Migration and Mutation: New Perspectives on the Sonnet in Translation

Description

Spanning four centuries from the Renaissance to today's avant-garde, Migration and Mutation explores how the sonnet has evolved in and out of translation. Contributors examine little-studied translation trajectories in the early modern period, such as the pivotal role of France between Italy and England or the first German sonnets and their Italian, French, Dutch and Scottish origins. Essays then shed new light on major European sonneteers In the 19th and 20th centuries, including Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Rilke and Pessoa, alongside lesser-known contemporaries and with novel approaches. And finally, contributors explore how translation and adaptation create metaphorical space in the 21st century. Migration and Mutation also pays attention to the political or subversive dimension of the sonnet, with essays on women, gay or postcolonial reclaimings of the sonnet and recent experiments such as post-Soviet Sonnets on shirts by Genrikh Sagpir. It takes the sonnet out of the confines of enclosed national traditions bringing it into renewed contact with mostly European, but also other, cultures.

Carole Birkan-Berz is Associate Professor of Literary Translation at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, France. She has published widely on the contemporary English sonnet and on poetry translation. Her most recent edited book is Translating Petrarch's Poetry: L'Aura del Petrarca from the Quattrocento to the 21st Century (2020). Oriane Montheard is Associate Professor of Translation and British Culture and Literature at the University of Rouen-Normandie, France. She has also translated many works of contemporary poetry including Stephen Rodefer and Ron Padgett as part of the collective Double Change. Erin Cunningham has recently completed a PhD on the sonnet in modern and contemporary Irish poetry at King's College London, UK.

This volume defies the legendary sense of formal closure associated with the sonnet to show how that form has thrived in translation, and how sonnets have occasioned transformations and reinventions in other media. Contributors range from theorists of translation and poetics to poets and practicing translators, giving the book a commanding breadth and facilitating lively conversations across the chapters. * Stephanie Sandler, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, USA * While the sonnet is often described as closed or fixed in form, the essays in this collection reveal it to be 'a migrant genre,' defined by its openness to travel and translation, and often used to defy political and social oppression. Deft and lucid essays range across subjects from Petrarch, Spenser, Rilke, the OuLiPo group, to Soviet dissidents, contemporary Singaporean poets and recent settings of Vivaldi. Migration and Mutation brings together scholars, translators and poets to show how this travelling form has been adapted or transposed to other languages, media, subjects and styles. * Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Reader in Early Modern Literature, King's College London, UK *