Migration and Mutation: New Perspectives on the Sonnet in Translation

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.

Revisiting the early modern period, the contributors examine some translation trajectories that have been little studied, such as the pivotal role of France between Italy and England or the first German sonnets and their Italian, French, Dutch and Scottish origins. Looking at the 19th and 20th centuries, the essays shed new light on some major European sonneteers such as Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Rilke or Pessoa, side by side with some lesser-known contemporaries or with novel approaches. In the 21st century the contributors explore how a metaphorical space is created via translation and adaptation - from the sonnet translations that flourished during the Second World War to the very contemporary transcoding and combinatorics that occur in 20th- and 21st-century avant-garde works such as Raymond Queneau’s or Christian Boek’s.

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.