Migration and Mutation: New Perspectives on the Sonnet in Translation

by Carole Birkan-Berz (Editor), Brian James Baer (Editor), Oriane Monthéard (Editor), Michelle Woods (Editor), Erin Cunningham (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501380501
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/22/2024
Series:	Literatures, Cultures, Translation
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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 Monthéard 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.

Table of Contents

Foreword
David Duff, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Introduction
Carole Birkan-Berz, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France

Part One: Revisiting early modern circulations
1. Poetic furor in translation: Spenser's and Sylvester's sonnet collections
Padraic Lamb, University of Lyon, France
2. The fashioning of English anti-Petrarchism: Spenser and Shakespeare remembering Du Bellay
Line Cottegnies, Université Sorbonne, France
3. 'Translated out of Ronsard'?: A misattributed translation of Petrarch's RVF 48 by Sir John Borough
Guillaume Coatalen, CY Cergy Paris University, France
4. Paving the way for Opitz: The first German sonnets at the crossroads of European circulation networks, 1556-1604
Elisabeth Rothmund, Université Sorbonne, France

Part Two: Sonnet translation as a space for poetic imagination
5. Keats's sonnets and the translation process: Mediation, conversion and response
Oriane Monthéard, University of Rouen, France
6. On translating Les Chimères by Gérard de Nerval
Peter Valente, Independent Scholar
7. Reshaping Rilke: A comparative approach to the latest translations of Die Sonette an Orpheus into English
Frédéric Weinmann, Independent Scholar
8. Fernando Pessoa's sonnets - dislocations in form, persona and language
Carlos A. Pitella, Centre for Theatre Studies of the University of Lisbon, Portugal
9. English sonnet spaces in Jacques Roubaud's Churchill 40
Thea Petrou, Independent Scholar
10. Lyrical gestures: The essence of the form and the spirit of the translated text in Don Paterson's 'versions' of sonnets
Bastien Goursaud, UPEC Université Paris Est Créteil, France

Part Three: Sonnet migrations across and outside Europe: Translating as a political act
11. Translation and transnationalism: Reframing the contemporary Irish sonnet
Erin Cunningham, Independent Scholar
12. Sonnet translation and imitation during the Second World War: Maintaining the idea of Europe?
Thomas Vuong, Independent Scholar
13.Translating Genrikh Sapgir's Sonnets on Shirts
Dmitri Manin, Independent Scholar
14. The vulgar eloquence of Singaporean sonnets
Tse Hao Guang, Independent Scholar

Part Four: Cross-media adaptations and beyond
15. On the theatricality of the Canzoniere, from medieval to modern times
Jean-Luc Nardone, Toulouse Jean Jaurès University, France
16. Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes: An attempt to exhaust the sonnet
Natalie Berkman, SAE Institute, Paris, France
17. The Four Seasons in flux: Translating the sonnets from Vivaldi's score in relation to performances by Nigel Kennedy
Paul Munden, University of Leeds, UK, and University of Canberra, Australia, and Anouska Zummo, Independent Scholar
18. Debating sonnet translation in the Soviet and post-Soviet era: Rethinking and transforming the Russian sonnet
Alexander Markov, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher