, and -be' means not. Literally: continue or not continue.

Where does "Shakespeare in the original Klingon" come from? From Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), where Chancellor Gorkon says it at a dinner aboard the Enterprise.

What other books have been translated into Klingon? Much Ado About Nothing (paghmo' tIn mIS), the Epic of Gilgamesh (ghIlghameS) and the Tao Te Ching (pIn'a' qan paQDI'norgh). paq'batlh is an original Klingon epic, not a translation.

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Related Reading

• Famous Klingon Quotes from Star Trek
• Klingon Language in Star Trek
• Marc Okrand: The Man Who Created Klingon
• Is Klingon a Real Language?
• Klingon Songs and Opera
• Klingon for Beginners