Translating Shakespeare’s Sonnets

My copy of The Sonnets just arrived. Lovely, lovely production & a really great enterprise!

 The Sonnets, edited by the founding editors of the translation journal Telephone, Shamila Cohen and Paul Legault, pairs 154 poet-translators with each of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets — literally rewriting history, or at least the great Bard’s poetic oeuvre. This collection of English-to-English “translations” includes work by Rae Armantrout, Mary Jo Bang, Jen Bervin, Paul Celan, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Ron Padgett, Donald Revell, Jerome Rothenberg, Juliana Spahr, and many others.

In the tradition of Ezra Pound’s Cathay or Jack Spicer’s After Lorca, these versions explore the themes of their originals while completely re-authoring them–imagining a new Shakespeare, self-described in his dedication to The Sonnets as: “THE WELL-WISHING. ADVENTURER … SETTING FORTH.”

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